Graham Saunders – författare

Harold Pinter provides an up-to-date analysis and reappraisal concerning the work of one of the most studied and performed dramatists in the world.

Drawing extensively from The Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library as well as reviews and other critical materials, this book offers new insights into previously established views about his work. The book also analyses and reappraises specific key historical and contemporary productions, including a selection of Pinter’s most significant screenplays. In particular, this volume seeks to assess Pinter’s critical reputation and legacy since his death in 2008. These include his position as a political writer and political activist – from disassociation and neutrality on the subject until relatively late in his career when his drama sought to explicitly address questions of political dissent and torture by totalitarian regimes. The book revisits some familiar territories such as Pinter’s place as a British absurdist and the role memory plays in his work, but it also sets out to explore new territories such as Pinter’s changing attitudes towards gender in the light of #MeToo and queer politics and how in particular a play such as The Caretaker (1960) through several key productions has brought the issues of race into sharper focus.

Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist series, Harold Pinter provides an essential and accessible guide to the dramatists’ work.

Harold Pinter provides an up-to-date analysis and reappraisal concerning the work of one of the most studied and performed dramatists in the world.

Drawing extensively from The Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library as well as reviews and other critical materials, this book offers new insights into previously established views about his work. The book also analyses and reappraises specific key historical and contemporary productions, including a selection of Pinter’s most significant screenplays. In particular, this volume seeks to assess Pinter’s critical reputation and legacy since his death in 2008. These include his position as a political writer and political activist – from disassociation and neutrality on the subject until relatively late in his career when his drama sought to explicitly address questions of political dissent and torture by totalitarian regimes. The book revisits some familiar territories such as Pinter’s place as a British absurdist and the role memory plays in his work, but it also sets out to explore new territories such as Pinter’s changing attitudes towards gender in the light of #MeToo and queer politics and how in particular a play such as The Caretaker (1960) through several key productions has brought the issues of race into sharper focus.

Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist series, Harold Pinter provides an essential and accessible guide to the dramatists’ work.

This new collection will add significantly to the body of scholarship on this important dramatist. This is the first study of the whole body of Wesker’s work, and will create new interest in this partly forgotten key figure in post-war British theatre.

A new study of Wesker’s work is overdue. The editors are recognized scholars in the field with a track record of publication on British theatre.  An impressive list of contributors comprises important scholars of post-war theatre – including John Bull and Chris Megson – alongside practitioners such as Edward Bond and Pamela Howard, who bring professional insights to bear.

Arnold Wesker was hailed in the press as ‘one of the great overlooked’ of British drama when he died in April 2016. Despite his pivotal engagement with the cultural politics of 1960s Britain and his international career, only a fraction of Wesker’s dramatic output tends to be studied. He is still remembered and discussed as the author of The Trilogy, three plays staged between 1958–60 that fail to reflect the daring aesthetics of his later work, thereby perpetuating an incorrect image of a naturalist playwright.

This important new book aims to remedy the recent critical neglect of the dramatist, building on existing scholarship and introducing new insights and perspectives. It examines the whole body of Wesker’s work for the first time, including some of his non-dramatic work, and considers it from a variety of perspectives. These include Wesker’s reception in Europe, his Jewishness and his attitude to politics and to community. Significant use is made of material from the Arnold Wesker archive, held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

It includes chapters on Wesker’s representation of, and attitude towards, women, his relationship with his Jewish origins and identity, and his role in establishing Centre 42 following his imprisonment for participation in the Aldermaston March in 1959. Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other working class towns of Britain, and arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress, which concerned the importance of arts in the community.

It will be of most interest to academics and scholars of post-war British theatre, and to those teaching theatre and drama. It is accessible for a student readership at all undergraduate levels, as well as postgraduates. It has potential for textbook and reading list use.

Wesker’s significance in British theatre history of the 1950s and 1960s means that the book may find readers amongst the informed general public.

This new collection will add significantly to the body of scholarship on this important dramatist. This is the first study of the whole body of Wesker’s work, and will create new interest in this partly forgotten key figure in post-war British theatre.

A new study of Wesker’s work is overdue. The editors are recognized scholars in the field with a track record of publication on British theatre.  An impressive list of contributors comprises important scholars of post-war theatre – including John Bull and Chris Megson – alongside practitioners such as Edward Bond and Pamela Howard, who bring professional insights to bear.

