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Ravenhill’s plays themselves are conscious of how his immediate predecessors (David Edgar, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths) were committed to various socialist causes and given how he sought to distance himself from them:
It is easy to get lost here. On the one hand, Ravenhill being conscious that his predecessors valued a socialist politics—and his commitment to move beyond it—is reminiscent of the tipping into postmodernism that we might find in Pirandello or Stoppard or even Beckett; on the other hand, it appears that Ravenhill partly tips into postmodernism out of a desire for a truly progressive politics (as if that were possible). Moreover, it is also worth noting how this desire that his work somehow be progressive (that he is “still desirous of political efficacy”) is reminiscent of what we see in Weiss and Kushner (indicating a tipping away from the postmodern instead). Wade sums up Ravenhill’s own conflictions on this score as follows:
Wade ultimately turns to postmodern ethics—and Emmanuel Levinas—to help him understand what is happening with Ravenhill and his peers,