Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age

Description

This study explores the ways in which playtexts have evolved in relation to the sociocultural and cognitive conditions of a mediatized age, and how they, in form and content, respond to this environment and open up new critical possibilities in text and performance. The study combines theatre and media theory through the innovative concept of 'mediatized dramaturgy' and offers conceptual reflections on the ways in which a playtext negotiates the new reality of contemporary culture. The book scrutinizes the form of playtexts and works through the exchange between text and performance by exploring contemporary works such as Simon Stephens's Pornography, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information, and David Greig's The Yes/No Plays, and their selected productions. Offering a pioneering intervention that expands discussions about the mediatization of theatre, and new playwriting, Mediatized Dramaturgyproposes areas for discussion that appeal to researchers, audiences and practitioners with an interest in the sub-field of media and performance, and British and North American drama and theatre. Media technologies and their socio-cultural repercussions have increasingly influenced theatre, particularly since the ubiquitous prevalence of digital technologies from the 1990s onwards. Consequently, new modes such as digital and intermedial theatre have come to populate and transform the theatre practice and scholarship. In this changing theatrical landscape, what has happened to plays in the historically text-oriented British theatre? How has playtext changed in an age of theatre marked by mediatization and its possibilities?

Seda Ilter is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests include theoretical and aesthetic implications of new technologies and media culture in theatre, dramaturgy, and new writing for performance. She has published on mediatized theatre, emerging forms of texts in digital performance, big data and theatre, as well as on politics of social media and protest, and contemporary theatre in Turkey.

Ilter offers a compelling argument for understanding new playtexts through the lens of mediatized rather than theatrical dramaturgy. This cogently written intervention into considerations of character, plot, language, and platform is thoughtful, insightful, and astutely observed. Mediatized Dramaturgy offers the concepts and vocabulary for twenty-first century dramaturgy. * Dr. Bernadette Cochrane, The University of Queensland, Australia *