Arnold Wesker was hailed in the press as ‘one of the great overlooked’ of British drama when he died in April 2016. Despite his pivotal engagement with the cultural politics of 1960s Britain and his international career, only a fraction of Wesker’s dramatic output tends to be studied. He is still remembered and discussed as the author of The Trilogy, three plays staged between 1958–60 that fail to reflect the daring aesthetics of his later work, thereby perpetuating an incorrect image of a naturalist playwright.

This important new book aims to remedy the recent critical neglect of the dramatist, building on existing scholarship and introducing new insights and perspectives. It examines the whole body of Wesker’s work for the first time, including some of his non-dramatic work, and considers it from a variety of perspectives. These include Wesker’s reception in Europe, his Jewishness and his attitude to politics and to community. Significant use is made of material from the Arnold Wesker archive, held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

It includes chapters on Wesker’s representation of, and attitude towards, women, his relationship with his Jewish origins and identity, and his role in establishing Centre 42 following his imprisonment for participation in the Aldermaston March in 1959. Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other working class towns of Britain, and arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress, which concerned the importance of arts in the community.

It will be of most interest to academics and scholars of post-war British theatre, and to those teaching theatre and drama. It is accessible for a student readership at all undergraduate levels, as well as postgraduates. It has potential for textbook and reading list use.

Wesker’s significance in British theatre history of the 1950s and 1960s means that the book may find readers amongst the informed general public.

This book incorporates a wide theoretical, cultural, literary and historical engagement in exploring the tension between dramatic productions and the forms of censorship they encounter from creation to reception. The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship offers global new insights into censorship practices, examining attempts at repression motivated either by fears that audiences gathering together to watch live dramatic events will lead to sedition and mass uprisings, or by moral or religious squeamishness requiring the establishment of institutional systems of censorship to curb or suppress the stage. As such, the Handbook aims to initiate redefinitions of what we understand or experience as censorship.

Who knew theatre could (still) carry so many threats, or be so widely provocative and dangerous? This is an extraordinary and often eye-opening set of thirty-six individually insightful, wide-ranging and oftentimes disturbing essays, each of which offers unique insights into theatre censorship practices and their impact within a specific political and moral culture. There is a particular emphasis on the recent and current, and the authors speak with first-hand knowledge and from direct experience not only about the restrictions but also how artists sometimes negotiate and evade these. What makes the book so especially fascinating and illuminating is seeing so many examples juxtaposed together. This enables the reader to hear the essays and the cultures talking to and alongside each other. The collection repeatedly breaks fresh ground, and the editors deserve enormous credit for gathering and effectively curating so many reports from the front-line.  

Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders’s book  is a wide-ranging, incisive and compelling collection of reflections and case studies on the theatre industry’s relationship to censorship and self-censorship from a historical and contemporaneous perspective. An impressive array of authors have been assembled for this volume representing, among them, views on the subject from Spain, Denmark, Norway, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Iran, Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, Japan, Ireland, Australia, Russia, England and more. The book is by turns surprising in its curatorial and narrative design and wonderfully effective at delineating the complex and thorny paths that create socio-political cultures where the censorship and self-censorship of theatre artists thrives and/or is efficaciously contested and rebelled against. Of note is a through line of argument in the book around less overt modes of surveillance that police artists’ imaginations and thereby the work they create and produce. At a time in the world where many governments are increasingly seeking to limit artistic expression, this book is a necessary reminder of the many freedoms that have been fought for in theatres around the globe, and how the power of being unsilenced must never be taken for granted.

– Caridad Svich. Playwright & Translator

This is a truly excellent collection of incisive studies. It is wide-ranging, impressively global in scope, with an illuminating balance of the historical and the contemporary. In its impressive and well-realised ambition, demonstrated by the well-focused intelligence and academic flair of its many contributors, this collection is both magisterial and vital. It is an essential contribution to censorship studies, fascinating and inspiring, a must-read for anyone interested in the subject.

– Aleks Sierz. Theatre critic and author of Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (2011) & Good Nights Out: A History of British Theatre Since the Second World War (2021)