Research

My research centres upon the relationship between form and politics in contemporary playwriting, which I explore from both critical and creative perspectives.

Book: Radical Realisms in Contemporary British Theatre: Rethinking Feminist Form in Plays by Women (Bloomsbury 2025)

Book launch event at Schwarzmann Humanities Centre, Oxford, with Professor Sos Eltis and Dr Gabriela Minden. 

Radical Realisms revisits foundational debates in feminist criticism to argue that contemporary feminist plays demonstrate the potential of realism to adapt and respond to our changing world. The book maps the forms emerging from the ‘new wave’ of feminist theatre in the UK in the 2010s. By approaching feminist plays as theorising their own forms, the book offers an innovative approach to analysing plays and unsettles the boundaries between what is conventionally considered realist and what is experimental. Playwrights and practitioners studied include RashDash, Katie Mitchell, Alice Birch, Ella Hickson, Jasmine Lee-Jones, Tanika Gupta, Young Jean Lee, Lucy Kirkwood, Travis Alabanza, Yaël Farber, Split Britches and Caryl Churchill. 

I’ve also written a much shorter, public-facing article for Exeunt Magazine on ’10 years of [UK] feminist theatre in 10 plays’, which you can read for free here. 

I’d be delighted to speak about the book to your research seminar or university class – please contact me through the website or my university email address hannah.greenstreet @liverpool.ac.uk. 

Further publications

 Journal articles and book chapters

  • ‘Virtual realism and Black feminist world-building in seven methods of killing kylie jenner by Jasmine Lee-Jones’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 13.1 (2025). https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jcde-2025-2010/html
  • ‘Feminist Provocations: Experiments with Failure in Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. and We Want You to Watch’, in Women, Experiment and Dramaturgy, ed. by Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips (Palgrave, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63689-9_15
  • ‘“I want the world to change shape”: The Politics of Form in Ella Hickson’s The Writer’ in The New Wave of British Women Playwrights, ed. by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau (De Gruyter, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110796322-010
  • ‘Anger, ambivalence and Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)’, Backpages, Contemporary Theatre Review 29.3 (2019), 343-354.
  • ‘Narrative Dysfunction in The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 38.1 (2018), 78-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2017.1304733
  • ‘Historical Authenticity: Performing Victorian Blackness in Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti and An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’, Platform: Journal of Theatre Arts, Dec 2017.

Book reviews

  • Review of Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century, ed. by Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, Modern Drama, 66.1(2023), 123-126.  

Publications for a general readership

  • Since August 2017, I have written over 100 reviews/ features for Exeunt Magazine and The Stage as freelance theatre critic.
  • ‘Reading Drama: How to analyse a play’, English Review (September 2024).
  • ‘Theatrical Giants and Ghosts of a Nation: Jerusalem’, English Review (November 2023).
  • ‘Searching for Feminist Forms: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls’, English Review (February 2022).

Research collaborations

At Oxford, I co-convened the Theatre & Performance network, which provided an interdisciplinary intellectual home for theatre researchers across the university. Events I’ve organised as part of this included a biweekly critical reading group, a day symposium on collaboration in theatre, ‘in conversation’ events with playwrights Ella Hickson and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and academic talks by Professor Dan Rebellato, Professor David Wiles, and Dr Emma Whipday. I was also Postgraduate Representative for the Theatre and Performance Research Association (2018-2021).

I enjoy collaborating with theatres and theatre practitioners. I received funding from the TORCH Theatres Seed Fund to collaborate with colleagues from the Classics Faculty and Pegasus Theatre to develop a practice as research project around my queer reimagining of Euripides’ Andromeda. You can read more about the first phase of the project here. I’m currently working with the Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse to bring my play Four Letter Words to their studio stage.