“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

Kareem Khubchandani. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife.

This study creates a distinctive vocabulary for its ethnography of gay nightlife in India and the Indian American diaspora. The chapters on India read gay sociality in relation to repressive social-legal norms, while those on the United States address the emergence of a resistant, nostalgic “desi” style in the queer diasporic pursuit of community and pleasure.

Evert Sprinchorn. Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works.

Evert Sprinchorn’s Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works successfully examines the life and works of Henrik Ibsen by illuminating the irresolvable contradictions within his personality as well as those inherent to the bourgeois age. It will appeal to scholars of Ibsen, theatre, and intellectual history.

Babak Rahimi, ed. Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics.

This collection presents the diversity and interconnectedness of Middle Eastern dramaturgies and their complex experiential and interpretative dimensions. It contains eight essays by scholars and practitioners exploring the migration of artistic and political frameworks across various themes, styles, and performances.

Rohan McWilliam. London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800–1914.

This book offers the first history of London’s West End, the greatest pleasure district of nineteenth-century modernity, detailing the rise and development of its recreational spaces and tracing its signal impact on modern culture.

Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel, eds. Race and Performance after Repetition.

Race and Performance after Repetition is a vital showcase of contemporary performance studies scholarship that reconsiders the intersection of performance, temporality, and racialization across a wide variety of contexts and arguments. The book articulates several new conceptual frameworks, such as dark reparation, parabolic performance, and dedouble.

S.N. Behrman, Comedy, and the Extermination of the Jews: Broadway, Christmas Eve, 1934

S.N. Behrman’s Rain from Heaven premiered on Broadway on Christmas Eve, 1934. In the play, Hugo Willens, a refugee from Nazi Germany, describes a pamphlet he had written in Germany that led to his exile: the satirical pamphlet narrates the extermination of all the Jews but one. Tracking Behrman’s wide reading, which he recorded in his diaries, shows that anticipation of genocide was widely shared by writers in the public sphere to which he belonged. Behrman intended the story of the last Jew as a joke, as some of his audience understood, but it was a joke with political force. The fictional comic pamphlet was part of a larger project of remaking the comedy of manners for the purposes of anti-Nazi resistance.

Gendered Violence and Neoliberal Desaparecidos in Luis Cano’s Socavón

This article situates Socavón (1999), a monologue by leading Argentine playwright Luis Cano, in terms of former Argentine President Carlos Menem’s (1989–99) economic policies in post-dictatorship Argentina, demonstrating how neoliberalism can be understood through the gendered shame and violence it produces. Shunted aside in Buenos Aires and haunted by its legions of desaparecidos, protagonist Ulisito desperately seeks throughout Socavón to regain his masculinity – as well as his personhood and his visibility – through aggression. I argue that Ulisito’s violence is a form of civil resistance, a reaction against a dehumanizing economic regime, as well as a critique of unresolved human rights issues haunting democratic Argentina. Cano draws on numerous dramatic and literary antecedents, including a play that is foundational to dramatic modernity, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, as blueprints for a contemporary crisis. Socavón suggests that unless a more equitable society is created, women in particular will continue to be the victims of a collapsed masculinity trying to reassert itself.

Shana Redmond. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson.

Shana Redmond tracks the ways Paul Robeson’s presence has travelled via recordings and other forms of capture. The author builds on Robeson’s diverse output to construct an interdisciplinary method, enabling a formal analysis of a range of materials and underscoring the interplay between modes of representation and Black life.

Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness in Four Adaptations

Femi Osofisan is one of contemporary theatre’s greatest adapters. His dramaturgy frequently intertwines European texts with Yoruba songs, dances, rituals, and other cultural elements to break down ostensible cultural barriers. This article interprets Osofisan’s career as a movement from domestic to international concerns, charting the evolution of his dramaturgical approach from his early to later works to demonstrate his expanding cosmopolitan and postcolonial engagements. I argue that four of his adaptations – Who’s Afraid of Solarin? (1978), Tegonni (1994), Wesoo, Hamlet! (2003), and Women of Owu (2004) – serve as an index of Osofisan’s artistic focus as it shifts from a concentration on Nigeria’s domestic problems to expressing a Nigerian perspective on global issues. The latter three plays rely on complex and dynamic intertextuality, reflecting a postmodern self-consciousness as Osofisan metatheatrically explores the processes of performance, theatre, and art through direct interplay between his own characters and those of his Greek or Shakespearean sources. This argument challenges accounts of Osofisan’s career that emphasize an exclusive interest in Nigeria’s domestic politics, arguing instead that his drama is involved in a longstanding project of intercultural adaptation as a means of addressing international political, economic, and security problems.