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This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.
This indispensable overview of modern black British drama spans seven decades of distinctive playwriting from the 1950s to the present. Interweaving social and cultural context with close critical analysis of key dramatists' plays, leading scholars explore how these dramatists have created an enduring, transformative and diverse cultural presence.
Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women's plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes, it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners.
The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates abou...
The definitive guide to post-war British theatre's huge variety and expansion, exploring the diverse contexts that shaped it.
Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958) after becoming disillusioned about the lack of good roles for black actors on the British theatre scene. While this situation has only slightly improved since, his response has become the most revived black play in Britain, from its original production at the Royal Court in 1958, to the National Theatre in 2012. It depicts the lives of a black community living in poverty in a shared tenement yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the mid-1940s, showing how each of the characters carries dreams of escaping to create better lives for themselves and their families. Lynette Goddard focuses on how the play articulates the narratives of migration that prompted many Caribbean people to uproot from their homes on the islands and move to the England in the post-war era. For some of them, these dreams of a new life became a reality, but they were experienced differently across genders and generations.
Winner of the 2020 Alfred Fagon Award. As the 19th Century dawns in London, politicians of all parties gather to abolish the slave trade once and for all. But the price of freedom turns out to be a multi-billion pound bailout for slave owners rather than those enslaved. As morality and cunning compete amongst men thirsty for power, two women navigate their way to the true seat of political influence, challenging members of parliament who dare deny them their say. In this provocative new play by Juliet Gilkes Romero, the personal collides with the political to ask, what is the right thing to do and how much must it cost?
This book marks a significant methodological shift in studies of black British women’s theatre: it looks beyond published plays to the wealth of material held in archives of various kinds, from national repositories and themed collections to individuals’ personal papers. It finds there a cache of unpublished manuscripts and production recordings distinctive for their non-naturalistic aesthetics. Close analysis of selected works identifies this as an intersectional feminist creative practice. Chapters focus on five theatre companies and artists, spanning several decades: Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), co-founded by Booker Prize-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo; Munirah Theatre Comp...
This book examines the political alliances that are built across the diaspora in contemporary plays written by Black women playwrights in the UK. Through the concept of creative diasporic solidarity, it offers an innovative theoretical approach to examine the ways in which the playwrights respond creatively to the violence and marginalisation of Black communities, especially Black women. This study demonstrates that theatre can act as a productive space for the ethical encounter with the Other (understood in terms of alterity, as someone different from the self) by examining the possibilities of these plays to activate the spectators’ responsibility and solidarity towards different types o...
Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.