Highlights in Anglo American Drama - Hard - Man - v1

Highlights in Anglo-
American Drama
Highlights in Anglo-
American Drama:
Viewpoints from Southeast

Europe
Edited by
Radmila Nastić and Vesna Bratić

Highlights in Anglo-American Drama:
Viewpoints from Southeast Europe
Edited by Radmila Nastić and Vesna Bratić

Language Editor Michelle Gadpaille
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Radmila Nastić, Vesna Bratić and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-8682-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8682-6
CONTENTS
Highlights in Anglo-American Drama: Viewpoints from South-East

Europe—An Introduction ............................................................................ 1
Radmila Nastić and Vesna Bratić
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 4

Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre
Igor Grbić
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29

Strategies of Social Criticism in the Plays of Harold Pinter
and David Hare
Igor Petrović
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45

Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet: Empowering the Other,
Retroactive Revenge and Eth(n)ical Equalization
Vesna Bratić
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 62

The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico
Radmila Nastić
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 76

Wings of Desire: Pleas for Humanity in Mark Ravenhill’s
Faust is Dead and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed
Tijana Matović
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 100

The Sinister Faces of Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy
Biljana Vlašković Ilić
Chapter Seven...........................................................................................117
Representations of Marriage and Relationships in Contemporary
Anglo-American Drama
Sonja Novak
vi Contents
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 138

Is There Such a Thing as a Postmodern/ist (Anglo-American) Drama?
A Bosnian and Herzegovinian Academic Discourse
Ifeta Čirić-Fazlija
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 166

The Slovene Birthday Party on Film
Tomaž Onič
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 181

Harold Pinter in Croatia: A Critical Reception Oscillating between
the Labels of ‘Absurdist’ and ‘Pinteresque’
Mirna Sindičić Sabljo
Index ........................................................................................................ 199

HIGHLIGHTS IN ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA:
VIEWPOINTS FROM SOUTH-EAST EUROPE—
AN INTRODUCTION
RADMILA NASTIĆ AND VESNA BRATIĆ
The present volume represents viewpoints on some aspects of modern

Anglo-American drama and dramatists written by scholars from ex-
Yugoslav republics and resulting from long years of common interest and
cooperation in the field between the corresponding English Departments in
the region. The impetus that led us to embark on this project was the Word
Across Cultures Conference organised by the Institute of Foreign
Languages, University of Montenegro in Podgorica, Montenegro in July
2014.
The scholars who participated in the conference’s literature section
were able to observethat most of the papers presented focused on
(post)modern Anglo-American drama, which led us to conclude that
Anglo-American drama is a growing field of interest among regional
literature scholars; this gave us the inspiration to work towards creating a
book on the topic. What ensued were extensive discussions between the
participants and a wide network of drama scholars as to the content and
title of the prospective book. Finally, we settled on the title HIGHLIGHTS
IN ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA: VIEWPOINTS FROM SOUTH-
EAST EUROPE which, we believe, best reflects the joint interests and
efforts of our contributors, who range from experienced scholars of
international standing, to mid-career specialists and young scholars with
noteworthy international references.
We would like to think that this book will appeal to both an academic
and a non-academic readership. The academic readership will certainly
benefit from this book, since English and, especially, American drama is
not appropriately represented by the number of book titles it deserves
world-wide. Some authors even go so far as to call American drama (and,
mutatis mutandis, the drama scholarship) “a bastard child”, “an
illegitimate offspring” of literature (and literature scholarship). While
2 An Introduction
working on our doctoral theses, even the youngest among us had to cope
with a noticeable shortage of books or volumes of essays on Anglo-
American drama, and we had to resort to individual papers spread across
diverse journals. Each drama scholar knows how difficult and time
consuming it is to search through a variety of journals on mostly general
topics in order to find useful drama-based papers, which is why searching
for a drama-specific book feels somewhat like hunting for pearls. This is
why we believe the book makes a genuine contribution to drama
scholarship, not only by the very value of its content but as a source of
ideas for prospective young researchers.
The volume can also be used by undergraduate and Masters students to
help with seminar and Masters papers, especially bearing in mind the
number of students represented by the English departments from which
the contributors come, some of which include drama courses as part of
their syllabi.
The South-East European perspective on Anglo-American drama also
represents a valuable addition to existing drama scholarship, since all the
contributors are from the ex-Yugoslav republics and write from a
standpoint of multiple othernesses. The book might also be of interest to
theatre and film scholars and the general non-academic readership, notably
among theatre and film enthusiasts, because of the variety of approaches
adopted in the papers.
The first chapter, as an appropriate introduction to the volume, centres
on one of the founders of modern English drama, W. B. Yeats and the
perfomative aspect of drama, while the remaining chapters explore a
variety of postmodern British and American plays and playwrights. The
second chapter dwells on social criticism in Harold Pinter and David Hare
and the third on Pinter’s American “counterpart” David Mamet and the
phenomenon of “(retro)active revenge of the other” explored in his recent
plays. The fourth chapter continues in the same vein, exploring how
American society is re-created in the tales “told” in the plays of Sam
Shepard, where both the norm and the Other are equally elusive in the
Mexican dreamland landscape. In the fifth chapter we are back in the UK,
exploring the overtly postmodernist plays by Mark Ravenhill and Sarah
Kane. The chapter centres on Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire and
follows logically from the previous chapter, as Sam Shepard and Wenders
shared postmodern(ist) artistic interests, made apparent in their
collaboration on Paris, Texas. The sixth chapter ventures on a journey
through the sinister fairy-tale land of Martin McDonagh’s Ireland,
commenting on contemporary violence, while the seventh employs a
sociological and anthropological approach to marriage and relationships in
Highlights in Anglo-American Drama 3
Anglo-American drama. The eighth chapter opens up the entirely new

question of the reception and theatrical publication of Anglo-American
plays in the region. It deals with the (non)presence of a scholarly discourse
on American drama in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the ninth and the
tenth focus on the reception of Harold Pinter’s works in Slovenia and
Croatia, respectively. The ninth considers a production of The Birthday
Party as an intriguing blend of both play and film, and the tenth embarks
on the venture of further examining how Harold Pinter’s work is received
in Croatia.
CHAPTER ONE
YEATS’S PLAYS AND TRADITIONAL THEATRE
IGOR GRBIĆ
JURAJ DOBRILA UNIVERSITY OF PULA
1. Introduction
William Butler Yeats began writing plays very early in his career and,
to the end of his life, considered playwriting an important aspect of his
literary creation. Writing at a time when, in the theatre, realism prevailed,
he increasingly felt the need to side with the opposite camp, the one that,
over the decades, produced the anti-naturalistic theories and experiments
of Antonin Artaud and Jacques Copeau in France, of Max Reinhardt and
Bertolt Brecht in Germanyand of various alternative theatres in Moscow
and St Petersburg (later Leningrad), to name just a few. Since “[r]ealism is
created for the common people and was always their peculiar delight”
(Yeats 1916, viii), and since, in the theatre just as in anything else, Yeats
is an aristocrat believing in a primordial authenticity of the particular
human expression he is observing and undertaking, he cannot but deplore
the existence of a stage―and its consequent identification with the theatre
in general—whose guiding ideal is a thorough reproduction of the outside,
“real” world. The contemporary situation, however, was only the tip of an
iceberg: for almost three centuries, the voice and bodily gestures had been
losing their expressivity (Ibid.,ii), and it was high time we discovered
“grave and decorative” gestures and scenery, recovered the artificial
potential of the human voice, as well as “dresses of so little irrelevant
magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
much labour into the immortal people of romance” (Yeats 1903, 265-266).
All this was in order to realize a theatrical maximum, seen as a maximum
distancing from everyday, “functional” practices, as a maximum activation
of properties specific to the theatre. This naturally led Yeats to the concept
of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total theatre including and unifying all kinds of
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 5
arts. Such drama goes back to the times of yore, when the boundary
between art and religion was ill-pronounced, and very permeable. As early
as 1899, Yeats writes that he wants a drama that will be performed in
hidden temples, with its own priesthood, that will, he hopes, “make their
Art into the Art of the People” (qtd. in Ellmann 1979, 133).1 For Yeats, as
for so many others, the theatre had begun in ritual (Yeats 1903, 266, but
also in many other places), and it was the site to which it had to be
redeemed.
Much has been made of the influence of the Japanese nō drama on
Yeats – too much. Yeats's intuition, which, coupled with his artistry, made
him the profound poet he was, would have been a poor thing, indeed, had
he needed to wait for an external factor to be put in motion. Quotations
like the above from 1899, along with specific references to his plays,
could be easily multiplied to show that Yeats had been groping for
different, non-naturalistic, solutions well before the noteworthy winter of
1913/14, when he was introduced (textually rather than performatively,
alas) to the world of nō.2 The latter was only a crystallization of a growing
vision.3 In the present chapter I intend to show that virtually all
“innovations” of Yeats's maturing dramatic theory and practice (he
constantly rewrote his own plays, in search of the right form) had already
been shared by many, sometimes all, great theatrical traditions of the
world, sometimes for centuries, or at a time well over two millennia before
his own earthly existence. Yeats saw none, but intuited the primordial,
ritual, religious sensibility, common to them all. Nō is only a part of a
much wider world stage, by far the largest part of which does, true
enough, pertain to South, Southeast and East Asia. At his own home,
Yeats took the best of the traditional theatre he had at his disposal: Greek
drama (see especially his versions of Sophocles's Oedipus plays, or The
King's Threshold (1904), modelled on classical Greek drama), medieval
and Elizabethan drama (e.g., the latter's influence on the technical setup of
On Baile's Strand (1904)). Of course, by Yeats's time their performative
features had all been long dead and forgotten, unlike the bulk of dramatic
practices outside the West. A chapter-size consideration can only scrape
the surface, but it should suffice to show Yeats the playwright as
belonging to a tradition into which he was not born (the same could be
said for almost all of Yeats). I concentrate on the performative aspects of
both Yeats’s theatre and traditional theatres, and use the term traditional
in the loose meaning of pre-modern―which roughly coincides with pre-
naturalistic―but give preference to what might more properly be called
classical drama and its offshoots, rather than to the many folk forms. I am
deliberately downsizing my references to nō, though fully aware of the
6 Chapter One
true status it has in both Yeats’s and the world’s dramaturgy. A more
proper examination of a subject already sufficiently analyzed would fit ill
with the space I can afford.4 In some cases the theatrical forms examined
are not particularly old, but they can with certainty or in all likelihood be
derived from older, more “classical” forms, which derivation authenticates
their presentation of traditional practices.
2. The stage
“I call to the eye of the mind...” By the time the two musicians first
pronounced these words to open At the Hawk’s Well (1917)―which, in its
turn, opens Four Plays for Dancers, the first of an immediate nō-
inspiration―Yeats had already amply experimented with the scenery,
reducing it to suggestive essentials, and leaving the more literal,
descriptive, lacunae to be filled by the creativity of the actor and the
imagination of the audience, always supported by the text of the play
itself. Thus, in the same play, the stage can already be “any bare space
before a wall against which stands a patterned screen” (Yeats 1921, 3).
The screen (or curtain) pattern may be of mountain and sky, as in The
Dreaming of the Bones (1919). The important thing is that it should only
suggest, only create the atmosphere, the mood―which can imply
representing something that is an accompaniment to, not a reflection of the
text―and should not be a precise mimetic prop to the physical locale
(Ibid., 53). Any rich, heavily painted, ready-made scenery ridicules the
world-creating potential of the text, underrates the actor’s powers to
express it, and stifles the imagination of the audience. The setting, like the
costuming, should be symbolically decorative― colours are thus more
than welcome―which lifts it out of time and place, carrying it nearer to
faeryland (Yeats 1911, 217).
This is in perfect harmony with the aesthetics of traditional theatre. In
contrast to a cluttered and, starting with the Baroque, a perspective-ridden
Western stage, traditional scenery, including the stage background, is
always kept to a minimum. Khon, the classical dance drama of Thailand,
and the oldest still to be seen there, even goes as far as featuring simple
movements against a white screen (even though its rich plots, based as
they are on the epic Rāmāyaṇa, offer ample opportunities for visual
literalization of its ambience). Jingxi―best known as Beijing
opera―makes use of a non-representative, multicoloured backdrop owned
personally by the star actor of the troupe (Bowers 1960, 283). Ancient
Greek theatre was no exception: in its exemplary period (fifth century
BC), the only background was the façade of the skēnḗ building, possibly
decorated in architectural perspective. In At the Hawk’s Well, the well is

