In a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw. A co-founder of the legendary 1980s performance theatre company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This edition brings together both the plays and the story of how the plays came to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Deirdre Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, this book provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald’s career as writer and collaborator, and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the UK.

A cofounder of the United Kingdom’s legendary 1980s performance company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This book brings together both the plays and the story of how they came to be written and produced. With a compelling introduction by the author and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Dee Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, it provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald’s career as writer and collaborator and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the United Kingdom.