Description
Book SynopsisIn a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw. A co-founder of the legendary 1980s performance theatre company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This edition brings together both the plays and the story of how the plays came to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Deirdre Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, this book 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.
Table of ContentsWritten Worlds - Claire MacDonald
Part One
You Did Not Know Who You Were - Tim Etchells
An Imitation of Life
Storm from Paradise
Part Two
Correspondences - Deirdre Heddon
Correspondence
The Writer in the Room: A Conversation - Lenora Champagne and Claire MacDonald