indicated by a square blue cloth (Yeats 1921, 5), but Yeats can also
represent things synecdochically, i.e., offering a part for the whole. Thus,
his preference for a forest pattern over a forest painting to indicate a forest
(qtd. in Ellmann 1979, 132) is strikingly reminiscent of some traditional
practices, like the nō substitution of a framed twig for a forest.5
Traditionally, arm in arm with poor scenery, go modest stage
properties. Objects used by the actors are make-believe or at least stylized,
rather than literally present. In The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), Emer
moves her hand as though putting logs on an imagined fire and stirring it
into a blaze (Yeats 1921, 33), just as in jingxi more stable props like door
thresholds and stairs are only suggested through mime (the actor pretends
to open a door and takes a high step whenever entering a room). A castle
wall can be indicated by a blue cloth with painted white bricks, held up by
stage attendants. Some props mean what they are (pots, cups, brooms),
some are again synecdoches (oars mean a boat), while others can be all
kinds of things, depending on the context (a chair can be a chair, but also a
throne, a garden bench, or a tower, if the actor stands on it, an
impenetrable barrier, if the heroine stands behind it in distress, or a
surmountable obstacle, if a warrior jumps over it in acrobatic bravado) (for
more, see Bowers 1960, 283-284).6 The Nāṭyaśāstra, the oldest treatise on
classical Sanskrit theatre (nāṭya), dating from at least the first centuries
AD, allows for both realistic and conventionalized kinds of props, but the
former were not to be simply borrowed from real life; rather, they were
expected to be especially made for the purpose.7 Here, too, parts may have
represented wholes, and either props were made of cloth-covered cane
frames (like in nō), or a piece of cloth would be stretched over the frame
and then painted so as to resemble the wanted object (as in Assamese
aṅkīya nāṭ, which, though not more than half a millennium old, is very
probably one of the closest relatives of nāṭya, now centuries dead). Even a
form as realistic and popular as Thai likay―only two hundred years old,
but, performatively, heir to classical forms―does away with a stage
setting, keeping only a dais and a few chairs brought in by the actors
themselves, if needed.
Among the innovations of the Four Plays for Dancers, we find the
unfolding and folding of a black cloth. In At the Hawk’s Well the First
Musician stands motionless at the front centre of the stage, with the folded
cloth hanging from his hands. The other two musicians appear and start
slowly unfolding it. It is while they are doing this that they also start
unfolding the words of the play: “I call to the eye of the mind...”
Unfolded, the cloth presents a golden hawk pattern. The cloth is slowly
8 Chapter One
folded up. As such, this element, found in all four “nō plays”, is not a nō
feature, and it remains curious as long as we do not amplify our
understanding by other theatrical traditions. I argue that it performs the
function of a curtain. The curtain is always a metaleptic threshold, i.e., a
boundary line between worlds. Although we tend to identify it with the
one belonging to the proscenium arch, this is a modern, Western
invention. Traditional theatres, if introducing a curtain, tend to have it at
the rear, or, as in nō, at the beginning of the hashigakari bridge, for
curtained entrances. The role of the curtain may become especially
dramatic. In Japanese kabuki there is a door covered by a curtain whose
metal rings hang on a metal rod. Their squeaking announces the imminent
emergence of somebody important. In the Indian rās līlā the curtain opens
to reveal Kṛṣṇa (usually spelt Krishna) and Rādhā, the highlights of this
religious performance. This is very much like revealing the golden hawk
on Yeats‘s cloth. There is more, however. Of particular interest is the use
of a loose curtain in a number of Indian theatres, starting possibly with
nāṭya itself, where a curtain―and even more than one, for a multiple
scene―might have been held by attendants and then lowered or pulled
aside to present a character. This is certainly what we find in some later
theatres. In kūṭiyāṭṭam, the Keralite form believed by many to still
preserve much of the original nāṭya, a simple red curtain is used for
special entries, while its close relative, kathakali, has gone the farthest.
The first preliminary dance is performed behind the hand-held curtain.
Very often, before a major character appears, he slowly peeps from behind
the curtain. However, when a powerful character appears for the first time,
a struggle is staged between the character and the curtain. Accompanied
by drums and cymbals, the character performs a number of dance
sequences only partly visible to the audience – until the curtain is dropped,
and the character is manifested in his full glory. This playing with the
curtain, known as tiranokku, is only the most moving elaboration of the
idea of introducing one world into another, of making them meet, an idea I
believe Yeats’s cloths also essentially shared.
Inspired by Gordon Craig’s conception of the theatre, Yeats
experimented widely with lighting, too. Actually, it was one of the trends
of the day, but also of another era into which the West had stumbled
unaware of its precedents. Methods of spotlighting different locales at a
time had been known and used in India for centuries. Among the Japanese
inventions, there were lighting techniques which bathed the actors in
sunlight or shadow, according to the needs of the moment, but we also
find long candlesticks protruding out to the actor's face as a spotlight
(Bowers 1960, 321). Nevertheless, the preferred mode (when at all
necessary: Greek drama, for example, was performed by daylight) seems

to have been uniform lighting, whether in Asian or in Elizabethan theatres,
with no pretense of realism, so that the source of the light itself was (and
very often still is) in full view of the audience. Here, too, Yeats could not
possibly agree more when he opted for a large chandelier: “Indeed I think,
so far as my present experience goes, that the most effective lighting is the
lighting we are most accustomed to in our rooms” (Yeats 1921, 3).
This brings us to the last and boldest aspect of the stage: the
mechanical effects. It is not that traditional theatre does not know of these;
it is that it cannot think highly of them. The more distant from its roots a
theatrical tradition becomes, the greater its thirst after special effects.
Greek theatre is a case in point: Aeschylus and Sophocles have no use for
a deus ex machina, but it is introduced by Euripides, to come into vogue
by the time of post-classical, Hellenistic theatre. Once again, in a truly
traditional theatre everything can be suggested by words, mime and
gesture (e.g., the Indian mudrās), the nature of a characterand the stage
conventions, and then savoured and completed by the audience.8 Yeats
was open to the possibility of using mechanical effects, “when it
represents some material thing, becomes a symbol, a player, as it were”
(Yeats 1966, 342). In other words, this occurs when such effects become
an organic and, as such, functional part of the whole. It is this final,
overarching effect that matters, and if at other times it can be produced by
means aggressively antinaturalistic, there is no fundamental contradiction
involved. In The Green Helmet (1910) we are offered orange houses, a
vivid green seaand Black Men with eyes looking green from its reflection.
3. The players
The player is the second of Yeats's three pillars of drama (these are
treated in his essay “Play, Player and Scene”). The actor should be non-
conversational, make no irrelevant gestures, and look like a painting in a
frieze (Yeats 1962, 172 and 176-7). These are all expectations by which
traditional theatre puts much store, and I shall shortly come back to each
of them. Yeats's dramatic universe is in fact player-centered, the player
using all of his various potentials and thus becoming the foremost vitalizer
of the written germ into the full-fledged world of the play. This view of
the player as an all-round performer is a far cry from the common modern
understanding of the actor as the faithful imitator of real life. Unlike with
Yeats, in not a few traditional theatres, the text of the play is of secondary
importance and highly typified, the real event being the player (in
Southeast Asia the director is virtually replaced by a stage manager, who
10 Chapter One
chooses and rearranges scripts: he does not write the dialogue;instead, the
players improvise around the story line, using some set patterns). Though
in a much, much more sophisticated sense, even Yeats's plays could be
called typified, amplifying moments of particular states of the soul and
evoking redemption. Besides, there are certainly true archetypes among
his characters (e.g., the self-aware Old Man). General, primordial types,
not particularized and psychologically nuanced characters, have been the
true inhabitants of most traditional theatre since Greek times (even when
on the surface they might seem to be highly individualized).9 Yeats openly
and repeatedly denies the importance of the character in tragedy. All true
tragic art is passionate art, “the drowner of dykes, the confounder of
understanding”, moving us to a trance-like intensity that makes of the
persons on the stage humanity itself (Yeats 1911, ix). Yeats talks of
moods, rather than characters, autonomous realities only putting on
various masks for their drama. What happens on the stage is a gradual
intensification of a fundamental human emotion, a moment of supreme
passion unfolding the depths of the human being and his or her existence.
This is what makes David R. Clark call Yeats's theatre “a drama of
perception”: his plays move from passion to perception; they are
recognition scenes, showing heroic suffering turning into deep knowledge
(Clark 1965, 15-16). This certainly is a direct influence of nō, but, again,
features as the ultimate raison d'être of traditional theatre in general,
whether tacitly implied or elaborated upon, as in Aristotle on Greek
tragedy or Zeami Motokiyo on nō, and, with special and systematic
treatment, in Indian criticism, with its doctrine of the eight (later nine)
rasas, aesthetically spiritualized states of mind, clearly to be distinguished
from as many related bhāvas, which are merely their psychological,
natural conditions within our daily life.
Whoever feels the need for such noble theatre must of and within
himself, even without outside influences, intuit that the goal must be
achieved through some kind of distancing from what we grossly call the
real world.10 Detachment, mimetic asceticism, stylization, a ritual-like
quality evoking a world of superhuman transcendence―whatever you
name it, the dream requires an actor more accomplished than can be
provided by the tradition-emancipated performative infrastructure at
Yeats's disposal. Yeats was well-aware of the problem. Having grouped
together his plays The King's Threshold, Deirdre (1907) and On Baile's
Strand, he writes in a letter that each one of them requires “one player of
genius and that is out of reach probably henceforth for ever” (Yeats 1954,
674).
The most obvious moment to be reconsidered regarding the actor is his

appearance. Yeats attaches great importance to his costume, which has to
be magnificent, but he is quick to warn that the most facile way to
“achieve” this is―as has happened, in fact, during the deterioration of
Western theatre―to make it “more and more magnificent, that the mind
might sleep in peace, while the eye took pleasure in the magnificence of
velvet and silk and in the physical beauty of women” (Yeats 1903, 264-
265). Such magnificence is irrelevant. Starting with The Green Helmet,
one observes that colours become ever more functional in Yeats's plays,
not only to contribute to a mood or atmosphere, but as highly significant,
symbolic entities. The costumes in the watershed Four Plays for Dancers
are carefully minimalistic and powerfully suggest a ritualistic presence (of
a Celtic inspiration, I may add). This, too, comes close to nō and Greek
theatre, but traditional theatre equally offers a great many examples of
articulating non-realistic costumes at the opposite, meticulously luxuriant
pole. The entire twenty-third chapter of the Nāṭyaśāstra, for instance, is
dedicated to āhārya, one of the four aspects of acting, including costumes
and make-up. Their sumptuousness still survives in nāṭya's presumed heirs
and/or offshoots, kūṭiyāṭṭam and kathakali, with symbolic meanings
revealing the nature of every character. In the West, a late product such as
the Tudor stage still used colours as symbolic expressions of character,
with even the beard and hair reflecting emotions and changing to show
changes in feeling (Linthicum 1936, 14).
That Yeats embraced the use of masks in the theatre, after centuries of
their eking out an existence most suspect in the eyes of the various official
Christianities, can come as no surprise in a man who made the mask the
pivot of his entire worldview. His first dramatic uses of the mask were for
grotesque effects. At one point in the evolution of The Hour-Glass
(1914),11 the Fool is given a mask, the better to designate him a principle,
not a human being. The same happens with the Angel who appears to the
Wise Man in the 1912 version (Yeats 1966, 644-6). By the time of the
Four Plays for Dancers, Yeats's masks have clearly come to serve the
purpose of another distancing element, much in accordance with Craig's
ideas. The actor thus becomes only the bearer, the support of a particular
mask, which is the real character. The realities of the characters are to be
read from the features of the masks they wear. The ontological relation
existing between the actor and the mask is programmatically revealed in
The Only Jealousy of Emer, “written to find what dramatic effect one
could get out of a mask, changed while the player remains upon the stage
to suggest a change of personality” (Yeats 1921, vi). Instead of masks,
painted faces were another way for Yeats to detach the actor from the
12 Chapter One
character and, basically and foremost, to dissociate the two worlds they
inhabit.
, Nō certainly makes use of masks (mostly exquisitely symbolic in their
neutral universality, which lends specific expressions to specific tilts of the
head and the voice), and before he learnt about this, Yeats, of course, also
knew of commedia dell'arte and Greek theatre, both masked. Once again,
however, make-up (including masks, to be sure) has been an integral part
of the longing within traditional theatre to remove itself from the common
world. Apart from the various folk forms of theatre and quasi-theatre, with
their omnipresent masks, I am even tempted into observing that the farther
we move eastwards, the greater the overall tendency to substitute painted
faces or facial movements for solid masks. Greek theatre, apparently the
oldest we know of, used masks in all of its dramatic forms (including the
members of the tragic chorus). Dionysus, god of tragedy, was often
present as a mask on a pole. Interestingly, Greek make-up was said to have
started as face painting―as early as Thespis, who was in general credited
as the father of Greek tragedy―soon to solidify into a cloth mask.
Moreover, even at this early stage, we find the not uncommon theatrical
practice of one actor playing more than one character, just as is the case in
The Only Jealousy of Emer (Yeats 1921, 33).12 The twenty-third chapter of
the Nāṭyaśāstra extensively treats, among other things, the actors'
ornaments, colours, painted body parts, all according to the status of the
character. The term pratiśira (23.134-135), though commonly translated
as mask, remains vague and might just as well denote only making up the
face (see 23.182-192), and special kinds of crowns and hairstyle.
Significantly, kūṭiyāṭṭam and kathakali, which are most probably nāṭya-
derived, both favour heavy make-up over a ready-made mask, preserving
the latter only for some special animal or half-animal roles―possibly
revealing a folk influence―though kṛṣṇāṭṭam, one of kūṭiyāṭṭam's
predecessors, included proper masks (Zarrilli 1984, 176).13 This, however,
is south India. The north-eastern manipuri introduces another possibility:
faces so motionless that they become masks of themselves, which is also
found in Yeats's insistence on the graveness of expression. This strategy is
anything but rare further in Southeast Asia. In Bali, a paradise of
performative arts, across its various forms we find both make-up and
masks, but also the possibility of making only one's own face and body,
such as they naturally are, so intensely expressive as to turn an old man
into a young warrior or a beautiful princess (Pronko 1974, 18). If a
theatrical tradition opts for painting faces instead of putting on masks or
something else, this, too, can be done in more than one way. Yeats's
version seems restrained when compared to the striking, sometimes even
shocking geometrical designs found in Japanese kabuki or Chinese jingxi

