Cruel Britannia: British Theatre in the 1990s
- ISBN-10
- 0542954974
- ISBN-13
- 9780542954979
- Series
- Cruel Britannia
- Category
- Nihilism
- Pages
- 438
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2006
- Author
- Ken Urban
Description
In my dissertation "Cruel Britannia: British Theatre in the 1990s," I examine a group of young, confrontational playwrights who embraced nihilism as an ethical and political worldview, as a means of critiquing what they viewed as the facile moralism of contemporary British culture, with its simplistic division between right and wrong, victim and victimizer. Far from being misanthropic, however, and turning their backs on British theatre's socialist tradition, as some critics have charged, these "in-yer-face" writers---whose works are replete with disturbing, often unstageable acts of violence---saw cruelty as a means of both reflecting and overcoming the ennui and despair of contemporary urban life, shaped by global capitalism and cultural uniformity. It is no coincidence, then, that playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Joe Penhall and Philip Ridley emerged during the reign of "Cool Britannia," when Tony Blair's New Labour party rebranded London as the global capital of coolness, and when the British advertising industry heralded the return of "swinging London." Rather than being co-opted by this rebranding, these playwrights were part of what I call "Cruel Britannia," a youth-based counter-politics to the cynicism and opportunism of "Cool Britannia." "Cruel Britannia" stood against the latter's agenda which blurred Left and Right, and which sought to appropriate and commodify the avant-garde. The first scholarly investigation of these playwrights, my dissertation puts them in dialogue with the popular musicians and visual artists who shared their historical moment, indeed, who shared their poetics of cruelty.
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Other editions
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- 2009
- 46 pages
- Paperback
- -
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- 2015-01-16
- 234 pages
- Paperback
- Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
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