Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today by Aleks Sierz. London: Methuen Drama, 2011. 278 pp. Now available for pre-order from amazon.com here.

“… [In] 2008 Writernet listed more than 300 new writing production companies and estimated that there were some 25,000 play scripts in circulation at any one time,” Aleks Sierz writes early on in his new book Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today, an overview of new drama in Great Britain from 2001-2009 — a daunting number, and evidence, if any were needed, that text-based drama is in no danger of disappearing. Sierz, a theatre critic for London’s The Arts Desk, Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College and the author of the groundbreaking In-Yer-Face Theatre as well as books about Martin Crimp and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, provides an overview of only a sampling of these plays (there is a list of the plays Sierz references at the end of the book — seven closely-printed pages in an eye-challenging six- or seven- point type), and these three hundred or so plays are treated breezily, by necessity, in the 278 pages of the book. But in so doing Sierz provides a necessary context for the  means by which English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh dramatists are facing the changes of an increasingly fragmented and complex culture. The renaissance of drama begun by the writers Sierz profiled in In-Yer-Face Theatre continues into the new millenium, and Sierz is its most perspicacious guide to date.

Sierz is a theatre critic, of course, and though he treats of text-based drama Rewriting the Nation always has its focus on the theatrical production of these new plays rather than the plays themselves as literature. What’s more, Sierz is keen to quickly winnow the field in surveying these 25,000 plays, hoping to identify what he calls “New Writing.” In the first chapters of the book, Sierz surveys the state and production of new writing in Great Britain from 1956 on, carefully parsing a definition of this term. “If new writing is plays written in a distinctive and original voice which deal with contemporary issues, and sometimes experiment in form,” he says, “are there any types of new play that are not New Writing Pure?” Well, yes there are: “New writing is not about history plays, adaptations of novels or films, or old-fashioned genre pieces (like courtroom dramas), or devised work produced by a group of writers, or verbatim theatre, or musicals. It is not Lite. No, what makes new writing special is that it is written in a distinctive and original voice that speaks of the here and how. And that it does hold a mirror up to the nation.” (63-65)

This first portion of the book is a salutary companion to TCG’s snapshot of the new writing landscape in America, Outrageous Fortune, published a few years back — a broader picture than the statistics and anecdotes that the TCG book relies upon — but Sierz has bigger and more idiosyncratic fish to fry (and, it occurs to me, if Great Britain’s literary managers had to cope with 25,000 scripts winging their way through the mails, woe to those in the United States, which has a general and playwriting population perhaps five times larger). By necessity, Sierz deals with the 300 plays under his consideration by breaking the rest of the book into thematic groupings: the chapter “Global Roaming” deals with plays about international politics, “Market Forces” about business, economics, celebrity and migrant labor; “Two Nations” about class, racial and linguistic divisions; “Love Hurts” about family and sexuality, and “Rival Realities” about various dystopias and alternative worlds (including the world of mental illness) that arose during the decade in the nation’s drama. In all of these, Sierz seeks to tease out the implications of these themes to the idea of national self-definition as it is expressed in theatre and drama. His definition of New Writing Pure also allows him to examine new plays from older playwrights, including Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker, as they approached these issues as well — and avoiding the limitations of writing about new, young writers only.

It is a breezy survey, to put it mildly. At times the blizzard of play titles and dramatists’ names becomes almost phonebook-like in its density, but here and there flashes of a puckish wit reward the reader for his patience. “On the Shore of the Wide World … examines three generations of a Stockport family over nine months, a time pregnant with meaning” (bada-bing!), and even better, the actors in Modern Dance for Beginners “played four disparate couples in a play with enough anguish to fill a dozen condoms” (176) — a wry construction which certainly sticks with you, even if you’re not sure exactly what it means.

But Sierz is always evaluating, always critiquing, and never moreso than in the final chapter of the book. Unlike the structure of his earlier In-Yer-Face Theatre, Sierz is unable to identify singular, individual voices in this welter of new work, as he did with Nielson, Ravenhill, Kane, Ridley and others for the drama of the 1990s. Some things, despite the breadth of interests the dramatists surveyed, still went unexplored. “Given [some] political divisions, and the way they shape national identity, it is surprising that theatre had so little to say about some of the topics that people actually argue about. Before we get too complacent about how contemporary new writing is, it might be worth noting that there were no major plays about the house-price boom, the ethics of choosing schools or, with only one or two exceptions, global warming,” Sierz comments, though I’ve noted a sharp uptick in plays about this last just over the last few months. “Old people were rarely of interest to young playwrights. … If you can blame playwrights for failing to write these kinds of plays, you also have to hold theatres to account for neither commissioning them, nor taking steps to widen their rather narrow repertoire of plays. Women writers, while more visible than in previous decades, still fared less well than men. Despite all the variety of the decade, artistic directors and literary managers showed precious little interest in boldly broadening their repertoires beyond standard naturalistic and realistic fare. So plays written in a more absurdist or surreal aesthetic got short shrift. … Likewise, audiences did the same, often preferring the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar. And if new writing aspires to be daring, it rarely delivers the goods.” (236-237) Earlier in the book, Sierz quotes Royal Court literary manager Graham Whybrow on the distinctive voice of the individual writer: “Just imagine taking a single page of a writer’s work and throwing it on the floor in a mass of other pages, written by other writers. If you can identify that writer from one page then they have a distinctive voice.” From the excerpts from the dialogue that Sierz provides, it’s very hard to distinguish one writer examined from another as one could distinguish Kane from Ravenhill from Crimp from Ridley. “Although this experiment puts a premium on the literary quality of a playwright’s dialogue, and not on their dramaturgical skills,” Sierz says, “it remains a good guide to the singularity and personality of their voice.” (50) And more bluntly — and in an opinion you certainly won’t find in the pages of Outrageous Fortune — Sierz honestly admits that, “While there were very many mediocre plays [in the decade 2000-2010], there were only a handful of really good ones.” (240)

Several of the plays Sierz discusses here have made their way to New York in the past few years, including Anthony Nielson’s Stitching and Polly Stenham’s That Face; the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch is due to visit St. Ann’s Playhouse a third time a little later this season. In the near future, Soho Rep will offer a production of debbie tucker green’s Born Bad, and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is scheduled for Broadway soon. And more intriguingly, Kwame Kwei-Armah, a central figure in Sierz’ book, was just named artistic director of Baltimore’s Center Stage. The British invasion continues apace, whatever the American response may be to these plays that Sierz considers distinctively British. Some things never change.

Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today provides a solid, idiosyncratic and ultimately indispensible guide to the invaders. It also provides an example to American reviewers and critics, who appear to be somewhat loathe to synthesize the broad landscape of American drama into an examination of what politics and culture have meant to the written drama, and vice versa.

You can continue to follow Aleks’ critical musings at his blog, Pirate Dog, and for a taste of Rewriting the Nation there’s his speech, “British New Writing,” delivered to a London meeting of the Society for Theatre Research early in 2010.