Introduction

Contemporary European Playwrights samples a range of key writers who have radically reshaped European writing and whose work is in dialogue with Europe today. These are ‘generative’ playwrights whose work circulates across the continent, staged in different languages and productions, whose writing has opened up dramaturgical possibilities of style, form, and subject for other writers and enabled new kinds of work in performance. David Greig's afterword focuses on his new version of Aeschylus’s Hiketides (The Suppliant Women) a play about refugees, Europe, and democracy from the infancy of European theatre. Andrew Haydon observes that Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane have been encouraged to experiment formally in contact with European theatre practices, and Marissia Fragkou finds Alice Birch and Debbie tucker green’s linguistic and structural complexity better understood abroad than at home. Relatedly, the term dramaturg today serves different analytic purposes, as well as representing various forms of labour.