Modern Drama in Performance empowers students to explore three diverse, compelling and highly-respected plays written between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Throughout this course, students will experience interactive learning, which includes close readings of dramatic texts, small group discussions, drama-centric activities, and the analysis of filmed productions. In addition, students will collaborate to bring a live, modern theatre production to the stage at HKU.

In addition, this course requires students to engage with well-established critical perspectives that illuminate the relevant dramatic works (including postcolonialism, ecocriticism, feminism, social inequality, and intersectionality). In 2026, students will read theatrical texts by the influential playwrights Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Lucy Kirkwood; the work of other important playwrights will be discussed in relation to these three.

This course also guides students in acquiring the technical skills through which theatre is produced, performed and critiqued. This page-to-stage process will culminate in a live adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Students will engage in either acting, designing, or stage managing this production at HKU. (NOTE: Involvement in this stage production – either on stage or backstage – is a mandatory component of this course.)

Overall, Modern Drama in Performance enhances students’ abilities in academic analysis, essay composition, performance studies, and practical theatre production; these are skills and talents that remain highly relevant and transferable to future professional contexts.

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Modern Drama in Performance actively involves students in three connected lines of enquiry surrounding theatre texts and performance practices:

1. analysing dramatic texts by studying social context and engaging with close readings of plays;

2. understanding and applying critical theory to dramatic literary works;

3. developing theatre skills and embracing the collaborative creation of a live theatre production at HKU.

In the autumn semester, the classes are delivered once per week in a two-hour timeframe on Fridays, plus rehearsals/meetings (in small scene and design groups, for about 40 min per week) on Wednesday mornings. Friday class sessions consist of lectures, discussions, debates, screenings, rehearsals, and design meetings. Wednesday class sessions cover stage-related rehearsals/meetings; students only attend their group’s timeframe.

The final stage production for Modern Drama in Performance – A Doll’s House in November 2026 – is open to HKU students, faculty and staff; in addition, this production serves as an outreach opportunity for engagement with the broader Hong Kong community.

2-hour lecture per week, plus extra rehearsals/meetings (in small groups, for about 40 min per week), and a final performance.

Students are expected to develop:

1. Strategies for analysing different styles of dramatic texts in English from the modern and contemporary eras of professional theatre (approximately 1880 to the present);

2. Knowledge of core concepts in contemporary critical theory related to performance and drama

3. Approaches for researching and composing academic essays, plus critiquing live performances;

4. Skills in performing and visual/auditory designing for the stage

Short essays                                          30%

Critique of Theatre Production           25%

Performance                                          35%

Participation                                          10%

Primary Sources (listed in chronological order of original play publication); these plays for this course will be provided on Moodle.

Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays. Translated by James McFarlane, Oxford World’s Classics, 1981, Reissued 2008.

Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. Grove Press, New York, NY, 1961.  

Kirkwood, Lucy. The Children. Theatre Communications Group, 2017.

 

Secondary Sources (partial list only); the academic articles for this course will be provided on Moodle.

Farfan, Peggy and Lesley Ferris, editors. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-first Century. University of Michigan Press, 2021. 

Holledge, Julie, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins, editors. A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.