James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright

James Graham is one of the UK’s leading dramatists, a multi-award-winning writer who for almost 20 years has analysed and articulated concepts of power and authority in modern British society. James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright is the first full-length assessment of the writer’s output, applying core thematic areas - Democracy, Anarchy, Famous Faces and Television - to understand how different power bases operate in modern society, their effectiveness and influence, and how they came to pre-eminence during the last 70 years. The book concludes with an evaluation of Graham’s contribution to state-of-the-nation debates, Britain’s cycles of decline and its consequences for understanding contemporary national identity.

Maryam Philpott is a theatre critic with over 10 years’ experience writing for The Reviews Hub and her own site Cultural Capital dedicated to long-form theatre criticism, placing reviews in a broader historical and performance context. With a background in social and cultural history, previous publications include the peer reviewed academic monograph Air and Sea Power in World War One: Combat and Experience in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Navy, published by Bloomsbury.