Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre

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As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Sin Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.

Reviews

Utopian Drama delivers a breakthrough intervention that cracks open the scholarly paradigms of both theatre studies and utopian studies. Neither field has paid substantial attention to utopian drama; but now Sin Adiseshiah brings the full strength of her politically engaged, theoretically sophisticated and analytically astute interpretive skills to addressing this vacuum. In doing so, she expands the scope of intellectual and social engagement available in both fields and generates a much deeper understanding of the entire problematic utopian form and process. This work is truly a gift to us all. * Tom Moylan, Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland *
Sin Adiseshiah's fine and nuanced study of utopian drama is keenly needed at a historical moment when dystopia manifests on all fronts. From Aristophanes to contemporary post-dramatic, non-mimetic performance, this carefully theorized, productively hopeful analysis mines Western theatre traditions for insights into the generative thematic of utopia in drama. * Jill Dolan, author of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre *
Epic in historical scope and engaging with an array of interdisciplinary frameworks, Utopian Drama dislocates utopia from its established home in prose fiction. Diverse, comedic, and sensory, Adiseshiahs dramatic encounters with utopia contest and redress disciplinary exclusion from Utopian Studies. Ephemeral and nomadic, theatres utopian acts of imagining differently are those that emerge in this illuminating study as critical to dystopian times. * Elaine Aston, Lancaster University, UK *
Sin Adiseshiah is not the first to have noticed the preponderance of dystopian dramas in the long history of the theatre. But she is the first to offer an insightful counter-narrative: a history of dramatic utopias that stretches from Aristophanes through Margaret Cavendish to contemporary drama. Clear-eyed and critical, she nonetheless understands that "we need utopias, too." And in a world riven by forces of separation, whether amplified nationalism or a marauding virus, she reminds us of theater's capacity to imagine and inaugurate new social relations. * R. Darren Gobert, Duke University, USA *

Author Bio

Sin Adiseshiah is Reader in English and Drama at Loughborough University, UK. Her research interests are in contemporary theatre, utopian studies, and cultural gerontology. She is co-editor of debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (2020), Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (2016), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013), and author of Churchills Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (2009).