(with the former rather bichrome, stressing the facial features, and the
latter, symbolically colourful, obliterating or even aggressively ignoring
them (e.g., eyes painted above or under the natural ones)), or to the
sublimely grotesque make-up of kūṭiyāṭṭam and kathakali. Highly
indicative of the true nature of the mask, once the kathakali actor's make-
up has been completed, once the nō actor has put on his mask, they are no
longer, perceived either by themselves or by others, as this-worldly actors,
but as the otherworldly characters thus evoked. Finally, the already
mentioned innovation in The Only Jealousy of Emer of one player
changing roles on the stage has been known for centuries, not in nō, but in
kabuki (Pronko 1974, 192) and Marathi tamāśā (Abrams 1993, 295). The
make-up and costumes change, but the transformation can occur even
during the scene, e.g., with an assistant taking hold of the actor's top
kimono at the shoulder and pulling it off, only to disclose a different
kimono underneath, representing a different state or character.
Another distancing concern shared by Yeats and traditional theatre
involves the actors' movements. In some instances, these were deliberated
with the greatest sophistication (the Nāṭyaśāstra). Again, unsatisfied as he
was with the “little whimpering puppets” (Yeats 1923, 122) of the modern
naturalistic theatre, Yeats experimented with statuesque posing and
movement stylization long before his nō experience. Here I limit the
discussion to the element I find most intriguing, the one I propose to call
the marionette factor. One immediate influence on Yeats was, again,
Gordon Craig, the dramatic visionary who argued that “the actor must go,
and in his place comes the inanimate figure – the über-marionette we may
call him” (Craig 1957, 81). Yeats himself wrote of “those movements of
the body copied from the marionette shows of the 14th century” as
perhaps one of the things he felt impelled to look for in Asia (Yeats 1916,
vii). Indeed, its theatres could have proved for him an inexhaustible
inspiration. Puppet theatre has been abundantly present in Asia, but
especially curious is its repeated intimacy with ordinary human theatre.
Both kathakali and yakṣagāna (another south Indian dance-drama, itself
with conventions directly reflecting nāṭya) gave birth to puppet theatre
companies enacting plays as close as possible in style to that of the
original forms.14 Uday Shankar, the great modern Indian dancer and
choreographer who introduced Indian folk dances to the world, was
inspired by puppet theatre. Sometimes his human figures played puppet
roles and the dancers moved like puppets. That is, his human dancers
learnt from puppets, the underlying ideal obviously being a metaleptic
detachment. Man becomes secondary. This has been observed in Burma,
14 Chapter One
too, known for its puppet or marionette shows (yousshim bwé or yokthe
pwé). There―to borrow a happy turn of phrase―”puppets set the standard
a good dancer must abide by” (Sein and Withey 1965, 23). The most
complex and astonishing development I know of occurred in Indonesia,
whose famous wayang kulit―shadow puppet theatre centuries old and
almost certainly of animistic origins―engendered wayang wong, a theatre
with human actors imitating the movements and stories of wayang kulit.
Wayang wong, in its turn, engendered wayang golek, in which the
puppeteer sticks his puppets in the banana tree trunk before him (serving
as the stage), and then moves their arms by means of bamboo slivers, in
the fashion of wayang kulit. In other words, the puppets imitate human
beings imitating shadow puppets (Bowers 1960, 219). Such a double
remove comes close to Craig's idea of the über-marionette: man imitates
the man-made marionette but then goes even beyond―über―a mere
reconstruction, tending to embody an equally unhuman and unthinglike
stance.
The most refined stylization of body movement is, of course, dance. It
is difficult to find a single form of traditional theatre that is not either
dance-drama or at least drama with dance elements. Dance is possibly the
greatest single influence of nō on Yeats, visible in the very title he chose
to collectively designate his four “nō plays”: Four Plays for Dancers.
Though he never saw a nō performance, he well understood that its action
culminates with a prolonged moment of sustained passion, expressed
through dance (mai).15 The climax of action is, in fact, the climax of dance
(hardly a peculiarity of nō). To take an example outside the poetics of the
Four Plays, in The Death of Cuchulain (1939) the Old Man calls for a
dance and “the tragi-comedian dancer, the tragic dancer, upon the same
neck love and loathing, life and death”. What he has around him instead
makes him “spit three times. I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas”
(Yeats 2001, 546).
In traditional theatre the dance dimension can take a great number of
different manifestations, much more elaborate than in Yeats's usage. For
the present purpose, I shall outline just a couple of essentials. There is a
common distinction between pure, abstract dance and mimetic dance
(unlike modern theatre, in which mime is by default seen as something
comic, in traditional theatre such meaning is implied only in clowns’
mime). There is also a third, intermediary possibility: gestures are used
symbolically, but the symbolism is abstract, unrealistic and utterly
conventional, not mimetic (the best-known instance is the Indian
mudrās).16 Thus, Indian tradition distinguishes three kinds of dance: the
already familiar nāṭya (with its characteristic use of mudrās), the mimetic
nṛtya, and nṛtta, pure dance, all derived from the same Sanskrit verbal
root, nṛt (or Prākrit naṭ), meaning to dance. In the case of the closely
related Southeast Asian theatre, James Brandon distinguishes three kinds
according to the way dance is employed. First come battle scenes
performed as dance; secondly it may take the form of a conventionalized
gesture language during dialogue or song passages, and, thirdly, whole
sections of the story may be represented through dance, as in ballet
(Brandon 1967, 142). Yeats's dances seem to have been of the abstract,
“pure” kind, influenced as they were by nō, where dance, mai, is typically
of that sort, although there are also more representational variants. The
island of Bali, swarming with various dance forms, offers a number of
such dances, legong being the most abstract, while tjalonarang includes
pure dance only as its interludes (Pronko 1974, 20 and 23). The latter is
also true of tillana, any of the pure dance insertions within bharatanāṭyam,
the best-known of Indian classical dances. Another dance form with no
conceptual meaning is Thai rabam (Bowers 1960, 146). Instead of listing
other examples, let me point out that, in the West, dance played an
overwhelming role in ancient Greek theatre. Actors danced as a matter of
course, and since, at least in the beginning, these were actually playwrights
themselves, the first tragedians (Thespis, Phrynichus, Pratinas) were called
dancers, not actors or authors (Arnott 1989, 56), just as “to perform nō” is
nō o mau in Japanese, literally “to dance nō” (Inoura and Kawatake 1981,
112). After all, the very word orkhḗstra, indicating the stage, is derived
from the verb orkheĩsthai, to dance. Once again, the enchanted world to
which the stage belongs requires representational means only remotely
reminiscent of the everyday world. One’s movements cannot present an
exception.
Of course, the same holds true for the auditory aspect of the actor’s
performance. It is one of the things Yeats found deteriorating in the course
of time:
When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an always
larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes than
through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words is
exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like exhausting
emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they were reading
something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art of oratory, and
gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that is content with the
sympathy of our nerves [...] verse spoken without a musical emphasis
seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said
naturally and simply in prose. (Yeats 1903, 182-183)
16 Chapter One
As summed up by P. Ure (1963, 47), Yeats wanted a drama whose

primacy would be on speech, because only speech could express the
innermost soul with sufficient subtlety. Just as the actor is to avoid any
irrelevant or obtrusive gesture, so should his pitch and note change only
when necessary. The audience’s full attention is otherwise spoiled.
“[T]ragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone”
(Yeats 1911, x). A tendency in the textual body of Yeats’s plays has been
rightly noted, also starting with the Four Plays for Dancers: words take on
a determinative value; the former lyric softness gives way to a language
often masculine and objective, by realistic reference to place and action
(Clark 1965, 18-19). Yeats’s search for the right way to chant poetry
underlies his pursuits in the field of drama (particularly when it comes to
those plays or parts of plays which are written in verse). Yeats must have
felt comfortable with Artaud’s idea of language as a form of Incantation,
producing physical shock, shattering as well as manifesting things (Artaud
1958, 46). Yeats’s stress on words fits well with the classical Greek idea.
Before the fourth century BC, the Greeks were a strikingly oral culture, so
that even dramatic action was preferably described, not shown. Peter
Walcot infers therefrom the presence of so many messengers in the
tragedies: the supposed―I would even say ideal―seeing organ is not the
eye, but the audience’s imagination, moved by the words of the actor
(Walcot 1976, 32).
In imaginative theatre, there is no place for ordinary language, either.
Instead, words should be pronounced with a highly stylized gravity,
recited, chanted, even sung. The Nāṭyaśāstra takes great care of the
stylized verbal aspect (vācikābhinaya)―for it is “the body of the dramatic
art” (15.2)―and dedicates to it no less than four whole chapters (15-18).17
In the total theatre of nāṭya, though the musical part was usually realized
by a different type of performer, the actor, too, could occasionally sing and
even play an instrument. Jingxi actors sing as a matter of course, Greek
dialogues seem to have been performed in the form of monotonous singing
(or quasi-singing), and there is a fascinating example in the nāṭya-derived
kūṭiyāṭṭam of the character Śaṅkūkarṇa chanting a short passage of
dialogue and articulating, in the process, every single word with a
particular gesture. Then he repeats the gesture text at a slower pace,
emphasizing the facial expressions appropriate for the mood of each word.
Finally, he repeats all the gesturing and chanting as before (Richmond
1993b, 109). I shall shortly come back to the musical aspect, for it is
perhaps more intimately connected with the chorus and the musicians than
with the actor.
A provision at the beginning of Yeats’s “Note on ‘The Dreaming of the

Bones’” makes me consider one last moment. We read: “Dervorgilla’s few
lines can be given, if need be, to Dermot, and Dervorgilla’s part taken by a
dancer who has the training of a dancer alone; nor need that masked
dancer be a woman” (Yeats 1921, 129). Although this seems to be a highly
technical instruction, motivated by sheer convenience, its possibility in
itself reminds one of traditions in which such shifts have been widely and
systematically practiced, as a matter of course, or even of principle. Asian
theatre is (and, even more, used to be) typically male-cast, but there are
notable qualifications to be made in this regard. The Nāṭyaśāstra (35.28-
39) recognizes all kinds of possibilities, depending mostly on the desired
effect. There are both male and female actors, and both can play either
male or female roles. Some roles are ideally meant for children. We cannot
possibly know how far this unrealistic strategy went in theatrical practice,
but in kathakali, to take an example, female roles are still played by men,
while, conversely, in the still popular vasant rasa, for instance, the central
figure, the god Kṛṣṇa is usually played by a young girl. Jingxi, the Beijing
opera, though male-cast, features female roles as its main interest, and its
greatest stars are regularly those playing female roles (Pronko 1974, 286;
for more, see Scott 2001). More famous in this respect is Japanese kabuki,
with its onnagata, the male actor so specialized in female―ideally
female―roles that it has been said that whoever has grown accustomed to
their willowy beauty cannot but be utterly shocked by the “unfeminine”
movements and behaviour of women in modern Japanese plays. Again, if
a woman wanted to play a female role, she should imitate the men who
have already so subtly embodied the woman in a woman (Pronko 1974,
195). The practice was not unknown in the West (before males playing
females became possible for comic purposes only), and the tradition was
not preserved only from classical Greek to Elizabethan theatre, but as late
as the Restoration. Paralleling the above comment on the kabuki onnagata,
we thus find Samuel Pepys noting of the actor Edward Kynaston in
Fletcher’s Loyal Subject that he “made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in
my life” (Thorndike 1960, 372). The reason behind this gender shifting is
certainly not single, and its complexity is beyond the reach of this article.
However, I do feel the need to stress even here that, allowing for practical
considerations―the various kimonos worn by the onnagata are quite
heavy, the wig can weigh up to thirty pounds, and in Sri Lankan kolam
some of the masks need to be supported by a wooden sword―the main
driving force, even when subconscious, must be a grand metaleptic
detachment, stylization, an artificialization so sublime that the already
double figure of actor and character is once more doubled, into man and
18 Chapter One
woman, thus giving birth to an otherworldly being, the transcendent

androgyne abolishing all pairs of opposites and recovering the primordial
unity. At least for native audiences, there is also the clear aesthetic effect
of not letting the world of the stage slavishly emulate the world of outside
realities. Finally, to preclude any facile gender-centered charge invoking
chauvinistic concerns, suffice it to say here that from ancient India we
have evidence of all-women companies, and even today there are women’s
troupes (in Japan, too) in which all characters are played by women.
4. The chorus and the music

