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POLITICAL THEATRE IN POST-THATCHER BRITAIN: NEW WRITING, 1995-2005. By Amelia Howe Kritzer. Performance Interventions Series. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 239. $80.00 cloth.
Amelia Howe Kritzer's timely book on recent British political theatre deploys its periodization with strategy-its title references multiple historical frames on either side of the colon. Although it is debatable whether the term "Post-Thatcher" means post-1990 (when Britain's first female prime minister stepped down from office) or post-1997 (when Labour leader Tony Blair unseated Thatcher's designated successor, John Major), the label itself proves evocative. It reflects the belated yet resurgent cultural experience of the 1990s, extending that feeling across the turn of the century by using Britain's most recognizable political figure to explain the events and sociological processes for which she metonymically stands. The book's starting date, 1995, alludes to the premiere of Sarah Kane's Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre, but the title's reference to Thatcher insists that Kane's work be viewed in a sociopolitical context. This approach departs from that of Aleks Sierz and of Rebecca D'Monté and Graham Saunders, who write about 1990s drama under the rubrics of, respectively, "in-yer-face" and "cool Britannia," labels that emphasize the energy and attitude of the plays and their artists rather than their historical context.
Kritzer's study also takes wider aim than Sierz or D'Monté and Saunders, who focus only on the decade of the 1990s. Sierz's 2001 In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today breathlessly reported from the frontlines while the new wave was breaking and depends very much on the visceral sense of having...