Contemporary European Theatre

Got two new books out, innit? I was in Hong Kong a couple of years ago and one of the people I was speaking to said how much they liked Contemporary European Theatre Directors, which I edited with Maria Delgado in 2010, ‘but now we need the same thing about playwrights’. And I thought that’s a very good idea. Maria and I started planning and brought on board my brilliant colleague Bryce Lease, who has great expertise on Eastern European theatre. Four years later (it’s a very big book) here it is. 21 chapters, a substantial introduction, a foreword by Tiago Rodrigues and an afterword by David Greig, it features 39 different playwrights from 18 different European countries, pretty much all of whom have emerged over the last 30 years. Most chapters pair different playwrights together, to compare and contrast their work’s journeys across different European theatre cultures, exploring what the new encounters between play and culture reveals about the play, the culture, and perhaps Europe itself. I’ve written a long chapter about European playwriting 1945-1989 that forms a kind of prelude to the bulk of the book.

At the same time, Routledge asked if we wanted to do a second edition of the Directors volume, which we were very happy to do. Each chapter has been revised and updated - my chapter on Katie Mitchell had a lot of new work to take in - and there are three new chapters on Deborah Warner, Ivo Van Hove and Krzysztof Warlikowski, plus a new preface by Mark Ravenhill. The book’s been rejacketed to make it uniform with the new Playwrights volume.

Available from all the usual places.