The present subheading, joining two dramatic aspects, may seem an
unjustified cobbling up of loose ends, but the relationship between the
actor, the chorus and the music in traditional, total theatre is so intimate
that one could more readily criticize making the former a separate
subheading than subsuming the remaining two under a common one. And
this is another dimension Yeats felt to be an unforgivable lacuna in
modern theatre. I have great difficulty understanding the background of
comments such as the following one: “Even the argument that [any of the
Four Plays for Dancers] is not a play ‘in the traditional sense’ but makes
‘dramatic sense’ in its music and dance is not valid when one remembers
that there are no dance steps, no musical notes” (Sharp 1959, 81). The
comment charges Yeats with offering us only words and nothing but
words. That words were central to Yeats’s idea of his own theatre has
already been stated in this chapter, and Yeats himself made no bones about
it (taking this as a dramatic shortcoming seems to be a matter of personal
taste, and I have already pointed out that it was also the underlying idea of
the earliest Greek theatre). But what does it mean that there are no dance
steps? True, Yeats does not seem to have fixed in writing any steps to be
observed by all future actors, but then―sooner than delivering them orally
on the spot, I suspect―he probably left the matter to the extemporizing of
the actor, or to the discretion of the director. This is particularly likely
since Yeats had no living tradition on which to build, while in various
classical theatres the dance steps constitute one of the deliberately refined
aspects of an entire aesthetic organism. Be that as it may, there are dance
steps. Just as there is music, for which there are notes, attached to the first
edition, at least for two of the four plays for dancers (for At the Hawk’s
Well, by Edmund Dulac, and for The Dreaming of the Bones, by Walter
Rummel). Sharp’s comment is preposterous at its face value.18 In fact, the
opposite is true. Yeats was one of the few trying to remedy the fatal
Aristotelian legacy of the West. It was Aristotle, not Yeats, for whom it
was all just words, words, words, and who virtually excluded from his
dramatic considerations the musical and the visual aspects, a phenomenon
which was subsequently only aggravated by post-Renaissance interpreters
of his Poetics.
I shall first present the chorus, this great extension of both the actor
and the public, a metaleptic oddity whose perspective is so protean that it
is made up of all the perspectives appearing in a play and its performance.
The chorus can be anyone―a character in the play; a personal or
impersonal public commenting, warning, advisingor predicting; a god;
destiny; of this world; of another; of no world―which makes it everyone.
The chorus was a truly ingenious entity that could not leave Yeats’s
voracious imagination indifferent. One of the things he looked for in Asian
theatre, considered to be more authentic, was precisely a chorus “that has
no part in the action” (Yeats 1916, vii). A passage in his essay “Emotion
of Multitude” expresses very well both his appreciation of the chorus and,
to further qualify Sharp’s accusation, his own repulsion at any wrong use
of words in drama:
The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which
called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-enduring Odysseus,
and all the gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some well-ordered fable,
some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play
delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has
created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of far-off
multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than the mere
will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a
little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the
imagination. (Yeats 1903, 339-340)
This was published in 1903, and again predates Yeats’s acquaintance

with nō. As early as On Baile’s Strand (the next year), the Fool and the
Blind Man function both as a sub-plot, commenting on the relation
between Cuchulain and Conchubar, and a chorus. Parallel to their this-
worldly dimension, there is the Chorus of Women, introducing a
supernatural element (for more, see Taylor 1976, 22-23). This comes close
to the mutiple functions of the Greek chorus, as sketched at the beginning
of this subheading. In Deirdre the chorus of women musicians is relatively
removed from the action but still manipulates the reaction of the audience,
while the First Musician even hints to the others a secret about
developments. This is still before Yeats’s “initiation” into nō, where―just
as in Yeats’s later practice―the chorus can replace the voice of the
dancing protagonist, as well as function as commentary, accompaniment,
20 Chapter One
even interlocutor. Other traditional theatrical forms offer a fascinating

metaleptic variety in the kind and degree of the chorus’s involvement/non-
involvement in the action. Some seem to have been adumbrated by Yeats
even without direct contact with any of them. In Bali sanghyang djaran, a
horse trance dance is performed with the priest wearing a hobby-horse tail
around the waist. The chorus calls him and the priest heads toward it. Then
the chorus calls him from the other side and he goes back (Pronko 1974,
22). In Gujarati bhavāi there is a male chorus dressed as women, singing,
dancing and helping actors in various ways (with the properties, holding a
light, etc.). The members can even walk amidst the audience, e.g., to beg
for money in order to help the impoverished character on the stage (Gargi
1962, 88). More often, however, the role of the chorus seems to be less
invasive and restricted rather to accompanying description and narration,
or it may consist of one or two side-singers. In Japanese kabuki a side-
singer often intones the story, while with vast gestures and mime, the actor
intensifies his emotion and only takes over the best speeches. In the larger
part of Southeast Asia, dancers/actors too old to perform join the sitting
chorus to sing out the narrative. The performers execute what they hear (in
Indonesia the audience often gives more attention and respect to the
singing narrator―dalang―than to the action and its performers (Bowers
1960, 21). All the texts of Thai khon are sung by side-singers. They sing
out the name of every character, for the audience to recognize them, and
then chant the speeches of each one, changing the tone. The actors
approximate the meaning through slow gestures and movements; these are
then repeated faster (Ibid., 133-137).19 Reminiscent of Greek theatre and
its practice of changing the chorus’s identity (reflected in changes in the
subject) is kathakali. Although here all the lines of the characters are
delivered by the onstage vocalists, not by the actors/dancers―in Yeats’s
dance plays words are often delivered by a musician―there is a switch
between the narrative sections in the third person (usually in metrical
Sanskrit and sung by the vocalists) and the first-person dialogue and/or
soliloquy (in a mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam, interpreted by the
actors) (Zarrilli 2000, 41). The average audience can hardly follow the
language, but is highly familiar with the content. Similarly, in nō the
audience cannot understand the archaic Japanese but needs the help of
accompanying booklets. Such a strategy is always founded on the high
esteem in which a tradition and its language are held, and/or on the fact
that what matters in much traditional dance theatre is the performance, not
the text. Though of a completely different origin, an echo of the practice
can be found in Yeats’s “Note on ‘Calvary’“:
I HAVE written the little songs of the chorus to please myself, confident
that singer and composer, when the time came for performance, would
certainly make it impossible for the audience to know what the words
were. (Yeats 1921, 135)
By the time of The Words upon the Window-Pane (1934) and,

especially, Purgatory (1939), the dancers, the masksand the chorus had all
disappeared from Yeats’s dramatic world. Belonging, in Yeats’s vision of
history, to the objective phase of a dying cycle, when human beings are
reduced to mere fragments, incapable of spiritual transcendence, the
characters collapsed into doomed witnesses and commentators, the new
version of the bygone choruses (see Clark 1965, 102 and Nathan 1965,
240).
By now it must have become clear that in traditional theatre music is
omnipresent. It cannot always be clearly separated from other dramatic
aspects. Its various modes and functions would be too many even for a far
larger chapter than this one. It can be instrumental, vocal or both, intended
as independent or as accompaniment, even as a highly determining part of
action itself. In kabuki, the string samisen, sounding much like the human
voice, can become openly mimic and follow the actor’s intonations, even
continue his speech or emotions (helped by a narrator or a group of
singers). The speech can even pass, without break, from actor to narrator
to instrument (Pronko 1974, 152-153). In other cases (Greek drama, Indian
nāṭya), we do not know how exactly music (and dance, for that matter)
were integrated into a performance. But in India, as summed up by
Richmond (1993a, 46), songs were definitely used for purposes as far
apart as introducing the first appearance of a characteror a character’s exit,
reinforcing an already established mood, changing the mood or marking
when the situation changes, or when there is a gap in the action due to a
scenic mishap.
A great problem for Yeats had been precisely how to integrate songs
into the action and the meaning of a play, but by the time of The Green
Helmet they seem to have grown into dramatic climaxes (see also Taylor
1976, 20 and 31). In The Dreaming of the Bones― Yeats drew his
instrumental music from the flute and percussion instruments of nō, but
these are characteristic of most traditional theatre―the musicians alternate
between straight narration and singing, the latter being the atmospheric,
lyrical part (another common division). A musician can also become a
participant in the action (as in Calvary, where the First Musician is
imagined to be present on Calvary to witness Christ’s ascent to the top of
the hill). Nor did Yeats’s high dramatic ambitions leave out music. He had
initially dreamt of dramatic songs in which every word, every cadence
22 Chapter One
would be audible and expressive, and of a music “that shall mean nothing,
or next to nothing, apart from the words” (Yeats 1923, 129-130).20 In time,
however, he gave up on finding a musician submissive enough, or an
audience capable of hearing properly the words accompanied by music
(Ure 1963, 116).21
5. Conclusion
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Yeats took his dramatic
activity seriously, but this was certainly a domain in which his self-
confidence and clarity of vision were inferior to his range in the field of
poetry or even fiction. What he was clear about was that the Western
theatre of his day was a “theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians,
grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals”. These are Artaud’s
words (Artaud 1958, 41), but I cannot envisage Yeats hesitating whether
to subscribe to them. However, how to change such a dismal situation was
an altogether different question. He constantly rewrote his plays, often
more than once, testing them on the stage and then repairing the faulty
parts (always to the benefit of the male element, as Yeats put it, to achieve
“an increase of strength in the bony structure” (Yeats 1923, 186-187)). For
some plays there even existed a “stage version” and a “reading version”
(Ure 1963, 23-24). However, I feel his growing suspicion of any
opportunity to properly stage his plays was not occasioned so much by his
lack of any specific vision, as by the abundance of his general vision. He
felt only too well what an astonishingly grand artistic and spiritual entity
the theatre is, but lacked the concrete knowledge to reveal it. This may be
what James Flannery (1976) means when he argues that Yeats’s theatrical
ideas are of greater significance than the plays themselves. Yeats was
possibly right when he wrote to T. S. Moore that, “I always feel that my
work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith” (Yeats and Moore 1953,
156).22 Still, there is also a conspicuously general note to Yeats’s
suspiciousness:
It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre of

Art; for one must get one’s actors, and perhaps one’s scenery, from the
theatre of commerce, until new actors and new painters have come to help
one [...] (Yeats 1903, 266)
It has been my intent throughout this chapter to indicate―despite the

size of the subject and the scarcity of space―how close Yeats’s theatrical
intuition, only a special manifestation of his total intuition, brought him to
the theories and practices of traditional, total theatre―despite the fact that
he never saw one, Western or Eastern, but was only carried along by the
contemporary wave of general discontent with modern theatre. Being part
of that discontent―only several decades removed―I cannot but assert
that, any specific evaluations of his merits and demerits apart, he thus
resuscitated, in stage and all of its flesh, much of what the theatre,
primordially and authentically, means. True theatre, the one being a
genuinely spiritual experience, cannot live away from ritual, however
interpreted and however staged. Yeats frequently mentions this core part
of the theatre, and many traditional theatres were, or still are, performed
within or before temples and shrines, by priests, in connection to a
religious festivity, or at least they can be traced to some form of spiritual
engagement. My choice of traditional forms has aimed at
representativeness, but it must be kept in mind that traditional theatre is by
no means limited to the Eurasian continent.23 I have limited myself mostly
to the performative aspects, though there would be much to say about the
others as well (composition, plot and characters).
To repeatedly tax Yeats with having misunderstood and deformed both
the form and spirit of nō― to the point of asserting that he was
diametrically opposed to all its levels (Stucki 1966, 106)―is to repeatedly
read into his “nō-plays” and their underlying inspiration a purpose of the
critics in question, not of Yeats. Yeats was certainly not trying to write a
nō play of his own, but his own version of a traditional play―with
inevitable colourings of his own time, place and self. Neither need his
unhappy statement that “[i]t is an advantage of this noble form [nō] that it
need absorb no one’s life” (Yeats 1916, ii) be taken as a sign of his
superficiality, but rather of using such a “noble form” according to his own
needs, in order to ennoble his own plays, to create something of a
traditional theatre of his own. Because he, too, felt that a “noble form” is
what theatre is about, after all. And this is also what, for over a century
now, some have been feeling in the West when claiming―so
preposterously, on the surface―that by using some of the techniques
characteristic of Eastern theatre, many dramatic masterpieces of the West
would come much closer to their original productions. Like anything else
that is sacred, a sacred theatre tends to be essentially one.
References
Abrams, Tevia. “Tamāshā”. In Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance,
ed. Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli (New
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993): 275-304.
24 Chapter One
Arnott, Peter D. Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. London

and NewYork: Routledge, 1989.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary C.
Richards. New York: Grove, 1958.
Bharata. Nāṭyaśāstra. Edited and translated by Manomohan Ghosh.
Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 2007.
Brandon, James R. Theatre in Southeast Asia. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1967.
Clark, David R. W. B. Yeats and the Theatre of Desolate Reality. Dublin:
The Dolmen Press, 1965.
Craig, Edward G. On the Art of the Theatre. London: Heinemann, 1957.
Flannery, James W. W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early
Abbey Theatre in Theory and in Practice. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1976.
Gargi, Balwant. Theatre in India. New York: Theatre Art Books, 1962.
Inoura, Yoshinobu, and Toshio Kawatake. The Traditional Theater of
Japan. Warren: Floating World Editions, 1981.
Linthicum, Marie C. Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Nathan, Leonard E. The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats: Figures in
a Dance. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to
Contemporary Pluralism. Leiden: Brill, 1990.
Pronko, Leonard C. Theater East and West: Perspectives toward a Total
Theater. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California
Press, 1974.
Qamber, Akhtar. Yeats and the Noh. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill,
1974.
Richmond, Farley P. “Characteristics of Sanskrit Theatre and Drama”. In
Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, ed. Farley P. Richmond,
Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli (New Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1993): 33-85.
―. “Kūṭiyāṭṭam”. In Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, ed.
Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli (New
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993): 87-117.
Scott, Adolphe C. The Classical Theatre of China. Mineola, New York:
Dover Publications, 2001.
Sein, Kenneth, and Joseph A. Withey. The Great Po Sein: A Chronicle of
the Burmese Theater. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1965.
Sharp, William. “W. B. Yeats: A Poet Not in the Theater”. Tulane Drama
Review 4, (1959): 70-82.
Stucki, Yasuko. “Yeats’s Drama and the Nō: A Comparative Study in

