Materialist-feminist criticism and selected plays of Sarah Daniels, Liz Lochhead and Claire Dowie.

This thesis is an examination of the extent to which contemporary British plays
written by women constitute an ideological theatre. It is based upon the premise that there
is a relationship of feminist theatre practice to feminist theory, where theory is seen to
have informed practice and practice has informed the theory. I argue that an ideological
theatre can be understood with reference to first, playstructure and second, the place of
the performer in relation to both character and spectator. The implications of these can be
seen terms first, of representation and second, of the physical presence of the body of the
performer on stage and are therefore seen to be to do with the representation of issues on
stage and performance issues to do with the woman performer respectively. Using aspects
of a materialist-feminist analysis I examine the ways in which feminist epistemology has
brought about a transformation of social relations in so far as these are deployed through
representation and specific processes of performance based upon the slogan "the personal
is political". This involves looking at the influence of performance issues and acting,
especially at power-relations as they are reproduced and represented in selected theatre
exercises. Importantly, these strategies for reading are always seen in the context of
modem British political theatre; the importance of this emerges through my proposition
that an ideological theatre practice is one which both establishes and foregrounds a
relationship or resistance to existing theatrical form or genres. This constitutes the first
part of my thesis.
The second part of the thesis is comprised of three case studies. In these I draw
together aspects of representation and the processes of performance established in Part
One as a way of understanding selected plays constructed in relation to existing genres. In
Chapter Three I look at the plays of Sarah Daniels in relation to melodrama; in Chapter
Four I look at the plays of Liz Lochhead in relation to adaptation. Chapter Five is my
concluding chapter in which I stress the importance of both foregrounding previous
genres and questioning generic expectations by examining the interactions of theatre with
stand-up comedy in the work of Claire Dowie.