Encountering Europe on British Stages: Performances and Politics since 1990

Forty years after Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community, the country’s political and cultural landscapes are still marked by scepticism or resistance to ‘continental’ Europe. Encountering Europe on British Stages is the first book-length study of the ways in which British theatre and performance have engaged with Europe and European identities since the end of the Cold War. The book explores images and ideas of Europe and Europeanness as produced on British stages and studies the reactions to works that have negotiated Europe, its past and present, its peoples and their experiences. It also investigates the determining effects of British and European cultural policies and structures. What can we learn from the British performing arts scene of the last quarter-century about what Europe, as a cultural construct and political formation, means for Britain today?

It considers the work of dramatists and theatre companies which engaged with the emerging reality of the ‘New’ Europe in the 1990s: including Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Edgar, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter and companies Complicite and Suspect Culture. Against a changing context that covers the narratives of expansion and utopian feelings at the turn of the millennium; the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism; the transformations precipitated by the global recession in 2008 and the ‘Eurozone crisis’; the migration crisis and the referendum on Britain’s European Union membership, the work of playwrights including Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens, Zinnie Harris, Tena Stivicic, Caire Bayley and Anders Lustgarten is examined.