In this interview on 22 March 2022 in London, Mesut Gunenc talks to theatre critic and historian Aleks Sierz about how his work has influenced contemporary British drama, why he chose the name ‘in-yer-face theatre’ for 1990s avant-garde plays, and why some writers have rejected the label. They also discuss the differences between experiential and experimental theatre, especially focusing on the work of Anthony Neilson, and finish by considering the key themes that characterize 1990s new writing in Britain.

Aleks Sierz is author of the seminal In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001), as well as of other work about new writing and post-war British theatre history. His more recent books include Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (Methuen Drama, 2011), Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s (Methuen Drama, 2012), and Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War (Methuen Drama, 2021). He has co-authored, with Lia Ghilardi, The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years (Oberon, 2015). Mesut Gunenc is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Adnan Menderes University in Turkey. He is the author of Postdramatic Theatrical Signs in Contemporary British Playwrights (Lambert, 2017) and co-editor, with Enes Kavak, of New Readings in British Drama: From the Post-War Period to the Contemporary Era (Peter Lang, 2021). He is currently a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University in the UK.

Gay Sweatshop spent twenty-two years producing plays as Britain's first openly gay professional theatre company. Their alternative and political work primarily took the form of author-driven new writing, though experiments with performer-driven work intrigued the company from its earliest cabarets to its late phase of queer solo work under Lois Weaver. In this article, Sara Freeman pinpoints Sweatshop's tenth anniversary new play festival in 1985 as the moment when the company committed to new writing as a strategy for gaining greater legitimacy as a theatre group and as a central mode to encourage gay and lesbian voices and representation. She argues that while this had been the default mode of much 1970s political theatre including Sweatshop's, as it played out in the 1980s, a new writing strategy represented a move toward institutional stability as the locus of theatrical radicalism shifted aesthetics. In this analysis, the celebration of company anniversaries and the creation of festival events provided occasions for the company to experience the success or failure of its policies. Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. She is the co-editor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008). Her recent publications appear in Modern British Playwriting: the 1980s. Readings in Performance and Ecology, and the forthcoming volume The British Theatre Company from Fringe to Mainstream: Volume II 1980–1994.

Taryn Storey believes that a series of letters recently discovered in the archive of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) makes it important that we reassess the genesis of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Dating from November 1952, the correspondence between George Devine and William Emrys Williams, the Secretary General of the ACGB, offers an insight into a professional and personal relationship that was to have a profound influence on the emerging Arts Council policy for drama. Storey makes the case that in 1953 Devine not only shaped his Royal Court proposal to fit the priorities of the ACGB Drama Panel, but that Devine and senior members of the ACGB then collaborated to ensure that the proposal became a key part of Arts Council strategic planning. Furthermore, she puts forward the argument that the relationship between Devine and Williams was instrumental to new writing and innovation becoming central to the future rationale for state subsidy to the theatre. Taryn Storey is a doctoral student at the University of Reading. Her PhD thesis examines the relationship between practice and policy in the development of new writing in post-war British theatre, and forms part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Giving Voice to the Nation: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre and Performance in Britain 1945–1995’, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Victoria and Albert Museum.