| Mind the Gap responds to the way scholarship on twentieth-century British drama has constructed and deployed the label political to describe, understand, and, in some cases, dismiss plays written and produced since 1900. Generally, this dissertation attempts to rethink how the categories political and non-political---and the genres informing these categories, such as realist, absurdist, and epic---confront perceived cultural injustice and domination. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that political drama comprises a broader range of drama than simply Brechtian and neo-Brechtian theater. Specifically, absurdist and realist political dramaturgies require us to think of political drama as a diverse, multiple, and contested body of work whose most effective examples continually force readers and viewers to reconsider the role of drama as a forum for political debate.; In demonstrating this claim, this work examines not only the overtly epic political drama of Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, Athol Fugard, and Caryl Churchill (to name a few), but also the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and the more recent work of Sarah Kane as representative of British drama's "new brutalism." For instance, Mind the Gap demonstrates that Pinter's and Kane's apparently cloistered psychological dramas index the hysteria, trauma, and neurosis implicit in the structures of late capitalist economic and political ideologies. Similarly, it expands upon Adorno's claim that Beckett's drama offers a negative dialectical critique of dominant power structures to demonstrate how it follows through on the critical impulse outlined by theories of epic drama. Throughout, this dissertation tries to show that reading the politics of drama requires attention both to a play's "thesis" as well to the production values and narrative innovations it introduces to the stage. |
