Contemporary British Playwrights

Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Aleks Sierz, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights (2011)

Although 10 years out of date now, this guide to contemporary British playwrights offers an interesting overview of the lives and work of 25 of the most important dramatists working in Britain today.  The list only includes seven female playwrights (Sarah Daniels, April de Angelis, Debbie Tucker Green, Tanika Gupta, Sarah Kane, Winsome Pinnock, and Shelagh Stephenson), but there is a good representation of Black and Asian British playwrights, and race, gender, and class are important themes throughout the book.  It would be interesting to see what an overview book published like this would look like today.  Several of the names were familiar.  For example we went to see Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman in London a couple of years ago.  But most of the playwrights and their work were new to me.  There sems to have been a strong trend towards what Aleks Sierz calls ‘In-yer-face theatre’ in the late 1980s, through the 1990s, and into the 2000s, in which playwrights aimed for a deliberate shock value in terms of sex and violence.  Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill is one important example, Sarah Kane’s baby eating Blasted is another.  These extremes seem to have toned down a little in recent years, but again it would be interesting to see what a contemporary book would say about this.  Many of the writers have an association with the Royal Court Theatre in London, frequently described as a ‘writers theatre’.