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184 6 / THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
as Monstrous Regiment, Gay Sweatshop, Joint Stock, and John McGrath's 7: 84 worked collaboratively with dramatists who were invited to help devise and develop shows. Increasingly in the 1970s published plays were either transcriptions of the first production or 'blueprints for the alchemy of live performance' (Micheline Wandor). In Ireland the founding of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 by the well-established playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea had similar motives of collaborative cultural catalysis. Their first production, Friel's Translations (1980), exploring linguistic colonialism and the fragility of cultural identity in nineteenth-century Ireland, achieved huge international success.
This ethos of collaboration and group development helped foster the first major cohort of women dramatists to break through onto mainstream stages. Working with Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment in the late 1970s on plays such as the gender-bending anticolonial Cloud. Nine (1979), Caryl Churchill developed plays out of workshops exploring gender, class, and colonialism. She carefully transcribes and overlaps the speech of her characters to create a seamlessly interlocking web of discourse, a streamlined version of the ebb and flow of normal speech. In Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987), plays that anatomize the market-driven ethos of the 1980s, she explores modern society with the wit and detachment of Restoration comedy. Pam Gems studies the social and sexual politics of misogyny and feminism in her campy theatrical explorations of strong women?Queen Cristina (1977), Piaf( 1978), Camille (1984)?while Sarah Daniels reinterprets the naturalism of kitchen- sink drama by adding to it the linguistic stylization of Churchill.
Massive strides in the diversification of English-language theater occurred during the era of decolonization, when two eminent poets, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, helped breathe new life into anglophone drama. As early as the 1950s Derek Walcott was writing and directing plays about Caribbean history and experience, re- creating in his drama a West Indian 'oral culture, of chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables,' at a time when theater in the Caribbean tended to imitate European themes and styles. After moving to Trinidad in 1958, he founded what came to be known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and for much of the next twenty years devoted himself to directing and writing plays that included Dream on Monkey Mountain, first produced in 1967, in which Eurocentric and Afrocentric visions of Caribbean identity collide. Since then, a notable breakthrough in Caribbean theater has been the collaborative work of the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, which, following the lead of Louise Bennett and other West Indian poets, draws on women's personal histories in dramatic performances that make vivid use of Jamaican speech, expression, and rhythm. Meanwhile in Africa, Wole Soyinka, who had been involved with the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s when Rrecht's influence was first being absorbed, returned to Nigeria in the year of its independence to write and direct plays that fused Euromodernist dramatic techniques with conventions from Yoruba popular and traditional drama. His play Death and the King's Horseman, premiered in Nigeria in 1976, represents a tragic confrontation between colonial officials and the guardians of Yoruba rituals and beliefs. While Soyinka has been a towering presence in sub-Saharan Africa, other playwrights, such as the fellow Nigerian Femi Osofisan and the South African Athol Fugard, have used the stage to probe issues of class, race, and the often violent legacy of colonialism. In England playwrights of Caribbean, African, and Asian origin or descent, such as Mustapha Matura, Caryl
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INTRODUCTION / 184 7
Phillips, and Hanif Kureishi, the latter of whom is best-known internationally for his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988), My Son the Fanatic (1998), and The Mother (2004), have revitalized British drama with a host of new vocabularies, new techniques, new visions of identity in an increasingly cross-ethnic and transnational world. The century that began with its first great dramatic movement in Ireland was followed by a century that began with English-language drama more diverse in its accents and styles, more international in its bearings and vision than ever before.
Additional information about the Twentieth Century and After, including primary texts and images, is available at Norton Literature Online (www .wwnorton.literature). Online topics are
? Representing the Great War ? Modernist Experiment ? Imagining Ireland
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
CONTEXTS
TEXTS
1899, 1902 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
1900 Max Planck, quantum theory
1901 First wireless communication across the Atlantic 1901-10 Reign of Edward VII 1902 End of the Anglo- Boer War 1903 Henry Ford introduces the first mass-
produced car. Wright Brothers make the
first successful airplane flight 1905 Albert Einstein, theory of special relativity. Impressionist exhibition, London
1910 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
1910 Postimpressionist exhibition, London
1910-36 Reign of George V 1913 Ezra Pound, 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'
1914 James Joyce, Dubliners. Thomas
1914-18 World War I Hardy, Satires of Circumstance
1914-15 Blast
1916 Easter Rising in Dublin
1916 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
1917 T. S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of
