Contemporary European Playwrights

Contemporary European Playwrights is a follow-up to 2010’s Contemporary European Theatre Directors (which is also just out in a new revised and expanded edition). Like the former, this focuses primarily on theatre makers who have made their names in the era following the end of the Berlin Wall, but now focusing on playwrights rather than directors. It’s coedited with Maria Delgado, like the last book, but also with my colleague Bryce Lease, who has considerable expertise in Eastern European theatre (particularly Poland). The book includes discussion of writers from Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, the UK. In each essay writers are paired together usually by nation or region sometimes to contrast, sometimes to find the affinities, looking at the way in which their plays have changed and developed as they move across the continent. 39 European playwrights are represented in detail in the book.

My own chapter is an exception to the general principle. In the first book, we began with an excellent chapter on Ariane Mnouchkine whose career was established long before the Berlin Wall fell but formed a kind of bridge between the pre- and post-1989, providing an historical context for the new generation. My chapter ‘European Playwriting and Politics, 1945-1989’, is an overview of the nearly fifty years of playwriting before the Berlin Wall trying to sketch out what I call the ‘theatrical imaginary’ of the period, by which I mean the distinctive forms and images that haunted stage writing in that period. Some of those ideas were imposed (socialist realism), others were invented intuitively (absurdist theatre), others created through conscious ideological thought (epic theatre). At the same time I try to draw together differences and similarities between playwriting traditions across Europe and the article touches on plays and playwrights for almost 30 different countries.

In the introduction, Maria, Bryce and I look at some of the current differences between playwriting cultures, careers, unions, publishing and more; we consider how different language groups fare, and wonder whether there is such a thing as European playwriting as such rather than just national playwriting within Europe.