Class, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworth

Jez Butterworth is undoubtedly one of the most popular and commercially successful playwrights to have emerged in Britain in the early twenty-first century. This book, only the second so far to have been written on him, argues that the power of his most acclaimed work comes from a reinvigoration of traditional forms of tragedy expressed in a theatricalized working-class language. Butterworth's most developed tragedies invoke myth and legend as a figurative resistance to the flat and crushing instrumentalism of contemporary British political and economic culture. In doing so they summon older, resonant narratives which are both popular and high-cultural in order to address present cultural crises in a language and in a form which possess wide appeal. Tracing the development of Butterworth's work chronologically from Mojo (1995) to The Ferryman (2017), each chapter offers detailed critical readings of a single play, exploring how myth and legend become significant in a variety of ways to Butterworth's presentation of cultural and personal crisis.

Sean McEvoy is a Bye Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK. His research specialisms include early modern English theatre and contemporary British and Irish theatre, with a particular interest in tragedy. Previous publications include Hamlet: A Sourcebook (2005), Ben Jonson: Renaissance Dramatist (2007), Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage 1601-2004 (2016), and Tragedy: The Basics (2017).