A companion to modern British and Irish drama This Companion provides a set of provocative agendas for investigating modern drama. It offers the most comprehensive challenge to existing constructions of the canon and examines in detail the dialogue between developments in Britain and Ireland. Contributors investigate radical postcolonial readings offer revisionist feminist critiques and reflect on why certain playwrights have been written in and others written out. Why have certain institutions dominated the constructions of dramatic canons What role have female playwrights adopted in challenging stage conventions and modes of production These are among the questions addressed by the Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama . The volume analyses a wide range of plays and performance traditions and explores the political cultural economic and institutional frameworks that readers require in order to get to grips with them. The Companion plots continuities and discontinuities innovations and resistances to the new. Its authoritative contributions highlight different treatments of realist conventions investigate anti realist experiments and examine representations of war terrorism comedy trauma and sexuality by playwrights from Shaw and Wilde to the present. Contributors also discuss the contending forces that have influenced the construction of the modern dramatic canon engaging with contemporary discourses that challenge the dominance of London as well as of white English males and realism Cover13; Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction Part I Contexts 1 Domestic and Imperial Politics in Britain and Ireland: 13;The Testimony of Irish Theatre 2 Reinventing England 3 Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Si232;cle 4 New Woman Drama Part II Mapping New Ground 19008211;1939 5 Shaw among the Artists 6 Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists 7 Gregory Yeats and Irelands Abbey Theatre 8 Suffrage Theatre: Community Activism and Political Commitment 9 Unlocking Synge Today 10 Sean OCaseys Powerful Fireworks 11 Auden and Eliot: Theatres of the Thirties Part III England Class and Empire 19398211;1990 12 Empire and Class in the Theatre of John Arden and Margaretta DArcy 13 When Was the Golden Age Narratives of Loss and Decline: John Osborne Arnold Wesker and Rodney Ackland 14 A Commercial Success: Women Playwrights in the 1950s 15 Home Thoughts from Abroad: Mustapha Matura 16 The Remains of the British Empire: The Plays of Winsome Pinnock Part IV Comedy 17 Wildes Comedies 18 Always Acting: No235;l Coward and the Performing Self 19 Becketts Divine Comedy 20 Form and Ethics in the Comedies of Brendan Behan 21 Joe Orton: Anger Artifice and Absurdity 22 Alan Ayckbourn: Experiments in Comedy 23 They Both Add up to Me: The Logic of Tom Stoppards Dialogic Comedy 24 Stewart Parkers Comedy of Terrors Part V War and Terror 25 A Wounded Stage: Drama and World War I 26 Staging the Holocaust in England 27 Troubling Perspectives: Northern Ireland the Troubles and Drama 28 On War: Charles Woods Military Conscience 29 Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter 30 Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma Part VI Theatre since 1968 31 Theatre since 1968 32 Lesbian and Gay Theatre: All Queer on the West End Front 33 Edward Bond: Maker of Myths 34 John McGrath and Popular Political Theatre 35 David Hare and Political Playwriting: Between the Third Way and the Permanent Way 36 Left in Front: David Edgars Political Theatre 37 Liz Lochhead: Writer and Re Writer 38 Spirits that Have Become Mean and Broken: Tom Murphy and the Famine of Modern Ireland 39 Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global 40 Howard Barker and the Theatre of Catastrophe 41 Reading History in the Plays of Brian Friel 42 Marina Carr: Violence and Destruction 43 Scrubbing up Nice Tony Harrisons Stagings of the Past 44 The Question of Multiculturalism: The Plays of Roy Williams 45 Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language 46 Theatre and Technology Index.