'This cutting-edge book brings together original and timely essays on the work of Dennis Kelly, one of Britain’s most fascinating contemporary playwrights and screenwriters. Offering nuanced perspectives on Kelly’s destabilising dramaturgy, searing storytelling and scenarios of acute moral ambiguity, Beautiful Doom explores his impact across stage and screen, from plays like DNA and Taking Care of Baby to Matilda the Musical and television dramas like Utopia and Together. The volume is packed with insights for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners alike – an indispensable resource for understanding the enduring significance of Kelly’s dramatic work across a range of media.'
– Clare Wallace, Charles University

Jacqueline Bolton is Honourary Senior Fellow at the University of Lincoln
Nicholas Holden is Head of Academic Affairs and Research at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art

Introduction: ‘Grimy little people like me’: Situating Dennis Kelly – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Part I: Incubation
1 DNA in the classroom: Drama as English exam – Charlotte Bell
2 Suspended in time and place: children and precarious masculinity in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys – Marissia Fragkou
3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’: Dennis Kelly’s ‘School Plays’ – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Part II: Antibodies
4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’: Watching torture in Dennis Kelly’s works – Clare Finburgh Delijani
5 Utopia: Dennis Kelly’s ‘unworthy’ drama – Chris Megson
6 Beautiful doom: The political aesthetic of Utopia – Sam Haddow
7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama: Towards neoliberalism – Basil Chiasson
Part III: False positives
8 ‘I just want it to be your words’: Problematising verbatim theatre in Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby – Sarah Beck
9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ Narrative, the ‘post-truth’ era, and Dennis Kelly’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas – Catherine Love
10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism – Mark Robson
11 Atopia: Dennis Kelly, Modernity, and Community – David Pattie
Part IV: Variants
12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’: The art and politics of storytelling in Matilda the Musical – Aloysia Rousseau
13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company –Catriona Fallow
14 Performing stories, engaging audiences: Dennis Kelly’s narrative aesthetic –Janine Hauthal
Conclusion: ‘Your subject matter isn’t film, isn’t TV, isn’t books. It’s people, it’s real life’: An interview with Dennis Kelly – Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden
Index