Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage

Abstract

This book considers plays in which self-refl exive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Termed historiographic metatheatre, this form has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-refl exivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others that use the device of the play-withinthe-play to explore constructions of nationhood, and of Britishness in particular. He argues those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.