Twenty-First Century Anxieties: Dys/Utopian Spaces and Contexts in Contemporary British Theatre (Issn, 32)

"The volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how 21st-century British theatre increasingly intercuts dystopian and utopian elements to create innovative strategies for addressing current social and political concerns. In the case studies, a key role is given to the ways in which the selected plays use real and fictional spaces on stage and thereby manage to construct interactional spaces which the spectators are invited to share" -- Provided by publisher Table of Contents 5 Anger, Anxiety and Hope: The Complicit Realities and Engaged/ing Communities of Contemporary British Dys/Utopian Theatre 7 “Something’s Missing”: Feeling the Structures of Project Neoliberal Dystopia 17 “To Watch is not Enough”: Utopia, Performance, and Hope(lessness) 33 Environment, Virus, Dystopia: Disruptive Spatial Representations 49 Towards a Genealogy of the British Feminist Dystopian Play 63 Performing Utopia? The Contestation of Dystopian Space in Cecelia Ahern’s Flawed Series 79 Dystopian Dramaturgies: Living in the Ruins 93 A Description of This World as if It Were a Beautiful Place: From Avant-Garde Destruction to Dys(u)topias 109 The End of Capitalism and the End of Democracy: Dystopian and Critical Utopian Political Economies in an Age of Austerity 123 Utopian Past and Dystopian Present? Nostalgia in Brexit Britain 139 Civil Wars and Republics in Contemporary (Dystopian) Drama 155 The Spectre of Utopia/Dystopia: The Representation of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change as Culture-War Issue in Richard Bean’s The Heretic (2011) 171 “I Am the Abyss into Which People Dread to Fall”: Encountering Anxiety in Dystopian Drama 191 Visions of Hell in Contemporary British Drama 207 “Hiding from the World”: Dystopian Subjectivity in Martin Crimp’s In the Republic of Happiness 215 “Let the Doors Be Shut upon”... COVID-19: Relocating the Globe Theatre Stage to the Net 231 Notes on Contributors 249 Index of Names 251 Subject Index 255