Contemporary British Theatre and the Imaging of China - Poststructuralism, Dialectics, and the Shadow of Brecht

This monograph interrogates the construction of the People's Republic of China across seven plays by White British playwrights. It analyses these original plays to explore the ways in which China is constructed as a political entity in relation to the British sense of self. It constructs a methodological correlation, contingent upon ambivalence, between the appearance of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble on the London stage in 1956, the dialectics of Brecht’s method, interculturalism and translation, and poststructuralist conceptions of language, to explore tensions between neo-imperialist fantasy and postcolonial critique.