The uses of history in contemporary British political drama: David Edgar, Howard Brenton, and Caryl Churchill

Abstract

This dissertation examines the uses of historical material in the oppositional theatre of three contemporary playwrights. David Edgar, Howard Brenton, and Caryl Churchill are of a post-Pinter generation of expressly socialist dramatists who have used agitational propaganda, documentary, and social-realist forms to subvert the dominant narratives of British history. Manipulating such received histories for the polemical purposes of demystifying both the past and the present, these writers construct metahistorical paradigms which interrogate ruling class versions of the past and attempt to recuperate an indigenous working-class tradition of British radicalism. However, while Edgar, Brenton and Churchill successfully challenge the authenticity of received histories, they remain constrained by the available forms of the history play, which frequently lead them towards the same bourgeois-heroic conventions of dramaturgy they try to reject.