In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today

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Eyre, Hermione (18 September 2011). "Philip Ridley: The savage prophet". The Independent . Retrieved 3 March 2021.

In his lecture entitled Blasted and After: New Writing in British Theatre Today Sierz cites "five mighty moments in the history of the 1990s" that shaped in-yer-face theatre. Outside of this lecture Sierz has gone into greater detail about the importance of these moments: [6] The influence of North American plays and Scottish theatre [ edit ] In-yer-face theatre has often been mistakenly categorised as being a 'movement' [43] [44] [45] which Sierz has disputed: [46] Sierz, Aleks (16 February 2010). NEW WRITING SPECIAL (Speech). Lecture entitled Blasted and After: New Writing in British Theatre Today, about in-yer-face theatre in 1990s and its aftermath, given by Aleks Sierz at a meeting of the Society for Theatre Research, at the Art Workers Guild. London . Retrieved 10 November 2020.Ruble, Blair A. (2011). Urals Pathfinder: Theatre in Post-soviet Yekaterinburg (PDF). Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. p.17. ISBN 978-1-933549-77-4. 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 c d e f g h i j Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber Limited. ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8 . Retrieved 12 November 2020. Ansorge, Peter (1999). "Really a Golden Age?". In Edgar, David (ed.). State of Play. Faber and Faber Limited. pp.37–38. ISBN 0-571-20096-6. Quoting from an interview with Elaine Aston, in Caryl Churchill (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997) 5.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] a b Sierz, Aleks (24 May 2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Great Britain: Methuen Drama. p.231-234. ISBN 9781408181331. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed. With a new foreword by the author (1961; New York: Vintage [Knopf], 2004). Dromgoole, Dominic (2000). The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting (1sted.). London: Methuen Publishing. ISBN 0413772306.

Sierz also states that the murder "resulted in calls for the censorship of films, of television and of art works" [18] because "in 1994 the judge in the boys' trial explained the murder by speculating that they had been exposed to a violent video, ' Child's Play 3', this created a media storm which, I would argue, is the cultural context for the media uproar over Blasted". [6] Stephen Daldry at The Royal Court Theatre [ edit ] It might seem strange to attribute so much time and effort to in-yer-face theatre, given that the movement—in contrast to the rest of the history of drama—is a flash in the pan. So what is its legacy? Or, to be more frank: why should we care?Sierz, Aleks (21 October 2015). Introduction. The Pitchfork Disney. By Ridley, Philip. Modern Classics (Reissueed.). Great Britain: Methuen Drama. pp.1–24. ISBN 978-1-4725-1400-4. Sierz has been mistakenly cited as coining the term "In-yer-face theatre", saying that "Although I certainly was the first to describe, celebrate and theorise this kind of new writing, which emerged decisively in the mid-1990s, I certainly did not invent the phrase." In his piece "A brief history of in-yer-face theatre" Sierz outlines a number of instances where the phrase was used directly or indirectly by others prior to him popularising the label. In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s". University of the West of England, Bristol. 6–7 September 2002, Writernet 2003. Retrieved 9 June 2008. (Conference report posted on writernet.co.uk, in both HTML and PDF versions). Towards the end on the 1990s there were declining numbers of new in-yer-face plays being performed in Britain. In response to Trainspotting being performed at the Bush Theatre, critic Charles Spencer wrote that "You may not like these in-your-face productions; but they are quite impossible to ignore." Later that year when the play transferred to the West End, The Times's Jeremy Kingston remarked that the previous two productions of the play had brought "actors within inches of the audience, and such in-yer-face realism".