Introduction: ‘Grimy little people like me’: Situating Dennis Kelly – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Part I: Incubation
1 DNA in the classroom: Drama as English exam – Charlotte Bell
2 Suspended in time and place: children and precarious masculinity in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys – Marissia Fragkou
3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’: Dennis Kelly’s ‘School Plays’ – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Part II: Antibodies
4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’: Watching torture in Dennis Kelly’s works – Clare Finburgh Delijani
5 Utopia: Dennis Kelly’s ‘unworthy’ drama – Chris Megson
6 Beautiful doom: The political aesthetic of Utopia – Sam Haddow
7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama: Towards neoliberalism – Basil Chiasson
Part III: False positives
8 ‘I just want it to be your words’: Problematising verbatim theatre in Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby – Sarah Beck
9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ Narrative, the ‘post-truth’ era, and Dennis Kelly’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas – Catherine Love
10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism – Mark Robson
11 Atopia: Dennis Kelly, Modernity, and Community – David Pattie
Part IV: Variants
12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’: The art and politics of storytelling in Matilda the Musical – Aloysia Rousseau
13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company –Catriona Fallow
14 Performing stories, engaging audiences: Dennis Kelly’s narrative aesthetic –Janine Hauthal
Conclusion: ‘Your subject matter isn’t film, isn’t TV, isn’t books. It’s people, it’s real life’: An interview with Dennis Kelly – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Index

This long-awaited book is the first multi-authored collection on the eclectic body of work produced by contemporary British writer, Dennis Kelly. Covering the period from 2003 (Debris) to 2022 (the film version of Matilda the Musical), the volume examines the full range of his creative output for stage and screen, from new writing to adaptations of classic playtexts, musical theatre, and original works for television.

Over the past twenty years, Kelly’s writing has earned him a place at the centre of British cultural production. That his landmark productions – DNA (National Theatre Connections, 2008), Matilda the Musical (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2010), and Utopia (Channel 4, 2013–14) – are so distinct from one another in content, genre, and audience testifies to Kelly’s intellectual and intuitive command over storytelling and its effects. The fourteen original essays collected in this volume offer in-depth analyses of recurring themes – truth, justice, addiction, and agency – and formal innovation in Kelly’s works, offering scholars and students the opportunity to critically engage with the extant dramatic oeuvre of one of the UK’s most compelling writers.

This groundbreaking collection includes contributions by a range of outstanding scholars in Anglophone playwriting studies, with world-leading contemporary theatre scholars writing alongside some of the very best new and early career researchers in the field. The volume concludes with an original interview with Dennis Kelly, which draws on some of the themes of the collection while capturing his reflections on writing for theatre, film, and television.

‘This cutting-edge book brings together original and timely essays on the work of one of Britain’s most fascinating contemporary playwrights and screenwriters … an indispensable resource for understanding the enduring significance of Kelly’s dramatic work across a range of media.’
Clare Wallace, Charles University