The Curious Incident of the Drama in the Night-Time

ABSTRACT Much like the dog in the “night-time” of Simon Stephen’s 2012 adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel, the state of modern and contemporary drama is, if not dead, moribund. Once prominently offered in curricula of humanities departments, the work of such playwrights as Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, and, yes, Harold Pinter seems destined to make little more than occasional appearances. Scholarly journals dedicated to or named after a single dramatist are similarly experiencing worrisome declines in interest and submissions. Is the corpus of twentieth-century drama in particular destined for the margins or footnotes of performance history much like, say, nineteenth-century melodrama or burlesque? This article attempts to calculate the odds of drama enjoying any fate better than that suffered by Stephens’s dog in the night-time.