What is it about?
Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century.
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Why is it important?
For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.
Perspectives
I'm really pleased that this book is finally ready to share. The idea of revisiting the contemporary history play - a type of playwriting that had been much discussed in the 1980s and 1990s - came from my work in neo-Victorian studies. I'd been used to analysing plays that focused on one specific period of history, but I wondered what we could learn about trends in historical playwriting by looking at historical drama set in any period of the past, and including plays staged in England and the United States. The book creates an open and flexible set of descriptors to help readers navigate the increasingly complex timelines and journeys through history that playwrights are developing. I also hope that the book will help to give stage drama more prominence in the discussion of historical fiction, which is often dominated by novels and TV shows. Theatre has a centuries-old traditional of historical fiction of its own, and in the 21st century, it's drawing on TV, film and experimental fiction to do fascinating things with our notions of the past.
Professor Benjamin Poore
University of York
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Contemporary History Play, January 2024, Bloomsbury Academic,
DOI: 10.5040/9781350169661.
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