Dramatic Theories”. Modern Drama 9, no.1 (1966): 101-122.
Taylor, Richard. The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese
Nō. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.
Thorndike, Ashley H. Shakespeare’s Theater. New York: Macmillan,
1960.
Ure, Peter. Yeats the Playwright. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
Walcot, Peter. Greek Drama in Its Theatrical and Social Context. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1976.
Yeats, William B. Ideas of Good and Evil. London and Stratford-upon-
Avon: A. H. Bullen, 1903.
―. Preface to William B. Yeats, Plays for an Irish Theatre. London and
Stratford-upon-Avon: A. H. Bullen, 1911.
―. Introduction to Ernest F. Fenollosa, Certain Noble Plays of Japan, ed.
by Ezra Pound. County Dublin: Dundrum, 1916.
―. Four Plays for Dancers. New York: Macmillan, 1921.
―. Plays and Controversies. London: Macmillan, 1923.
―. Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. London:
Oxford University Press, 1940.
―. The Letters of William Butler Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade. London:
Rupert Hart Davis, 1954.
―. Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1962.
―. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Russell K.
Alspach with Catharine C. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
―. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Vol. II: The Plays, ed. by David
R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. New York: Scribners, 2001.
Yeats, William B., and Thomas S. Moore. W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge
Moore, Their Correspondence 1901-1937. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1953.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance &
Structure. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984.
―. Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
―. “Religious and Civic Festivals: Early drama and theatre in context”. In
Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary J. Williams, and Carol F.
Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York and
London: Routledge, 2006): 53-84.
26 Chapter One
Notes
1
Note that here, too, any democratization worth its salt has to proceed from above;
otherwise, it is mere barbarization.
2
His early miracle plays, as he himself called them―with no historical
implications from Christian theatre, but rather expressing their supernatural,
epiphanic character―are an obvious case in point. Yeats also saw some of the
experiments of the symbolist Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris (staging even Sanskrit
plays) which influenced his Abbey Theatre. Finally, the impact of E. Gordon Craig
will be mentioned more than once in this chapter.
3
Among the various reductive interpretations of Yeats's interest in nō, the most
pronounced is possibly the one claiming the spiritist in him was simply attracted to
the many ghosts of (some of) its plays.
4
I can refer in the matter especially to Qamber 1974 and Taylor 1976.
5
True enough, in nō we also find the matsubame, the painted pine backdrop, but
besides its being the only regular stage decoration, its function is probably highly
emblematic, standing in fact for the famous Yogo pine tree at the Kasuga shrine in
Nara, under which the god of the shrine was seen dancing in the form of an old
man (Ortolani 1990, 138).
6
This is very much like nō, where a number of planks assembled in a particular
way stands for a boat, but if put together differently, they become a chariot, or else
a porch, if combined in yet a third way.
7
Nāṭyaśāstra, Chapter 17.
8
An instance of shared stage conventions is the way to indicate a long journey. For
traditional theatre we can take the Nāṭyaśāstra (14.17), which instructs the actor to
walk excessively within a given area. Compare, in Yeats, going around the stage to
represent a (continuation of the) journey (e.g., The Dreaming of the Bones).
9
This is so even when a play deals with a historical or quasi-historical subject, as
happens in nāṭya, kabuki and part of Southeast Asia theatre. A good example in
Yeats is The Dreaming of the Bones, where characters are in fact symbolical
embodiments of directions in the history of Ireland and modern civilization (Clark
1965, 56). Other examples include The King and the Great Clock Tower (1934)
and A Full Moon in March (1935), where, as noted by Ure (1963, 163), the
personages function as projections of the fable's meanings, simulacra of human
forms, with no individuality and no names, except ritual ones.
10
The outside influence, in Yeatsʾs case, would have been nō. However, not only,
as already stressed, do his experiments antedate his first contact with the Japanese
form, but they even, once contact had occurred, remained of a very textual nature.
The Japanese dancer Michio Ito was the closest Yeats came to experience for a
visual reconstruction, while he had none of the auditive dimension of nō.
11
Yeats probably spent more time re-writing than writing his plays, always in
search of a more accomplished expression of his growing dramatic vision.
12
In The Cat and the Moon (1917) the First Musician also plays the saint. Greek
theatre (Arnott 1989, 166) was also familiar―and Indian kūṭiyāṭṭam still is―with
the less common practice of, conversely, having several actors playing one
character. In either case, it is always the character that matters.
13
An opposite instance is Thai khon, where the heavy make-up was in time
formalized into masks.
14
Ever since R. Pischel's work, there has been an undying, however generally
disqualified, minority of scholars advocating the hypothesis that classical Sanskrit
theatre (nāṭya) sprang from puppet theatre.
15
Compare Yeats: “I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the
actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are
holding down violence or madness – 'down Hysterica passio'. All depends on the
completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath” (Yeats
1940, 86).
16
Occasionally, the mudrās can be used in an obviously mimetic way, as in South
Indian ayyappan tiyatta.
17
In the case of verse plays, a major contributor to a strikingly non-realistic diction
is certainly the meter. Both Greek and Sanskrit drama made use of various metrical
patterns to express different moods. In his “nō-plays”, in particular, Yeats, too,
used a variety of meters to give word to, as classified by L. Nathan, three basic
states of being: the choric, the heroic, and the supernatural (Nathan 1965, 229-
231). Besides, Yeats's rhythmic dialogues (e.g., in The Cat and the Moon) often
echo the stychomythic tradition of Greek theatre.
18
As for the audience's reactions, suffice it to mention that At the Hawk's Well did
not fail to impress, for its stylizations, even the highbrow Eliot, present at the 1916
premiere.
19
Here too, as we repeatedly find in traditional theatre―as well as in Yeats and
Craig's theories―during the performance of one actor the others stand still. This
convention of concentration and intensification exists in nō, too, and it cannot be
accidental that the stylization is also present in Japanese cartoons, unlike the
realistic, Western Disney tradition, where everybody moves all the time.
20
This “textualization” of songs stands in sharp contrast to the traditional
possibility of using them for their musical quality alone, sometimes to a complete
annihilation of word meaning (e.g., the dhruvā songs in Indian nāṭya).
21
Unlike in word-centered Yeats, we have just seen this (has) presented no
problem to traditional theatre. We have good reason to believe that even in the
logocentric Greek theatre, understanding the words might have been obstructed by
the music, including the actor's way of reciting/chanting the lines.
22
Note again the keywords to Yeats's conception of the theatre: ritual, faith.
23
Rabinal Archi, for instance, is still performed in Mexico and has generally been
accepted as a form offering some hints of what Mayan drama might have been like
before the Spanish. The audience watches from all four sides (in some other
traditional forms the audience takes three sides―also at the premiere of At the
Hawk's Well (see Yeats 1921, 87)―or two―as in today's nō). There are lengthy
solo speeches, no realistic dialogue, and never in a conversational tone; the main
characters narrate past events rather than re-enacting them in the dramatic present
28 Chapter One
(also a nō feature), a stage assistant brings and carries away the propsand there is
plenty of stylization (Zarrilli 2006, 70).
CHAPTER TWO
STRATEGIES OF SOCIAL CRITICISM

IN THE PLAYS OF HAROLD PINTER
AND DAVID HARE
IGOR PETROVIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF NIŠ
1. Introduction
The careers of Harold Pinter and David Hare are related in a peculiar
way. In his book Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, the seventeen years
younger Hare mentions that he admired Pinter’s works as a school boy,
and remembers the letter he wrote to Pinter at the time, expressing the love
he cherished for his plays (Hare 2005, 172-3). The respect remained and
grew, and in the following decades became mutual. Hare wrote the
introduction to Pinter’s last play Celebration and, on the evening of 7
December 2005, he had the honour to introduce the Channel 4 television
broadcast of Pinter’s Nobel Lecture “Art, Truth and Politics”, which has
rapidly become a “manifesto” for numerous politically and socially
engaged artists in the first years of the new millennium. In 2011, Hare was
awarded the PEN Pinter Prize as a “British writer who casts an
‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world” (BBC News 2011),
something Pinter had been praised for as well. It is, however, important to
note that, despite close personal contacts, in terms of style, form and
language, Pinter and Hare evolved as writers of distinctly dissimilar plays.
Hare has been typically interested in topical social and political issues and
events, sometimes resorting to the use of documentary techniques in his
plays. On the other hand, Pinter’s works are enigmatic, ambiguous, and
full of symbols, archetypal depths and idiosyncratic linguistic
complexities. They are not limited to any specific location and time, and
as such are open to a broader range of interpretations. These differences
30 Chapter Two
indicate that, as internationally recognized political playwrights, Pinter

and Hare developed different strategies of social and political criticism. In
the current cultural climate, characterized by a tendency to prioritize
entertainment and marginalize the true critical potential of art, it is
important to identify and delineate the differences in their strategies in
order to examine their respective critical efficiency.
It is a fortunate fact that Pinter and Hare offer at least vague theoretical
frameworks for the interpretation of their works. Both authors wrote
numerous essays, articles and letters, and gave countless speeches and
interviews, many of which were eventually collected and published and
are widely used by scholars because they contain useful guidelines for
analysing their plays. For example, in his book Obedience, Struggle and
Revolt, David Hare writes that his playwriting career was based on several
principles. Firstly, he claims that a work of art should have a specific
social purpose, which can be achieved by combining fiction with fact.
Next, he states that it is important for the author to distance himself from
the issue he is dealing with in order to achieve the highest possible level of
objectivity and authenticity. Equally significant, he writes, is the author’s
neutrality when it comes to defining the target audience. He strongly
criticizes agitprop theatre, which specifically addressed the working
classes (Hare 2005, 27-31). Pinter, unlike Hare, never had the tendency to
impose himself as a theoretician or a playwriting authority. In the texts
included in Various Voices (Pinter 2005b), there are no explicit
recommendations similar to those Hare gives in his essays and speeches.
Nevertheless, after reading the extensive corpus of Pinter’s nondramatic
texts, written over several decades, it is possible to identify two basic
principles which represent the foundation of his playwriting. The first is
his refusal to tailor his plays to the taste and expectations of the audience,
producers or directors. The second, foreshadowed by the opening text of
Various Voices, written as early as 1950 and entitled “A Note on
Shakespeare”1, is his inclination towards Shakespearean universality and
timelessness, which characterize his works.
A reading of Harold Pinter‘s and David Hare’s plays in the light of
their own principles would be quite revealing and relevant for the purpose
of identifying the authors’ specific critical strategies. Only then would it
be possible to determine to what extent they remained true to their own
stated convictions and how successfully they employed these in their
plays. It would also reveal which of the two strategies of social criticism is
more effective, considering their common goal – to reach the truth about
burning social and political issues and communicate it in the best possible
way. Naturally, such a task requires a comparative analysis of Pinter’s and
Strategies of Social Criticism in the Plays of Pinter and Hare 31
Hare’s works. It is, however, not easy to determine which plays would be
meaningful to compare, not only because of their different stylistic
features and idiosyncrasies. For instance, their chronologically close plays
are thematically very distant. In the 1980s, at the time when Hare’s plays
could hardly be seen as politically engaged and when he was the least
productive, judging by the number of plays and screenplays written
between 1980 and 1990, Pinter entered his so-called “openly political”
phase. It coincided with his intensified social and political activism, and in
that period he wrote some of his best known engaged plays. On the other
hand, in the post 9/11 era, when Hare’s interest expanded from local to
international affairs, and when he wrote some of his most frequently
performed and internationally recognized works, Pinter had already
decided to end his playwriting career and dedicate his efforts solely to
political activism. Nevertheless, in spite of these divergences, it is possible
to examine and compare plays by Pinter and Hare that reflect their
responses to the same political issues and events that concerned them,
such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
2. Plays Dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In his own words, Hare’s interest in the Israeli-Palestinian issue came
from his private life, i.e. being married to a woman of Jewish origin
(Nicole Farhi). The result of this concern was Hare’s journey to Israel,
Gaza and the West Bank in November 1997, as part of an ambitious
project commissioned by Elyse Dodgson, Head of the International
Department and International Director at the Royal Court Theatre in
London, who had an idea to appoint three playwrights, one Palestinian,
one Israeli and one British, to produce a play dealing with the British
Mandate in Palestine between 1922 and 1948. Upon his return to London,
Hare wrote Via Dolorosa (1998), his first play dedicated to the Israeli-
Palestinian issue. It was written as a monologue, but interestingly, instead
of dealing with the British mandate in Palestine as was intended by the
project he was commissioned to complete, it was a mere portrayal of
Hare’s experiences and observations during the journey. Another surprise
was Hare’s decision to perform the monologue himself, instead of
employing actors, which was a new moment in his theatre career. During
1998 and 1999 Via Dolorosa was performed not only in Britain, but also
on Broadway, where it proved to be so successful that it moved from stage
to television and was broadcast on BBC and PBS. Having in mind the new
moments and “the sudden turn in [his] career which proved to be
32 Chapter Two
interesting” (Hare 1999, xi) (the expansion of Hare’s interest from local
concerns to international topics and affairs), Hare decided to publish his
experiences, impressions and reflections related to the production of Via
Dolorosa in a book called Acting Up: A Diary.
It is unfortunate that he did not meet the expectations of the project.
Instead of giving an objective account of the role that Great Britain played
in the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hare wrote a play which,
in view of its content and the author’s attitude towards the subject,
strongly resembles a travelogue. Hare places his observations of the
Middle East in the context of earlier literary accounts of journeys to Israel,
quoting Herman Melville’s and Arthur Koestler’s impressions of
Jerusalem. Melville, he reminds us, wrote that “[T]he air over Jerusalem is
saturated with prayers and dreams” (Hare 1998, 8), while Koestler
observed that the rocks of Jerusalem “have seen more holy murder, rape
and plunder than any other place on earth.” Hare, on his part, describes it
as a dirty and gloomy city. However, the tone is very different when it
comes to the state of Israel. Hare compares it with the United States and
says that entering Tel Aviv, he had a feeling he was in California, while
travelling from Israel to the Gaza Strip was like “moving from California
into Bangladesh” (Ibid, 24-5).” Hare describes the members of the two
nations in a similarly slanted manner. For instance, he reports the words of
a British humanitarian worker in Gaza who said that Palestinians are
people who always want things to fail and are happy when it happens. By
contrast, in Acting Up, Hare does not conceal the fact that he was careful
not to insult the Jewish community in Britain and the United States with
Via Dolorosa. He states that he is aware of the influence the Jewish people
have in theatre2, and that it is, for example, very risky to book a play on
Friday, the day when Jewish audiences do not go to the theatre. In short,
Hare openly says that he is afraid that the success of his play largely relies
on the Jewish theatre-going community, in both Great Britain and the
United States. This may also be why he approaches the Israeli-Palestinian
issue as a topic most people are tired of, since it has been in focus of
global public debate for decades, although he never mentions the roots of
the conflict, i.e. the question of sovereignty over the land he is visiting.
Also, he avoids comparing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to similar issues
in other parts of the world, except for occasionally referring to the
deteriorating situation in Serbia, at the time, which culminated in the
bombing of the country by NATO. He, for instance, fails to draw a parallel
between the situation in the Middle East and that in Northern Ireland,
which is a topic he should be familiar with. The greatest weakness of Via
Dolorosa, however, is the author’s silence about the role of Great Britain
in the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, namely, the Balfour

