The primary focus of my research is the modern theatrical Gothic. My doctoral thesis examines the increasing prevalence of Gothicist strategies in British political drama staged or written since the turn of the millennium, including work by playwrights like Mike Bartlett, Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green, Stef Smith and Jasmine Lee-Jones, as well as theatre companies such as Imitating the Dog, Proper Job, Tilted Wig and DARKFIELD. The project builds upon the important work of scholars like Kelly Jones, Madelon Hoedt and Emma McEvoy, who have led efforts to acknowledge contemporary Gothic performance as a vibrant and vital field that has been routinely overlooked since the emergence of Gothic studies as a major academic discipline in the late 1970s. 

In line with their essential undertaking, a key aim of my thesis is to re-assess the boundaries of what we understand ‘Gothic theatre’ to be. While Gothic (in) performance is commonly regarded as that which subjects its audiences to macabre aesthetics and unsettling affects, I argue that while the sensational and the shocking undoubtedly remain integral to the Gothic mode, the presence of these qualities alone is not sufficient to define or account for the broader influence of Gothicism in contemporary British theatre. Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017), for example, can hardly be said to inspire affective terror in the same way as Stephen Mallatratt’s The Woman in Black (1989) or Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories (2010), and yet its political consciousness clearly draws from the Gothic tradition in its use of supernatural returns, troubled familial bonds, excessive displays of obsessive passion and imageries of political, national and ecological decay. At the same time, as the often-cited controversy surrounding Anthony Neilson’s Relocated (2008) demonstrates, overtly ‘Gothicised’ productions risk dismissal from consideration as politically conscious works precisely due to their association with the Gothic, which has, on the stage as well as in literature and cinema, frequently been disparaged as merely a sensationalist and melodramatic mode of entertainment. Considering dramaturgical trends in recent political drama together with both implicit and explicit forms of Gothic theatricality, I identify Gothic performance as an acutely political form that strikes the deep vein of anxieties that disturb our cultural and political lives in the twenty-first century.