The Mirror Behind the Curtain: Perspectives on Leading Playwrights Writing for the Proscenium Stage

An indispensable guide to over a hundred years of drama, this book provides an invigorating and illuminating study of the work of over twenty-five playwrights who wrote for the proscenium arch stage. Beginning with the work of the great writers from the late-nineteenth century—August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen—Dominic Dromgoole takes the reader on an exhilarating journey into the work of writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Harold Pinter, and as recent as Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill. Along the way, the plays of such luminaries as Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and James MacPherson are considered in a series of essays that display all of Dromgoole's characteristic panache and insight.