Defining British drama -- Patterns of development and organizing principles -- Critical treatment -- Arthur Pinero : the problem play versus the new realism -- Reinterpretation of Ibsen -- Refurbishing nineteenth-century styles -- Thesis drama and metaphysical comedy --Symbolism and politics -- Shavian influences and the question of censorship -- Intellectual drama versus public theatre : Graville-Barker and John Galsworthy -- Realism versus Agitprop : D.H. Lawrence and the Workers' Theatre Movement -- Sean O'Casey : expressive realism and the imagery of politics-- Terence Rattigan : updating the well-made play --John Osborne : the rhetoric of social alienation -- Arnold Wesker : utopian realism -- Brechtian influences : epic stagecraft and British equivalents.
John Arden : the popular tradition and epic alternatives --Edward Bond : rationalism, realism and radical solutions -- David Edgar : from Agitprop to socialist realism -- Howard Brenton and David Hare : utopian perspectives on modern history -- Oscar Wilde : paradoxical fantasy and moral subversion -- John Synge : satiric artifice and critical realism -- Somerset Maugham : popular comedy versus social criticism --Noel Coward : comedy as social image -- Ben Travers : society as farce --Joe Orton : farce as confrontation -- Harold Pinter : power plays and the trap of comedy -- Politics and comedy : Peter Barnes and Trevor Griffiths -- Traditionalism and theatricality : Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn --Tom Stoppard : theatricality and the comedy of ideas -- Rejection of society : J.M. Barrie versus Wilde's Salome -- W.B. Yeats : theatre of the mind -- J.B. Priestley : temporal dislocation and transcendence --Expressionistic archetypes : W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
T.S. Eliot : the drama of conversion -- Appealing to the popular imagination : Christopher Fry and Peter Shaffer -- Apocalyptic visions and Artaudian theatre : John Whiting and David Rudkin -- Samuel Beckett : interior space and play as image -- Early groups and feminist principles -- Pam Gems : reinterpreting the stereotype -- Caryl Churchill : theatre as a model for change.
