Utopia: Three Plays for a Postdramatic Theatre

2015 MacDonald, Claire (b. 1954). Utopia: Three Plays. Bristol, Eng.: Intellect/U.S. ed. Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2015. 86 pp. The book consists of an introduction, “Written Words, by the author (xiii-xxx), three plays, An Imitation of Life (7-23), Storm from Paradise (25-42), which was previously published in Walks on Water. Ed. Deborah Levy (London: Methuen Drama, 1992), 159-181, with the author's Preface on 181; a response to the first two “You Did Not Know Who You Were” by Tim Etchells (3-6), and Correspondence (51-68), with a response, “Correspondences” by Deirdre Heddon (45-49), “The Writer in the Room: A Conversation” by Lenora Champagne and Claire MacDonald” (69-80), and a Bibliography that includes a Filmography and Impact Theatre: Collaborative Productions (81-83). An Imitation of Life was first performed at the Bush Theatre in London in January 1987. Storm from Paradise was first performed on May 11, 1988, at the Lancaster Playroom. The two were then performed together as Utopia at the Bush Theatre in 1989. Correspondence was commissioned by the Managerie Theatre in Cambridge and first performed there in 2008. 

The three plays, the first inspired by J.G. Ballard’s works, depict various dystopian settings and the characters imagine other ones. The female author was a cofounder of the 1980’s Impact Theatre Co-op and the founding editor of the journal Performance Research and a contributing editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She has a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.