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 Kelly’s Post-Romanticism Together (2021) and Pulling (2006–2009)
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) and 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
