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This volume is an important commentary on many of the recent playwrights on the British stage. It consists of twenty-one articles by as many critics, on fourteen recent dramatists. Some of the more prominent playwrights get more than one article – there are three on each of Pinter, Stoppard and Bond, and two on Shaffer – and one on each of the ten others – Ayckbourn, Hampton, Storey, Gray, Griffiths, Churchill, Brenton, Hare, McEwan and Edgar. And there are two articles on socialist drama.

Sharon Pollock's Doc is a watershed play not only because it is her most intensely personal work to date, but also because the protagonist-daughter confronts her ambivalence on yet another front: the relationship to the maternal. After the play ends with what seems a tidy resolution, the ghost of Bob, the mother, lives on to inhabit the character of subsequent mothers: Eme in Getting it Straight and Joan in Fair Liberty's Call. The treacherous stepmother in Blood Relations and the complicit adoptive mother, Mama George, in Whiskey Six Cadenza, are supplanted by more complicated and more sympathetic maternal figures. In Doc, Pollock bravely raises ghosts from her own past. Once summoned, they bring with them new challenges.

Voici l’introduction à «Portraits of the Artists» [Portraits d’artistes], cinq articles sur des pièces écrites par cinq dramaturges canadiennes. Les chercheuses ayant participé à ce collectif examinent des pièces qui ont voulu tracer le portrait de cinq femmes artistes. L’introduction est le lieu d’une réflexion sur les questions qui se posent lorsque l’on dramatise le vécu d’autrui, et surtout, de femmes artistes pour qui les règles sont dictées par le sexe.