Utopia

This book offers readers for the first time the texts of Claire MacDonald's Utopia, a sequence of playtexts commissioned and written over a twenty-year period (1987-2008) by one of the key players in the development of performance theatre and writing in Britain. It is both a collection of plays and a book on how plays come to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Dee Heddon and Lenora Champagne, it provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald's career as writer and collaborator and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the UK. Together the plays interrogate the relationship between words and the fictional worlds they make, challenging the traditional understanding of 'non-text-based theatre'; and their performance history spans several decades and at least three continents, involving some of the Britain's leading experimental directors, performers, designers and composers.

The book will appeal to students of theatre, acting, performance and drama studies looking for post-dramatic scripts to study, to produce and to stage, and to researchers and students interested in the historical contexts of second generation British performance theatre (1975-85) and its implications.

The volume will be divided into two parts, introduced by a critical essay by the author, placing each work in a historical context and describing the twenty-year project they now comprise. Part 1 contains the texts of the first two plays, 'An Imitation of Life' and 'Storm from Paradise,' introduced by Tim Etchell. Part 2 is introduced by Dee Heddon and contains the final play, 'Correspondence.' is a production dossier collates commentaries, interviews and critical responses to the work, from the collaborative teams who commissioned and worked on them, and from critics at the time of A final interview between the author and writer and critic Lenora Champagne, focusing on women in the experimental tradition, completes the volume.