Staging an Intervention: The Politics and Performance of the History Play
Event details
This research seminar celebrates the publication of two new monographs by Theatre academics in the School of ACT: Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play by Rebecca Benzie, and The Contemporary History Play: Staging English and American Pasts by Benjamin Poore. The research for these books is underpinned by several archive and performance projects funded by the University and based on York’s theatrical past. In this seminar, Benzie and Poore will reflect on the process of writing and shaping their respective books, which share some methodologies but follow different lines of inquiry.
History plays make up a significant proportion of all the new work produced in UK theatres, and yet it has been unfashionable to discuss this fact since the 1990's. Instead, history plays are usually bracketed under the rubric of ‘new writing’ or ‘political theatre’. In our work on historical drama on stage, we broaden the definition of ‘history play’ to include any play which makes a claim to being set in the past. Understood in this way, history plays make powerful interventions in present-day political discourse through both implicit and explicit means.
In their new books, Benzie and Poore argue that the history play has been changing during the twenty-first century to represent, and address, underrepresented groups and perspectives. They propose that collecting and naming these patterns and practices can empower theatre-makers and audiences to consider the relationship between product and process more reflexively, leading to a more developed understanding of how theatre performs the past. In his work, Poore considers plays from England and the United States to explore how a new generation of playwrights has overturned the established conventions of historical realism. With a focus on feminist discourse, Benzie interrogates the gender politics of contemporary representations of the past and explores the role of historiography in the playwriting process.
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Meeting ID: 953 8728 7191
Passcode: 517889
About the speakers
Benjamin Poore (he/him) is Professor of Theatre at University of York, UK. His books include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians, Theatre & Empire, and Sherlock Holmes from Screen to Stage. Ben’s research interests are centred on histories of playwriting, revival and adaptation in the theatre, particularly from the Victorian era to the present day. He has published widely on the stage and screen afterlives of characters from Victorian literature and culture. These have included Sherlock Holmes, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and the villains of fin de siècle popular fiction. Ben’s most recent book is The Contemporary History Play: Staging English and American Pasts (Methuen Drama Engage, 2024).
Dr Rebecca Benzie (she/her) is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, UK. Her research interests include feminist theatre practices, new playwriting, and acts of commemoration. She is an experienced theatre practitioner and dramaturg, specialising in devised theatre and textual adaptation. Her key publications comprise Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play (2024) published in Bloomsbury’s Engage Series and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Women in Contemporary British Theatre co-edited with Marissia Fragkou (due 2025). She has also published a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War (2023) and a co-authored journal article with Benjamin Poore on the history play for Studies in Theatre and Performance (2023).
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