Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

New Faces For British Political Theatre

2000; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14682761.2000.10807023

2040-0616

Elizabeth Sakellaridou,

Irish and British Studies

The myth of the rise and fall of political theatre in Britain appears unnecessarily dramatic when viewed through some recent developments of the English stage. The simultaneous turn of several playwrights of the older generation to focus on the unmaking of the East European socialist states, at the beginning of the '90s, proved just a fad and soon discredited the hopes for a thematic renovation of an exhausted British ideological theatre. Yet other aspects of the same writers' recent works have tackled crucial issues such as the menace of an advancing Baudrillardian world view and the consequences of the electronic media on the individual. With the emergence of new writers, new exciting possibilities are opening up. The work of Winsome Pinnock, from the established tradition of feminist and black theatre, and more recently Sarah Kane's Blasted, Patrick Marber's Closer and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, forcefully highlight the new nightmares of the end-of-millennium western society: uncontrolled militarism, consumerism and sex in the media era and the arid and vicious emotional landscape which has formed as a result. These are not answer plays, nor could they be. In a postmodern, post-Brechtian manner, they are terrifying reminders of this new cultural debris out of which we are trying to shape our historical existence.