This Companion provides a set of provocative agendas for investigating modern drama. It offers the most comprehensive challenge to existing constructions of the canon and examines in detail the dialogue between developments in Britain and Ireland. Contributors investigate radical postcolonial readings, offer revisionist feminist critiques, and reflect on why certain playwrights have been written in and others written out. Why have certain institutions dominated the constructions of dramatic canons? What role have female playwrights adopted in challenging stage conventions and modes of production? These are among the questions addressed by the Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama. The volume analyzes a wide range of plays and performance traditions, and explores the political, cultural, economic and institutional frameworks that readers require in order to get to grips with them.

The Companion plots continuities and discontinuities, innovations, and resistances to the new. Its authoritative contributions highlight different treatments of realist conventions, investigate anti-realist experiments, and examine representations of war, terrorism, comedy, trauma and sexuality by playwrights from Shaw and Wilde to the present. Contributors also discuss the contending forces that have influenced the construction of the modern dramatic canon, engaging with contemporary discourses that challenge the dominance of London as well as of white English males and realism.

Mary Luckhurst is Senior Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of York. She is the author of Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006), co-author of The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays (2002), and co-editor of Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000 (2005). She has also edited The Creative Writing Handbook: Techniques for New Writers (1996), On Directing: Interviews with Directors (1999), and On Acting: Interviews with Actors (2002). She was awarded a University of York outstanding teaching award in 2006 and is also one of the Higher Education Academy's National Teaching Fellows.