Dennis Kelly explores Kelly’s unusual career path and sheds light on his eclectic approach to the arts, characterised by a refusal to write texts that people can fit within neat categories. This is the first monograph on Kelly’s work for stage and screen and brings to light his essential contribution to contemporary British drama and his huge range of work including his rise to international fame with Matilda the Musical.
Drawing on Kelly’s published and unpublished texts, his work in production, reviews, original interviews with directors, actors and with Kelly himself as well as critical theory, Dennis Kelly examines and reappraises key motifs in his work such as his preoccupation with violence, the complex relationship between the individual and the community or his emphasis on storytelling. It also offers new insights into overlooked aspects of Kelly’s work by setting out to explore his traumatic narratives and his post-romanticism. In keeping with Kelly’s wish never to repeat himself, this study offers multiple critical entries into his plays, television series and films, drawing on moral and political philosophy, trauma studies, studies in humour, feminist theory and film studies.
Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist series, Dennis Kelly is addressed to students and scholars in Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as theatre practitioners and offers in-depth analysis of one of the most unique and challenging voices in contemporary British playwriting and screenwriting.
Dedication
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART 1
Life, Career and Key Notions
1 Life and Career
2 Reappraising Assumptions About Kelly’s Work
PART II
Key Works
3 ‘What Kind of Person Are You?’: Probing Human Nature in Love and Money (2006), The Gods Weep (2010) and The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas (2013)
4 The Individual and the Collective in Osama the Hero (2005), DNA (2008) and Orphans (2009)
5 Trauma Narratives: Debris (2003), Girls & Boys (2018), After the End (2005) and The Third Day (2020)
6 Together (2021) and Pulling (2006-2009): Kelly’s Post-Romanticism
PART III
Key productions
7 Girls & Boys in production
8 Matilda the Musical (2010) on stage and screen
9 Utopia’s Ethics and Aesthetics
Appendix: An Interview with Dennis Kelly
Biography
Aloysia Rousseau is a Senior Lecturer at Sorbonne University, Paris. Her research focuses on Contemporary British Theatre. Rousseau has published Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (2011) and co-edited The Renewal of the Crime Play on the Contemporary Anglophone Stage (2018), Scènes britanniques et irlandaises contemporaines (2021) as well as The New Wave of British Women Playwrights (2023).
"Dennis Kelly is one of the most important playwrights of the 21st century. He has inspired so many playwrights and written the defining plays of his generation. Rousseau's brilliant, incisive book is full of deft insight and penetrating analysis. It is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper study of Kelly's extraordinary body of work."
- Lucy Kirkwood, playwright
"Rousseau has done the impossible -- written a definitive guide to that most mercurial and elusive of playwrights, Dennis Kelly. It’s a rich, smart and comprehensive analysis, written with verve and energy, reminding us how daring, diverse and funny his work is, while also making a compelling case for its political sophistication. This is the book Kelly deserves."
- Dan Rebellato, Royal Holloway, UK