Declaration of 1917 and the British Mandate for Palestine commissioned
by the League of Nations in 1922. Hare’s silence on this issue is even
more shocking since he was commissioned by The Royal Court Theatre to
produce a play dealing precisely with this period, i.e. the British
administration of Palestine between 1922 and 1948. He failed to do so,
without any explanation, thus leaving his decision open to various critical
interpretations.
A decade later, Hare returned once more to the Israeli-Palestinian
issue. His monologue Wall, originally published in The New York Review
of Books on 30 April 2009, deals with the gigantic concrete barrier which
Israel is currently building in the West Bank, isolating 23,000 Palestinian
people from their possessions. Hare compares it to the Berlin wall, but
with one important difference, saying that, “The Berlin Wall was built to
keep people in. This one, they say, is being built to keep people out” (Hare
2009). For Hare, the Israeli West Bank barrier is a symbol of deep division
between the two peoples, which is reflected in the terminology each of
them use to describe it, because “[the] Israelis call it the gader
ha’harfrada, which in Hebrew means ‘separation fence’. The Palestinians
don’t call it that. Not at all. They call it jidar al-fasl al-’unsuri, which in
Arabic means ‘racial segregation wall’” (Ibid). After a brief reminder of
the alleged causes that led to the building of the wall, Hare lists some
shocking facts about its size and scope and the funds spent on its erection.
Even more shocking are the environmental consequences of its
construction for the Palestinian side, evident in the number of trees which
have been cut thus far, thousands of acres of confiscated land, and
destroyed greenhouses and irrigation pipes. Apart from creating numerous
environmental problems, the barrier will also leave thousands of people
without their primary source of income and subsistence. Hare appears to
be more critical of the Israeli side than in the previous play, judging by his
attitude towards the building of the West Bank barrier and the long-term
consequences of its construction. He mentions the fact that the
International Court of Justice issued a ruling that “the construction of the
wall, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law”
(International Court of Justice 2004). However, in other respects, the
monologue shares most of the characteristics of Hare’s previous play
dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It has Via Dolorosa’s travelogue
quality, since once again Hare assumes the attitude of a distanced and
omniscient narrator who comes from a more civilized part of the world.
Also, as in the previous play, he is completely silent on the British role in
creating the current situation in the Middle East.
34 Chapter Two
Harold Pinter, on the other hand, never wrote a play dealing directly
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, unlike Hare, he was a
committed activist for the rights of the Palestinian people, although he
came from a Jewish family himself. He was a prominent member of the
interest group Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which opposes Israel’s
current policy towards Palestine, especially the occupied regions of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He was also involved with the association
Independent Jewish Voices, among whose signatories was David Hare’s
wife, and was the patron of the Russell Tribunal, which presented its
report on Palestine to the UN in 2012. But although none of Pinter’s plays
directly addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this does not mean that
none of them can be related to this decades-long problem. For example,
Mountain Language can easily be interpreted in terms of the treatment of
Palestinian civilians by the Israeli forces. Although it is commonly
speculated that Pinter wrote the play as a response to his visit to Turkey in
the 1980s, where he witnessed the mistreatment of the Kurdish minority
and the destruction of their culture and language, the plot of Mountain
Language is not limited to this particular subject. Pinter himself confirmed
this in a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1988:
[T]his play is not about the Turks and the Kurds. I mean, throughout
history, many languages have been banned—the Irish have suffered, the
Welsh have suffered and Urdu and the Estonians’ language banned; the
Basques’ language was banned, you know, at various times. (Pinter 1988)
The lack of explicitly stated place and time in the play makes it
applicable to many similar situations, in both the present and the past. In
Mountain Language, Pinter managed to depict the essence of the
relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, which makes this
play quite relevant for understanding the division of roles in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. So, the comparison of Hare’s plays about Israel and
Palestine to Pinter’s Mountain Language reveals a paradox. Instead of
giving a valid, documented account of the actual circumstances in the
Middle East, Hare was silent on a number of crucial points, not only on
the role his country played in the area, but also on the issues of cultural
repression and bureaucratic torture. This is where Pinter’s play is far more
informative, revealing and critical. For instance, Pinter’s image of women
standing in line in front of a prison where their sons and husbands are held
without trial or valid explanation can be seen today not only in Turkey and
Palestine, but also in numerous other areas of conflict in different parts of
the world.
3. Plays Dealing with the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

The same paradox appears in the plays that deal with the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, as in the case of Israel and Palestine, David
Hare dealt with these wars in two plays, Stuff Happens (2004) and The
Vertical Hour (2006). Stuff Happens can be viewed as a semi-
documentary. Its title was derived from Donald Rumsfeld’s recorded
comment on the looting in Baghdad given in response to the Iraq war
(Rumsfeld 2003), and the characters are politicians who were actually
involved in its escalation. Some of the dialogues, however, are fictional,
although Hare states that they are not “knowingly untrue” (Hare 2004,
author’s note), leaving space for speculation about his sources. Typically
for Hare’s technique, in this play, too, in a crowd of ruthless and
manipulative politicians, there is one politician who is morally superior to
others. This is Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State. To this day
it remains unclear why he was portrayed as “a more heroic figure of
resistance than he deserves” (The Guardian 2004). Although Hare
presents him as an official who is aware of the absurdity and questionable
legality of G.W. Bush’s actions and decisions, Powell does not do much to
prevent them3.
While the protagonists of Stuff Happens are direct participants in the
decision to start the military intervention in Iraq, The Vertical Hour deals
with the consequences of this war on a personal level, through a story
about Nadia Blye, a professor at Yale and former correspondent from the
civil war in Yugoslavia. What both plays have in common, however, are
the characters who try to rationalize the war and present it as a
humanitarian intervention. In The Vertical Hour, such a character is Nadia
Blye. Her polar opposite is Oliver, her partner’s father, an elderly
physician who sticks to his leftist attitudes formed during the sixties and
the Vietnam War. For him, the war in Iraq is a criminal act and an illegal
invasion of a sovereign country, while for Nadia, it is a liberation mission
aimed towards the emancipation and democratisation of the Iraqi people.
Nadia’s rhetoric is typical of the official US mainstream media, while
Oliver is presented as an independent intellectual whose opinions are not
affected by propaganda. The Vertical Hour does not diverge from Hare’s
well-known playwriting pattern, with attention focused on the influence of
global socio-political events on the private lives of ordinary people. In that
respect it resembles Plenty, one of his early plays, in which Hare
investigates the impact of World War Two on the life of Susan Traherne, a
former secret agent. Nevertheless, special attention should be paid to the
way Hare depicts the characters of Nadia and Oliver. It is quite clear that
36 Chapter Two
his intention was to depict them as typical representatives of two different

cultures and two opposed views on the issue of the legality of the Iraq war
and its official justifications, a divergence which has polarized the entire
planet. Nadia is American, and as such, she is presented as a quintessential
representative of her cultural milieu. She supports the war using the
official US rhetoric, without questioning its legality, justification or the
consequences of such an action. By contrast, Oliver is presented as a
typical British gentleman (or rather represents Hare’s personal view of
him), a well-read intellectual who discusses every issue calmly and
objectively. However, as was the case with his plays dealing with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hare once again overlooks some key aspects of
the situation, such as the involvement of Great Britain in the Iraq war.
Reading The Vertical Hour, it is possible to get a false impression that
only US troops are involved in the war. It is worth remembering that this
may be so because Hare himself at one point spoke in support of the war
in Afghanistan, for the same reasons Nadia Blye gives in the play. His
criticism of US foreign policy came later:
Against the opinion of many of my closest friends, I believed in the

correctness of the first American intervention in Afghanistan because its
administration, in a genuine state of shock, promised that it would
henceforth be interested not just in defending the personal safety of those
born into the world’s richest nations, but in developing some more
enlightened attitude to its poorest. (Hare 2005, 196)
By 2001, Harold Pinter had already decided to give up playwriting and

concentrate solely on civic activism, which was, apart from poetry, his
main occupation until the day he died. However, as was the case with
Mountain Language, the archetypal quality of his earlier plays opens up
the potential for interpretation in the light of new global circumstances. At
least two of his plays, One for the Road (1984) and Ira (1991), contain
scenes which are shockingly similar to the images and reports from war-
torn Afghanistan and Iraq, although they were written many years before
those conflicts occurred. The two plays share similar imagery and, as a
matter of fact, the latter can be regarded as a product of Pinter’s growing
tendency towards minimalism and seen as a kind of a “distilled” version of
One for the Road. At the time it was written, during the Gulf War of 1990-
91, and the initial sparks of the forthcoming civil war in Yugoslavia, the
issue of secret prisons and political prisoners was once again in the
spotlight, and it is possible that Pinter felt an urge to react to the new
situation. The setting of the play The New World Order is typically
Pinteresque: a room without windows and with a chair in the middle. An
unnamed prisoner is tied to the chair while two tormentors, Des and
Lionel, identified only by their names and nothing else, describe the ways
they are going to torture him. Unlike in One for the Road, in which the
identity of the prisoner is explicitly stated (Victor is an intellectual
imprisoned for political reasons), the identity of the victim in The New
World Order is deliberately left unclear:
LIONEL Who is this cunt anyway? What is he, some kind of peasant—
or a lecturer in theology?
DES He’s a lecturer in fucking peasant theology4. (Pinter 2005, 273)
It is not only the prisoner’s identity that Pinter concealed. Unlike in the
former play, where it was clear that Victor was imprisoned by the
members of the establishment military forces, it is unknown who Des and
Lionel are and for whom they work. This is Pinter’s way of adding
archetypal depth to his plays, because the two torturers might be members
of the official state structures, but also representatives of a paramilitary
formation or a foreign interventionist army, because it is even unknown
whether the victim and his tormentors speak the same language, since he is
tied, hooded and completely silent throughout the play. This image of the
tied and hooded prisoner is the most striking structural element of the play
precisely because of its shocking similarity to the real life photographs
leaked from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, where the
members of the US army and CIA officials tortured and sodomized Iraqi
prisoners. Another hint that Pinter might have had the American
interventionist policy in mind while writing The New World Order occurs
in the closing lines of the play:
LIONEL I feel so pure.

Pause
DES Well, you’re right. You’re right to feel pure. You know why?
LIONEL Why?
DES Because you’re keeping the world clean for democracy. (Ibid,
277)
4. Identification of Pinter’s and Hare’s Strategies

of Social Criticism
Having considered how the two political playwrights approached the
same political issues in their plays, it is useful to compare their dramatic
achievements with the principles of playwriting stated in their nondramatic
works, their essays, lectures or speeches. As already stated, the chief
38 Chapter Two
principles of David Hare’s strategy of social criticism are combining facts

with fiction, and distancing the author from the subject in order to achieve
the goal of complete objectivity. However, a closer scrutiny of Hare’s
plays leads to the conclusion that he disregards his own principles in some
situations. In Via Dolorosa and The Wall he completely overlooks the
British role in the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in spite of
the fact that he was commissioned to write a play dealing precisely with
this topic. Pinter, on the other hand, very much unlike Hare, whose alleged
aspiration to reach ultimate objectivity essentially conceals his unwillingness
or lack of courage to openly criticize the questionable foreign policy of his
country, never made the same kind of compromise. He spoke
courageously (and for the pro-establishment public, outrageously) not only
in his Nobel Lecture, but also in many of his other public appearances.
Therefore, since both Pinter and Hare are internationally recognized
political playwrights, it is legitimate to raise the question of the ultimate
goals of their criticism, and the true nature of their political activism. Are
they similar, as is commonly thought, or actually quite different? Was
Pinter trying to unveil what Hare is attempting to conceal, avoid, justify
and preserve?
The answers to these questions lead to the identification of two
strategies of social criticism which are in many aspects essentially
different, even opposed, although they are commonly seen as alike.
Pinter’s strategy includes facing the audience with shocking scenes and
images, which reflect what existential reality is like for many people
throughout the world. In the plays from his early phase, such as The
Birthday Party, this shock is manifested as discomfort felt by the audience
while watching the verbal and psychological torture that Stanley, for
example, is undergoing, while in his plays written after 1983, such as One
More for the Road, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes, the shock
becomes more intense and realistic, because apart from the psychological,
Pinter also depicts the process and the consequences of physical torture.
His plays create an impression that Pinter’s intention was to face the
audience with scenes of torture and human suffering in order to awaken
their dormant and inactive conscience, or as Michael Billington points out,
“[The representation of torture and brutality], at the very least, has a
jolting effect on the lazy liberal conscience” (Billington 2009, 299).
Unlike Hare, who has always shown a tendency to present the members of
state institutions as common people “doing their job”, for whom the
audience should try to show understanding, and even feel empathy and
compassion, Pinter uses similar techniques to produce the opposite effect.
The soldiers and policemen depicted in One for the Road and Mountain
Language are also ordinary people “simply doing their jobs” in order to
feed the family, but what they do and what they say in Pinter’s plays
makes it clear that he does not want the audience to develop a
compassionate attitude towards them. The outcome of his strategy is quite
the opposite: the more routinely they do their job (Goldberg, Nicolas,
Sergeant), the more shocked the audience should be. Pinter’s typical
executors are people whose conscience is dead and who lack moral and
emotional intelligence. They arouse loathing but also raise a question:
what unexamined processes in our culture produce such inhumanity? In
that respect, Pinter’s strategy has more in common with Edward Bond and
Caryl Churchill than with Hare.5 Charles Grimes makes similar
observations, calling Pinter’s aesthetics “an assault on his audience”,
undertaken in order to “break through [the] protective buffer” (Grimes
2005, 31) that shields them from reality. Grimes explains that Pinter
wanted to bring his audience to a state of shock for a good reason, because
he considered them to be “complicit in current deployments of power and
unwilling to confront that complicity” (Ibid, 34). He assumes that Pinter
was aware that the importance of reason and common sense, as defined in
the Age of Enlightenment, was exaggerated. Therefore, in Pinter’s view,
didactic plays can hardly have a long-term effect on contemporary
audiences. For that reason, Grimes writes that “Pinter follows Bernard
Shaw in using political theatre to address the audience’s need for a new
moral self-definition”, to be achieved by “shock[ing] audiences into an
altered awareness of their true moral condition by exposing the violence
done in their name” (Ibid, 27-8). Dr Elizabeth Sakellaridou, a professor of
drama and theatre studies in the Department of English at Aristotle
University, Thessaloniki, Greece, goes one step further by claiming that
the physiological reaction of the audience is an aspect of Pinter’s
calculated strategy. Namely, she observes that each Pinter play is “a
sensory (visual) presentation of an emotional state rather than a rational
statement of an ideological position” (Sakellaridou 1989, 44). In that
sense, she finds Pinter’s strategy, based on sensual experiences and
powerful emotions, far more effective than the traditional strategies of
political theatre based on the appeal to the common sense of the
spectators.
Pinter’s strategy of shocking the audience should be compared to
David Hare’s strategy of humanizing and even reprieving the same corrupt
institutions through the character traits of some of their representatives.
This aspect of Hare’s playwriting is probably most easily visible in the
plays that are commonly called the State of the Nation trilogy: Racing
Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War
40 Chapter Two
(1993). In these plays, Hare depicted the internal functioning of three

