Adorno and Modern Theatre ― The Drama of the Damaged Self in Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Kane

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). It engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory, cultural critique and negative dialectical philosophy, arguing for the actuality of his project for an understanding of the social dimension of art and culture in the post-Auschwitz world. The study examines how Adorno's philosophical analysis of the experience of non-identity in art intersects and materializes in the work of a generation of seminal post-war dramatists, including their forerunner Samuel Beckett, whose work is characterised by philosophical depth and formal complexity. Bond's aesthetics of resistance, Rudkin's theatre of myth, Barker's theatre of desire, and Kane's radical formalism are examined for the ways in which they illuminate and develop the Adornian notion of theatre as negation.

Karoline Gritzner is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and a core convenor of the Performance Philosophy network. She is the co-editor with David Ian Rabey of Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (2006), the editor of Eroticism and Theatre in Theatre and Performance (2010), and co-editor with Will Daddario of Adorno and Performance (Palgrave, 2014).