Drama post-1950

Before embarking on a survey of the array of scholarly work published in 2023 that engaged substantively with post-1950 British and Irish drama, it is worth noting a strong sense of collective reflection on this field of study's ongoing purpose, remit, and future.At a time where humanities scholarship broadly continues to explore what our discipline has to say about ongoing global catastrophe and as the post-anthropogenic epoch looms large, it feels important to ask these questions of ourselves as scholars, teachers, and makers of drama.Such questions were particularly apparent in two of the leading journals in this area-Theatre Journal and Modern Drama-both of which published several articles reflecting on their own remit as a way to think more broadly about the field of contemporary drama.In her editorial for the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal, 'Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires' (TJ 752023 xi-xxvii), Laura Edmondson calls for a 'theatrical biome in which we are in just and caring relation with each other', looking ahead to the next seventy-five years, full of hope for 'a new list of the top thirty most-cited articles that teems with work of and from the Majority World.And may a substantial number of those citations come from well beyond our "field," however we define it' (p.xxvii).In 'Founding Pedagogies of Modern Drama' (MD 662023 143-57) Joseph Roach similarly reflects on the publication's dual imperative-championed differently by successive editors and contributors over the years-to attend to both the literary and theatrical dimensions of drama.To do this, Roach focuses on the classroom, reflecting on how research in this area can, first and foremost, nurture pedagogy.While his case studies draw on his own teaching experiences with the work of Henrik Ibsen and Suzan-Lori Parks, the broader ideological and conceptual questions Roach poses are of urgent concern for drama scholars, demonstrating how we 'can learn how to read a play, watch a play, stage a play, or teach a play as attentively as any poetry teacher reads a poem' (p.146).Roach's work in this issue sits alongside an array of important global perspectives on the practices of teaching and researching modern drama and, while the core case studies of many of these submissions fall beyond the remit of this editorial's focus on British and Irish Drama post-1950 specifically, they nevertheless constitute a very welcome, robust reconsideration of the core critical tools