Posthuman Drama: The Cybernetic Subject in Twenty-First Century Playwriting

By Richard Jordan

Posthuman Drama classifies a new form of western playwriting emerging since 2000 which interrogates the ethical and political consequences of technocapitalist acceleration. Drawing on both technological and ecological strands of critical posthumanist thought, the book identifies how a cybernetic approach to dramatic form has been deployed by western playwrights as a means of critiquing the posthuman paradigm: a discursive practice through which humans and organic nonhumans are equated with digital code. Posthuman plays examine the embodied consequences of this paradigm through a machinic approach to language, a networked approach to characterisation, a distributed approach to dramatic agency, and an accelerated approach to spacetime. Analysed plays include A Number (2002) by Caryl Churchill; Marjorie Prime (2014) by Jordan Harrison; More Life (2025) by Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman; The Sugar Syndrome (2003) by Lucy Prebble; I Love You, Bro (2007) by Adam J. A. Cass; Dead Man's Cell Phone (2008) by Sarah Ruhl; The Weather (2004) by Clare Pollard; Oil (2016) by Ella Hickson; and Mlima's Tale (2018) by Lynn Nottage. These analyses are contextualised by a detailed historical overview of nonhuman agency in western drama; interviews with six Australian performance writers who have experimented with AI tools; and a reflection by the author on his own experiences writing two award-winning posthuman plays. Engaging, timely, and accessible, Posthuman Drama reveals how playwrights working within the Aristotelian tradition are interrogating the embodied consequences of technocapitalist acceleration for the self, society, and the planet.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3032426030
• ISBN13: 9783032426031
• Release Date: March 2027
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Dimensions: 5.8" x 8.3"