The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

“Who’s Going to Mobilise Darkness and Silence?”: The Construction of Dystopian Spaces in Contemporary British Drama

This article examines the recent explosion of British dystopian plays, analysing their changing characteristics from the 1990 s to the 2010 s. After an initial brief look at precursors, it then focuses on examples of new writing which tackle the idea of dystopia in the absurdist manner typical of the 2000 s. In a third step, the focus is on the dystopian drama of the 2010 s and its more conventionally structured plots, which at the same time increasingly include ironic and parodistic elements. It becomes clear how this comparatively new genre is able to shake off the constraints of traditional dystopian writing and develop recognisable characteristics of its own. Throughout, emphasis is put on the “reality” of the plays’ fictional worlds, on the usage of the stage space, and on how the audience’s relationship with the stage is constructed as a double bind of distance and closeness.

Conclusion

The conclusion is summative, its purpose being to bring together insights drawn from the preceding chapters. It interrogates, more closely, the aspiration described in the Introduction; to explore the dynamic relation of law, literature and history in the closer context of modern British drama. It confirms that the theatre, and theatrical writing, is especially suited to realising one of the abiding ambitions of ‘law and literature’ scholarship, which is to humanise the legal text. An insight familiar to students of Shakespeare or Chekhov and various other dramatists whose work is already established in the literary jurisprudence ‘canon’, but which is just as persuasive in the context of modern and contemporary drama.

The Legacy of the Terrible Mother Archetype in Post-War British Drama

The theatre provides the playwrights with a public platform through which they open up a more comprehensive framework to reinterpret the concept of the feminine. The chapter, in which translation remains a fundamental instrument that will be utilized to offer new interpretations to old ideas about the feminine, explores how the post-war British woman playwright Ann Jellicoe translates a women-related myth and reinterprets the concept of the feminine in The Sport of My Mad Mother (w.1958, r.1962). In this context, the chapter focuses on the concept of the Terrible Mother archetype which represents the female creative power as well as the potential for destruction in the play within a special reference to Jung's premises on the archetypal nature of the femininity and maternity. Thus, the chapter indicates that Ann Jellicoe, taking on board and challenging the perceived social, ideological, and psychological ideals of femininity, reclaims the legacy of the female strength.