pillars of British society, the Church, the legal system and the Labour
party, but not in order to criticize their corruptness. His aim was to show
that even in such complex and corrupt institutions, unpopular among a
large percentage of citizens, there are people with high moral standards.
Hare achieved this goal, but he failed to provide an answer to the one
crucial question: since he made it evident that those characters are fully
aware of the corruption that surrounds them, why do they continue
working for the corrupt institutions and not confront immorality more
actively? Taking into consideration both Hare’s earlier and later plays, and
his defeatist attitude towards possible positive outcomes of personal acts
of rebellion, a cogent answer would be that they decide to remain silent so
that they could “feed their families”, since any energetic act of dissent
would probably have led to their eventual dismissal from the given
institution. This is the point where Hare’s critical strategy is in direct
contrast to Pinter’s. While Pinter’s critique is aimed precisely at those who
remain silent and are satisfied with the status quo, both when it comes to
his characters and the members of his audience, whom he regarded as
accomplices in the crimes of the state, Hare indirectly supports what Pinter
fiercely opposes. Although this aspect of Hare’s strategy is most obvious
in the Trilogy, it is also detectable in the plays he wrote before and after it.
For instance, each play from his “rebel trilogy” from the 1970s (Knuckle,
Teeth’n’Smiles and Plenty) sends a message that the system, although
obviously corrupt, is indispensable and indestructible, and every act of
rebellion against it has only two possible outcomes: either the rebel’s self-
destruction or his surrender to the system as it is. Although Hare’s attitude
can be interpreted as a consequence of his early disappointment with the
leftist ideals from his youth, it remained unchanged in his maturity and in
his more recent plays. In Skylight, there is a scene in which the audience is
led to feel pity for Tom, a cruel employer, unfaithful husband and bad
father, because as an old-school capitalist he fails to find his place in a
new business environment dominated by managers and speculators. The
latest example of this aspect of Hare’s strategy is the film The Reader
(2008), based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, in which, this time as a
screenwriter, he tries to provoke a similar feeling of compassion and to
seek excuses for a woman who worked as a guard at a Nazi concentration
camp, arguing for her illiteracy as a mitigating circumstance. Although the
underlying idea of the importance of literature for personal development is
certainly honourable, there were critics who challenged the suggestion that
illiteracy could be used as justification or excuse for participation in Nazi
war crimes (Bradshaw, 2009).
5. Conclusion
To conclude, if David Hare’s critical strategy is compared to Harold
Pinter’s, it can be said that the political goals they seek to achieve by
discussing burning social and political issues are completely opposed.
While Pinter’s aim was to raise political awareness among the members of
his audience in order to make them resistant to manipulation and the
negative influence of the media and official institutions, it appears that
Hare points out the weaknesses and corruption of the system not in order
to abolish it or reform it, but to consolidate it. Although it can be claimed
that Hare is a playwright who raises complex questions about society,
instead of providing simplified answers as the authors of agitprop plays
used to do, a close examination of his plays reveals that he is mostly
satisfied with the current state of affairs and the social order of the western
world, and that his attitude towards raising the political awareness of people
and the scope of civic activism is rather conservative and pessimistic.
The roots of this opposition, however, can be found as far back as in
Ancient Greece. It can be said that Pinter’s and Hare’s critical strategies
belong to two opposed paradigms of critical thought discernible already in
Greek Philosophy. The tradition Pinter belongs to can be called Socratic6.
In the history of European philosophy, Socrates is known as a thinker who
encouraged and treasured personal ethical development, rather than loyalty
to the polis. It is commonly known that personal contribution to
community by each individual had a special place in the Ancient Greek
ethos. Judging by the available knowledge on Socrates and his philosophy,
his teaching was based on principles different from the official ones: for
him, the ultimate virtue was not blind patriotism, but loyalty to one’s own
ethics and moral principles, and the ultimate crime, in his view, was for an
individual to betray those principles. He believed that the constitution of
one’s moral integrity was rooted in the universal ethical laws that were
inscribed in every person’s being, but that because of the negative
influence of external factors, such as the official system of education, or
the official social order, these laws were often suppressed and forgotten.
Socrates’ teaching was based on the revival of those laws. However, as is
well known, his teaching was interpreted as subversive because of its
alleged negative influence on young people, and Socrates was sentenced to
death. David Hare, on the other hand, can be associated with the Platonic
tradition. Since Plato’s legacy is more often idealized than objectively
interpreted, it is first of all necessary to point to critical studies of Plato’s
philosophy which challenge the dominant perception. For example, in her
essay “Plato’s Legacy: A Revision”, Dr Lena Petrović, a professor of
42 Chapter Two
modern Anglo-American literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš,

Serbia, proposes a critical re-evaluation of Plato’s philosophical legacy,
supporting the views of J. C. Ransom that the Platonic impulse is
predatory, as well as Béla Hamvas’ argument that the ultimate goal of
Plato’s philosophy “was not to found anything, but to rescue, and not
mankind but the state, and that in doing so he corrupted the more original
spiritual traditions” (Petrović 2009, 1). In short, the key difference
between Plato’s philosophy and Socrates’ teaching lies in their ultimate
goals. While Socrates strove for a morally conscious individual equipped
with developed critical capabilities, Plato’s ideal was a stable and secure
state. This essential difference between the Socratic and Platonic legacies
is equivalent to the differences between Harold Pinter’s and David Hare’s
critical strategies. Considering his persistent efforts to raise the political
awareness of the individual, Harold Pinter’s strategy can be seen as the
continuation of the tradition founded by Socrates. This line of critical
thought is characterized by an endeavour to cultivate a critical approach to
the dominant socio-political ideology of the state, arguing for an active
civic resistance to each form of institutionalized violence. On the other
hand, Hare strongly discourages the possibility of effective resistance to
the dominant social and political paradigms by sending a message that
each attempt at individual rebellion against institutions is destined to
failure. His main concern appears to be the well-being of the state and its
supporting apparatus, i.e. the proper functioning of its institutions, which
makes him close to Plato’s philosophical heritage. Fortunately, however,
from today’s perspective, there is almost universal agreement that Plato’s
model of the ideal republic, based on social inequality and unlimited
power of the elite, greatly resembles a fascist utopia.
References
Billington, Michael. Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
Bradshaw, Peter. “The Reader (film review)”. The Guardian, Friday 2
January 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jan/02/the-reader-
kate-winslet-film.
Grimes, Charles. Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence beyond Echo. New
Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.
Bogoeva Sedlar, Ljiljana. “Charcoals or Diamonds? On Destruction of
Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in Shakespeare’s
Plays”. Facta Universitatis Vol. 3, No. 1, University of Niš, 2004: 57-
72.
Hare, David. Acting Up: A Diary. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
—. Obedience, Struggle & Revolt: Lectures on Theatre. London: Faber

and Faber, 2005.
—. Stuff Happens. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
—. Via Dolorosa and When Shall We Live. London: Faber and Faber,
1998.
—. “Wall: A Monologue”. The New York Review of Books, April 30,
2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/apr/30/wall-a-
monologue/.
Petrovic, Lena. “Plato’s Legacy: A Revision”. Facta Universitatis, Vol. 7,
No. 1, 2009: 1-17.
—. “Letter”, Times Literary Supplement, 7–13 October 1988
—. Plays Four: The New World Order. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
Pinter, Harold. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics. London: Faber and
Faber, 2005.
Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. “The Rhetoric of Evasion as Political Discourse:
Some Preliminaries on Pinter’s Political Language”, The Pinter
Review: Annual Essays, University of Tampa Press, 1989: 43-47.
“David Hare wins Pinter literary prize”, BBC News, 26 August 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14685267
“DoD News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers”, U.S.
Department of Defense, April 11, 2003.
Notes
1
Pinter’s involvement with theatre began when he toured Ireland and the English
countryside as an actor in Shakespeare’s plays in the early 1950s. This early first-
hand experience with Shakespeare strongly influenced his later work.
2
My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on the diaries and emails of Rachel
Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, was “postponed indefinitely”
in New York and Canada because of content that Jewish communities found
disturbing.
3
It is interesting that Pinter's close friend Ariel Dorfman wrote a poem, "Pablo
Picasso has Words for Colin Powell from the Other Side of Death," in which he
directly addresses the former Secretary, accusing him of actively advocating the
Iraq war.
4
The phrase “peasant theology” may refer to “liberation theology”. It is well
known that Pinter criticized the assassination of liberation theology priests in
Nicaragua and El Salvador between 1964 and 1985, dedicating a large part of his
Nobel Lecture to that issue.
5
A scene from Bond’s play Coffee (1994) shows a German Nazi soldier who sits
down for a cup of coffee after having murdered an enormous number of Jewish
44 Chapter Two
prisoners in Babi Yar. His break is interrupted by a truck full of new prisoners that
he urgently needs to kill, which makes him mad because he has not finished his
coffee yet.
6
Professor Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar’s paper “Charcoals or Diamonds? On
Destruction of Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in
Shakespeare’s Plays” points to a similar tradition, mentioning Shakespeare,
Nietzsche and Howard Barker as its prominent followers. (Bogoeva-Sedlar 2004,
57-72)
CHAPTER THREE
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PLAYS

OF DAVID MAMET:
EMPOWERING THE OTHER, RETROACTIVE
REVENGE AND ETH(N)ICAL EQUALIZATION
VESNA BRATIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF MONTENEGRO
1. Introduction
David Mamet once said that as a boy he felt his peers and the whole of
society were sending one message to him, one containing the magic words
opening the world to all the “newcomers”: “Everything will be okay if
you’ll be like me” (Kane in Bigsby 2004, 11). His second-generation
Ashkenazi parents—non-practicing secular Jews—would definitely have
agreed. It seems that their son does not: he feels a strong call of the old
religion, which is very much reflected in his books (both fiction and non-
fiction from 1997 onwards).1 Mamet rose to fame with plays featuring all
male casts in the 1970s and 1980s and is often grouped with Sam Shepard
and David Rabe because of the open misogyny and sexism of his plays. In
his Lakeboat women are notoriously called “Soft things with a hole in the
middle” (Mamet 1996a, 208). Seemingly, Mamet’s creative boat has
changed its course recently by accepting some non-male crew,2 or has it?
Mamet’s business communities are undoubtedly phallocracies. If alpha
males are ever dethroned, then it is only a case of one phallic incarnation
being replaced by another, not about jeopardizing the phallic hierarchy
itself. Order is, in fact, the only constant in a world that mercilessly
challenges and/or destroys all the old myths. So, the phallocracy itself as a
system is never questioned, but rather the inability of those who should
support it and meet its demands. Mamet “losers” have sinned against the
system and tried to question or challenge the structures, and the timeless
laws of phallic power.
46 Chapter Three
2. The Phallic (Dis)order

