Abstract

This chapter offers an introduction to a collection of essays that brings into focus the continuing significance of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre culture. With reference to a series of plays that engage with ideas of national identity, such as the recent stagings of DC Moore’s Common (2017) and Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017), this essay argues that there is a timeliness to a study of how contemporary theatre has come to use the properties, themes and aesthetics of the Gothic as a tool, not simply to explore past horrors or exotic monsters that lie beyond our borders, but with which to playfully uncover our own unrelentingly abject relationship with the very soil that we walk upon.