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In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. By Aleks Sierz. London: Faber & Faber, 2000; pp. 274. $17 paper.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2004
Extract
One of the more original developments in contemporary theatre at the end of the twentieth century was the reactionary mode of playwriting to emerge from Britain’s younger generation. London and Edinburgh audiences, particularly, saw some of the most groundbreaking and influential movements in British theatre to be produced since John Osborne’s provocative debut of Look Back in Anger in 1956. In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Aleks Sierz contemplates the theatrical debuts of many young writers and the artistic contributions by directors, designers, and actors involved in each of their often scandalous new works. The brazen portrayals of violence including rape, murder, and incest as well as drug abuse, homosexuality, and the ruthless use of language made for a controversial new mode of writing. The young playwrights who brought these appallingly poetic stories to the stage were simultaneously reacting to the post-Thatcher, postconsumer, cultural climate of the 1980s and locating the theatre as an uncensored medium for which to write. The plays form an aggressive, provocative, sometimes obscene, and usually highly entertaining corpus that Sierz situates as one of the most influential theatre movements of the late twentieth century.
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- © 2003 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.