Aleks Sierz

With his 2001 book In-Yer-Face Theatre, British critic Aleks Sierz gave a name to the new experiential extremes in British theatre exemplified by the generation of playwrights that included Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Phyllis Nagy and Tracy Letts. He also contributed a new critical term that, like Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd and Bonnie Marranca’s Theatre of Images, was a convenient shorthand for the issues and aesthetic concerns expressed by these dramatists. Necessarily reductive and limiting, like all labels, but with that caveat a useful catch-all to get conversation and criticism started about this new landscape of work.

Well, it’s been ten years, and Sierz is back with a new book, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today, now available through amazon.co.uk (and scheduled to be issued stateside later this year). I discussed this book over drinks with Aleks in London’s Waterstone bookstore cafe in Trafalgar Square a few years ago and I’m glad to see that I’ll have a copy of it soon. According to Methuen’s Web page for the book:

In recent years British theatre has seen a renaissance in playwriting accompanied by a proliferation of writing awards and new writing groups. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the industry and of the key plays and playwrights. It opens by defining what is meant by ‘new writing’ and providing a study of the leading theatres, such as the Royal Court, the Traverse, the Bush, the Hampstead and the National theatres, together with the London fringe and the work of touring companies.

In the second part, Sierz provides a fascinating survey of the main issues that have characterised new plays in the first decade of the new century, such as foreign policy and war overseas, economic boom and bust, divided communities and questions of identity and race. It considers too how playwrights have re-examined domestic issues of family, of love, of growing up, and the fantasies and nightmares of the mind. Against the backdrop of economic, political and social change under New Labour, Sierz shows how British theatre responded to these changes and in doing so has been and remains deeply involved in the project of rewriting the nation.

Our readers based in London will no doubt wish to meet the author at the National Theatre Platform with Aleks Sierz, along with Ruth Little, Sebastian Born and Ben Power, who will discuss the book next Monday night; more information about the evening is here. You can keep up with Aleks’ continuing critical musing at his blog Pirate Dog.

It’s encouraging to see that there’s still a readership for books which treat plays as important cultural documents rather than fodder for a marketplace or awards ceremonies; at least in England, that is. But, speaking as a Yank, perhaps a national dramatic culture gets the plays (and the criticism) that it deserves.