Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

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Essential for students of Theatre Studies, this series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and reassessment of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume equips readers with an understanding of the context from which work emerged, a detailed overview of the range of theatrical activity and a close study of the work of four of the major playwrights by a team of leading scholars. Chris Megson's comprehensive survey of the theatre of the 1970s examines the work of four playwrights who came to promience in the decade and whose work remains undiminished today: Caryl Churchill (by Paola Botham), David Hare (Chris Megson), Howard Brenton (Richard Boon) and David Edgar (Janelle Reinelt). It analyses their work then, its legacy today and provides a fresh assessment of their contribution to British theatre. Interviews with the playwrights, with directors and with actors provides an invaluable collection of documents offering new perspectives on the work. Revisiting the decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Chris Megson provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1970s.

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Chris Megsons Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s is a compelling addition to the growing volume of books surveying and examining late twentieth-century British playwriting...Chris Megsons Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s is an outstanding example of its genre, giving an account of a remarkably self-critiquing period in British theatre history and which, with its own searching dynamic, offers with intellectual honesty a clear and thought-provoking interrogation of those times. The end Notes, Select Bibliography and the Index are a model of their kind. -- Christopher O'Shaghnessy * Platform *

Author Bio

Chris Megson is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has taught and published widely in the field of modern drama, and is editor of The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays. Series Editors: Richard Boon, Emeritus Professor of Drama, the University of Hull, UK, and Philip Roberts, Emeritus Professor in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK.