Are we considering playwrights this year? I am listing Caryl Churchill, Botho Strauss, Wajdi Mouawad, Tom Lanoye, Dea Loher, Fernando Arrabal, Yasmina Reza, Tom Stoppard. Does any of them seem Nobel-worthy to you all? (I'm not very familiar with playwrights)
Caryl Churchill is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - and most influential playwrights writing in today, albeit in English. I've long thought that she would make an incredible laureate. She's had a very long career marked by some very different "phases" and she's written some flat-out masterpieces. (See:
Cloud Nine or
A Number or
Far Away or
The Shriker or
Top Girls.) She's literally invented forms that legions of contemporary playwrights have copied again and again - and she's still innovating and she's in her 80s! She's just amazing.
There are also some really interesting dramatists working/who have worked in the German language - Strauss and Loher being two of them, but also Roland Schimmelpfennig and Franz Xavier Kroetz and Rainald Goetz - but I suspect that Handke's win may have hit pause on some of them. And I personally think that the most interesting German playwrights are actually just a hair too young to be in serious consideration at this point.
I read a couple of things by Wadji Mouawad a few years ago and recall not being blown away as much as I was led to believe I would be - granted they were in translation. I suspect that he's a better theatre director and that it's really about his productions?
Tom Stoppard is... fine. In some ways, he strikes me as a kind of obvious choice, just looking at his biography and his body of work and its influence but I also feel like the obviousness is what makes me sort of shrug my shoulders. Like some of those early plays strike me as a little smug now and his big hits - like
Arcadia and
The Real Thing - have always left me a little... skeptical. Like a style over substance kind of thing. I feel somewhat similarly about Reza's work. Entertaining but ultimately a bourgeois shell game? (Though, honestly, sometimes I feel like this prize is a bourgeois shell game, so what do I know?)
Other names that sometimes come to mind: Tony Kushner, whose larger body of work is (understandably) overshadowed by his
Angels in America, which is just one of the great classics of the 20thcentury. There's Athol Fugard from South Africa, whose work was pretty undeniably impactful. Adrienne Kennedy, an incredibly influential and super avant-garde America dramatist and the last surviving member of that revolutionary generation that included Edward Albee and Sam Shepard. Patricia Cornelius, this kind of wild Australian playwright who won the Windham Campbell Prize some years ago.
And though they're not playwrights, I sometimes find myself rooting for director-screenwriters like Pedro Almodovar or Wong Kar Wai or Mike Leigh or Michael Haneke, though he may again be a victim of the Handke selection.
