Foucault, Power and Political Theatre

The book Foucault, Power and Political Theatre: A Study of Selected Plays of John Arden, Harold Pinter and Edward Bond takes up selected plays of John Arden, Harold Pinter and Edward Bond to examine the multiplicity of experience and memories in post-war Britain, featured on the stage. Their theatre is explored as a place of epistemic battles, offering plurality of perspectives making space for resistance; and mapping the trajectory of their narrative, form and design as counter history; contesting the reality on what Foucault describes as 'discourse-power axis'. The attempt is to highlight the disunity discerned in their plays as an endeavor to diminish the definitive brackets of order, abrogating definitive assumptions, and display an antithetical landscape that confronts the integrated and cohesive interpretation of truth, knowledge and actuality. Political theatre of post-war years brought together voices that did not trust the decisiveness and confidence of knowledge(s), provided; they affected a paradigmatic shift and confronted the ideas of hegemony and homogeneity. Political performance even today, must confront the afflictions of capitalist consumerist society: disparity, inequity, and subjection. The objective of the book is to trace the history of political theatre of mid-twentieth century, and look at as collective certain works that equipped theatre with new structure and scheme, through experimentation in both narrative and form, that allows for present day pluralistic realities of post-modern world to find their stage and space.