In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today

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Funnily enough, in-yer-face theatre constitutes less of a rigid stylistic movement, and more of a cultural trend in 1990s Britain that saw the prevalence of similar works being produced at once. Some critics point to cultural events such as the AIDS epidemic or the aftermath of the Thatcher Era to explain the emergence of such anger in the art being made.

In-yer-face drama has been staged by new writing theatres such as the Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead, Soho Theatre, Finborough, Tricycle, Theatre Royal Stratford East, and even the trendy Almeida, all of which are in London. But experiential theatre is not an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon. The Traverse in Edinburgh was really important - as were Manchester, Birmingham, Bolton, West Yorkshire, and so on. Especially Live theatre in Newcastle. Of course, this is not an exclusively English or Brit affair either. Americans such as Phyllis Nagy, Naomi Wallace and Tracy Letts made a vital contribution to new writing in English - as did Scottish writers such as David Greig and David Harrower. Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation". New Theatre Quart. 18.1 (2002): 17–24. Published online by Cambridge University Press, journals.cambridge.org. Retrieved 9 June 2008. (Abstract. Subscription required for full access.) a b Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. pp.38–39. ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8 . Retrieved 12 November 2020.Eyre, Richard and Nicholas Wright. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. ISBN 0-7475-5254-1.

Dromgoole, Dominic. The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting. London: Methuen, 2002. ISBN 0-413-77134-2. THE THEATREVOICE DEBATE: NEW WRITING Audio recording and Transcript. Hosted by Aleks Sierz featuring Richard Bean, Simon Stephens and Mark Ravenhill. Sierz, Aleks (March 2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. pp.210–214. ISBN 0-571-20049-4. The sanitized phrase 'in-your-face' is defined by the New Oxford English Dictionary (1998) as something 'blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid'. The Collins English Dictionary (1998) adds the adjective 'confrontational'. 'In-your-face' originated in American sports journalism during the mid-1970s as an exclamation of derision or contempt, and gradually seeped into more mainstream slang during the late 1980s and 1990s, meaning 'aggressive, provocative, brash'. It implies being forced to see something close up, having your personal space invaded. It suggests the crossing of normal boundaries. [3] However, despite the near ubiquity of in-yer-face theatre, the ‘movement’ burned brightly but briefly. Audiences and playwrights alike began to tire of on-stage brutality. Many established stage writers, such as Martin Crimp, Martin McDonagh and the American playwright Tracy Letts owe their careers to explosive starts in in-yer-face theatre. However, the anger of their younger work is largely missing from their recent, more ‘mature’ work. Notable Figuresa b Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. pp.39–40. ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8 . Retrieved 12 November 2020. The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. […] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.’ In-yer-face theatre has often been mistakenly categorised as being a 'movement' [43] [44] [45] which Sierz has disputed: [46]