Precursive Texts in the Work of Simon Stephens: Motortown, Birdland, Punk Rock

<p>This chapter trains its focus on Simon Stephens’s repeated strategy of redeploying elements of recently historical and contemporary popular culture in conjunction with the reinterpretation of a seam of classic, continental avant-garde theatrical texts, specifically by Georg Büchner (1813 – 1837), Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956) and Frank Wedekind (1864 - 1918). It examines the way that canonical theatrical texts of these writers are digested alongside more recent cultural material, particularly that of film, in Stephens’s plays Motortown (2006), Birdland (2014) and Punk Rock (2009). In doing so, it identifies processes surrounding the synthesis and rearticulation of diverse source materials that are the result of an idiosyncratic style of adaptation distinctive to Stephens in his approach to original work.</p>