Deirdre Osborne: Critically Black: Black British Dramatists and Theatre of the New Millennium

This project offers comprehensive critical attention to the drama of the new millennium produced by contemporary black writers in Britain who, writing from an indigenous British identity and standpoint, have sustained a prominence in mainstream contexts in the UK and abroad, which was not achieved by their theatrical forebears. In centralising black people’s experience as a matter of course, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Lemn Sissay insert radical experiential revisions to conceptions of national culture. Although their work is the focus, the book makes selective reference to the work of other contemporary black and white dramatists in order to elicit comparisons and contrasts as they serve the scope of the study.

As black indigenous Britons, the four writers inherit the legacies of British theatre; theatre practice, performance, historiography and archiving which persistently restricted and even rendered invisible, black people’s presence and input until the mid-twentieth century. The project traces how legacies of restriction and exclusion interface with traditional British theatre heritage as formative influences upon these writers, but significantly, begins from the standpoint of their automatic constituency within British culture (as indigenous Britons) rather than building some kind of case for their inclusion.

It is the first book to offer detailed attention to two influential contexts that shape the reception of black dramatists: (i) theatre critics and reviews (ii) the ways in which two distinct routes (literary and performance studies) offer an unsatisfactory separation of critical approaches, each with its own shortcomings and strengths. The project identifies the need for critical languages which can meet the demands of the formal and experiential aesthetics the writers forge as they frequently slip between and re-work literary genres and performance traditions.