Feminist Views on the English Stage

Women Playwrights, 1990-2000

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by Elaine Aston

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published November 2003, 248 pages, cloth

ISBN 052180003X

Feminist Views on the English Stage is a study of contemporary drama from a feminist perspective, one that challenges an idea of the 1990s as a 'post-feminist' decade and pays attention to women's playwriting marginalized by a 'renaissance' of angry young men. Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic 'bad girl' of the stage, to the 'canonical' Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the century's end. Aston also explores new writing for the 1990s in theatre by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

 Contents

Acknowledgements
1. A feminist view on the 1990s
2. Telling feminist tales: Caryl Churchill
3. Saying no to daddy: child sexual abuse, the 'Big Hysteria'
4. Girl power, the new feminism?
5. The 'bad girl of our stage?': Sarah Kane
6. Performing identities
7. Feminist connections to a multicultural 'scene'
8. Feminism past, and future?: Timberlake Wertenbaker
9. Tales for the twenty-first century: final reflections
Bibliography
Index