If one reads Mamet’s plays carefully, one will (eventually) find an
unfulfilled need for love and an existential hunger for understanding as
well as a male fear of castration and a female desire for inclusion in the
male order. There is also a universal fear of death accompanied by an
equally universal inability to communicate, an abuse of trust, manipulation
and betrayal, an impermanence to all associations and connections, as well
as a collapse in communication and human relations. The phallic order,
incarnated in the language itself is, however, never seriously disturbed.
Paradoxically enough, the defenders of the system are not limited to the
white male heterosexual community: women, homosexuals and African-
Americans are no less ready to fight for the phallic order. There are
numerous examples of this, of which I will mention only a few: Ginny
Lingk in Glengarry Glen Ross, who rightfully claims protection from the
American (patriarchal) legislation, the manipulative student Carol in
Oleanna, who benefits from her professor’s dangerous deviation from the
robust framework of patriarchal structures, and the African-American
lawyer Henry Brown in Race. Del, a homosexual man in The Cryptogram,
feels truly honored by his (fake and manipulative) initiation into a
typically male community (Mamet 1995, 68):
DEL:...I was born a city boy. (Pause.) (He displays knife) And now I’m a
Forester. (Pause.) I’m a Ranger...did you know there’s a Fraternal Group
called the Catholic Order of Foresters?
Ironically, the knife which is a material correlative of the late, but

strongly craved, initiation of a homosexual male into the world of men, is
a symbol of abuse and manipulation by another, heterosexual man who
trades phallic power surrogates in exchange for a vacant apartment.
Robert, the empty phallic centre around which the play orbits, is an
inadequate heterosexual white male, but even such a male remains a
powerful “absence” manipulating the play’s triangle of powerless
“others”. The impotent triple otherness is embodied in a child, a
homosexual and a woman, all three abandoned and betrayed. Del and
Donny (the homosexual and the woman) use the patriarchal linguistic
code, more or less successfully, while the child (John) is frustratingly
excluded from communication between the adults. Adults talk in signs
whose seriousness John can only intuitively sense and which is directly
proportional to their (un)intelligibility. In the play, populated by a variety
of types of “otherness”, the furthest from the norm (the centre) is a child
who has not yet learned that language may sometimes be the least
Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet 47
communicative tool. His exchange with Del is still marked by an attempt

to establish communication. However, this communication also develops
“independently” of what the collocutor says:
DEL: But, you see, in reality, things unfold...independent of our fears of

them.
JOHN: I don’t know what you mean.
DEL: Because we think a thing is one way does not mean that this is the
way that this thing must be.
JOHN: The blanket was torn long ago (31)
Where the degree of otherness is concerned, compared to plays with an

all-male cast, such as Lakeboat, The Cryptogram is “weaker” only than
Boston Marriage, in which all three characters on stage are female, only
one of whom is entirely heterosexual, and of the four absent characters,
only two are men. The farcical Romance, out of six male characters,
features only one “perfectly” heterosexual character, and three overt and
two closeted homosexual characters. Ironically, Romance is an all-male
cast play just as Lakeboat or the famous Glengarry Glen Ross or American
Buffalo are. All Mamet’s recent plays draw on some type of American
“otherness”, and most often this is multiple otherness. Romance deals with
sexual and ethnic/religious diversity or rather, otherness, as do, to some
extent, Boston Marriage and November. Race deals with ethnic/racial and
gender otherness, and Edmond with racial and sexual otherness.
3. “Hell is Other People”

From Oleanna onwards, “otherness” has been strengthened in Mamet’s
plays, often presented in a light which is in no way flattering. Mamet’s
plays on otherness from the beginning tend to show what he claims in his
essays:that otherness is not “the fit subject of drama.” His plays do dwell
on otherness, but not as something substantially different from the norm:
in fact, quite the opposite. A politicized otherness in a politicized theater
just as elsewhere in art is “destructive”, “self-referential” and “decadent”
(Mamar qtd. in Quin 2004, 95). Disability, race, sexual orientation and age
are, according to the playwright,
not the result of conscious choice and so do not bear on the character of
the individual. They are not the fit subject of drama, as they do not deal
with the human capacity for choice. Rather than uniting the audience in a
universal experience, they are invidious. (Ibid.)
48 Chapter Three
Mamet’s Oleanna showed how the audience cracks along morally

dubious seams when a play “appeals to a prejudice or predilection
mutually held with the audience” (Ibid.)
After the show some couples were reported to have left the theatre
angry with each other or even separately, supporting either the male or the
female character. Of course, this would not have been possible had Mamet
not been traversing the thin line between right and wrong in the context of
the then-new phenomenon of political correctness. With Oleanna, the man
in Mamet’s plays ceased to be the (only) oppressor. Mamet’s affirmation
of otherness, articulated in Edmond’s mad cry: “They’re people, too”
(Mamet 1996, 273), opens a legitimate space for an authentic response to
the existence of the other, which may not always be constructive.
Edmond’s “revelation” about African-American “humanity” is at the same
time casting off the thirty-year-old burden of prejudice and the affirmation
of the “other” through renouncing mutual differences or a kind of “negative
immunity” provided by society. The condescending understanding and
ignoring of blacks in Edmond’s previous life give way to anger; when
Edmond finally manages to see the racial other, a drive for vengeance on
the (Anglo male) “subject” arises in him. He is furious because his very
prejudice has been stifling his instinctive urges for years. “The subject”
discards the hypocritical civility that has been imposed upon him and acts
in a way that he considers belongs to the other—the African-American,
and which is more fundamentally human and natural:
Edmond: I DIDN’T FUCKING WANT TO UNDERSTAND...let him

understand me...I wanted to KILL him (Ibid.)
Although Edmond is the only killer on Mamet’s stage, he is not the

only Mamet character who considers a homicidal impulse a legitimate
way to resolve “misunderstandings” with the “other”. “Teaching” in
Mamet’s plays is often mixed with violence—a character in American
Buffalo with an indicative name (Teach) says, “The only way to teach
these people is to kill them” (Mamet 1994, 11). This is, perhaps, the final
instance of Mamet’s “pedagogy” in Oleanna. For Mamet’s white male
characters, otherness could not be initiated into their epistemological
circle, since the concepts on which their knowledge is based are rooted
deep in the phallic hierarchy.
For some time the playwright has been observing Anglo heterosexual
male fears within a frame teeming with diversity. It is no secret that
Mamet has recently been keen to recycle his old “stuff”, but sometimes he
relishes showing that he is able to manipulate new “material”. There is
something of a Wildean complacency and a desire to, as David Walsh

rightfully observes “str[ike] a chord with a middle class public” (Walsh).
However, Mamet’s recent probes into the unknown territories of
women, homosexuals and African-Americans seem to serve the moral
rehabilitation of the white male. In short, Mamet’s plays on gender, racial,
ethnic and sexual otherness are a kind of ethical leveling. Women,
African-Americans, homosexuals, the weak, the poor, those “humiliated
and insulted” in American society can take control and power in what
Mamet both implicitly and explicitly claims to be the “best possible”
version of society currently available. The phallic order, usually
represented by judicial institutions, empowers the other(s), and they
ruthlessly exploit the newly gained rights in the very same fashion as
those who belong to the norm.
4. “No One is up to Any Good”: Race

Race represents the culmination of this idea. A young, female, African
American barrister trainee and an illegal female Hispanic immigrant
(offstage) destroy a powerful, rich, middle-aged white man. The centre is
destroyed by those at the furthest margin. It is here that Mamet emphasizes
his belated epiphany: it is not the society that is corrupt and rotten, but
human nature; or as David Walsh said of Oleanna, written almost two
decades earlier, “Mamet’s version of even-handedness involves
demonstrating that no one is up to any good” (Walsh).
It sometimes appears that the white partner in the law firm, Jack,
speaking in Mamet’s voice, sounds didactic (although Christopher Bigsby,
noticing more subtle forms of didacticism in other Mamet plays mentions
Mamet’s opposition to such a definition of his own playwriting practice
(Bigsby 2004, 35)). Every time Susan questions the actions of her boss
(Jack) as possibly biased, he refers to fallible human nature:
SUSAN: You think black people are stupid?

JACK: I think all people are stupid. I don’t think blacks are exempt
(Mamet 2011, 16).
Jack tries to be “above” the racial question, to transcend it somehow,

and at the same time to keep a balance within a society based not only on
prejudices, but also on prejudices about prejudices. “Political correctness”
on matters such as race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and so on,
jeopardizes the possibility of simply dealing with things.
Humaneness, which is the basis of everything, and justice and injustice,
are further deviated from when “otherness” is ruthlessly exploited and
50 Chapter Three
turned into its opposite. Jack, as well as Oleanna’s John, is misunderstood

by his female collocutor; he is, paradoxically, a victim of the prejudice
that whites in power must not be right. His concept of the “exploitation”
of all the advantages to which people have access, regardless of their
background or gender, is nothing but Mamet’s view of fallible human
nature paraphrased:
You tell me that equally, you might not exploit being black? Or that any
human being whatever might not, when pressed, exploit whatever
momentary advantage he or she possessed (Ibid., 47).
Jack champions the same view earlier, this time breaking the gender,
age and status stereotypes:
I’ll tell you what I think. I think that women. Just like men. In the main,
being self-interested, will exploit every advantage they may have. Chief
among theirs, youth and beauty. Just as will men, who possess the
advantages of being old and rich (Ibid., 18).
The play seems to point to a shift in the public perception of race. It is,
however, still tainted by hypocrisy and prejudice. Henry and Jack reflect
on popular attitudes and fears and reconstruct the possible outcome of the
case. Prejudices about prejudice have become the hypocritical basis of the
order itself. In such an atmosphere, truth loses its function and meaning—
it is important how things might appear or how they can be presented and
understood, not what the things really are. Truth and humaneness lose.
Justice is a matter of “the calendar” as is articulated by Henry, Jack’s
(African American) partner in their law firm:
Fifty years ago. You’re white? Same case. Same facts. You’re innocent
(Ibid., 9).
Susan feels the need for revenge and the affirmation of her own belief
that structural racism remains in supposedly prejudice-free transactions
(Ibid., 59). Her private war will destroy an innocent man. Gender and
racial “others” take over the active (subject) role and destroy a
representative of the privileged norm. By introducing a difference between
feeling shame as a psychological (and somewhat metaphysical) category
and guilt, which is a legal concept, Mamet tries to transcend the “petty”
issues of gender and race and speak about humans in general and his
newly acquired understanding of how pitiably corrupt we all are.
Despite the insight which the play offers (“all people want to confess”,
“all people feel shame” (Ibid., 46)) the dialogue is still “intransitive” and
the communication thwarted, while the gap between law and justice is
menacingly huge. The play seems to be hermetically enclosed between
Henry’s (African-American male) elaboration of the prejudice of the
whites against the blacks at the beginning and Susan’s simple (African-
American female) prejudice-verdict at the end (“Because the white man,
he was guilty” (Ibid., 64)). Two white men (Jack and Charles) are victims
here: Jack’s trust is betrayed, and Charles is convicted of raping a black
prostitute for whom he professes love and who extorts money from him.
His guilt was “proved” by digging up some dirt on him (a politically
incorrect discourse on a postcard from his student days) and a racially
inadequate “statement” from a hotel room spoken in a climax of passion,
conveniently complemented by planted evidence—sequins from the
woman’s dress left in the hotel room. In earlier Mamet plays, language
manipulated the truth in half-criminogenic and criminogenic
environments; Mamet has recently discovered that language is more
successfully and bitterly manipulated within higher social structures and
discourses—notably academic and, in particular, legal.
Each of Mamet’s losers overlooks (to their own detriment) the fact that
it is possible to underestimate an enemy positioned lower in the phallic
hierarchy. Any attempt at an “initiation” of the “other” into one’s own
ranks, through any form of empowerment (be that of knowledge, trust or
position) is endangering the order itself—it means opening Pandora’s box.
John does this with Carol more out of boastful self-confidence than
altruism or pedagogical ambitions, and Jack with Susan out of the need to
affirm his own impartiality and openness to differences. Henry, his
African-American partner, is well aware of this and highlights the
diversity of human beings, perhaps at a higher level than race:
HENRY: I don’t think we are brothers beneath the skin, over the skin, or in
any way associated with the skin (Race 37).
Reading Edmond’s words written nearly two decades before Race

(1982), it is clear that the white man is the one who feels uncomfortable in
his own skin:
EDMOND: It’s more comfortable to accept a law than question it and live
your life [...] We’ve bred the life out of ourselves. And we live in a fog.
We live in a dream (272).
52 Chapter Three
Edmond’s hatred is learned, but long suppressed. Just like the blacks,
the whites obey the imposed stereotypes of behavior, so that a black man
is capable of anything because
[...] he’s underpaid, and he can’t get a job, he’s bigger than me...he’s a
killer, he don’t care about his life, you understand, so he’ll do anything...
(Ibid.)
The white man is, at the same time, expected to “in a mess of
intellectuality wet [his] pants” (Ibid.) while suffering a (non-symbolic)
castration by a violent black man3. Jack in Race promotes both female and
African-American otherness, arguing that they both are in possession of
knowledge that white men do not possess: women know men’s intentions
just as blacks know things that no white man does (Mamet 2004, 20). This
relationship resembles that of predator-prey: black people know that the
whites will “fuck them whenever they see a chance” (Ibid.); the white
people do it because they know about African-American hatred, and the
vicious circle spins on and on. Blacks know whites and women know men
as the prey knows the hunter; the conflicts between them are perpetually
renewed through self-generating hatred, feeding on itself and growing all
the stronger.
5. “Whatever is, is Right”: An American “Romance”

It is possible to accuse Mamet of complacent condescension to the
white man from the position of the cultural center, only if we forget that he
is a member of the third generation of naturalized Americans. Mamet’s
Jewish “otherness” has taken different, more aggressive forms in his
recent works (especially those in prose). The plays of the earlier period,
according to many, Mamet’s best, touch on the subject sporadically but
with a bitterness suggesting the later, radical departure. In The Woods,
Ruth articulates her own genetically encoded fear of pogroms, and Teach
(American Buffalo) humiliates his ex-friend Ruth by mentioning the
frightening absence of choice in the Holocaust. Ruth is blamed for
inherited weakness and “ethnic” shame:
...And take those fuckers in the concentration camps. You think they went
in there by choice? [...] They were dragged in there [...] Kicking and
screaming (Mamet 1994, 73).
It is interesting that Jean Baudrillard uses the metaphor of the

Holocaust in his indictment of the postmodern condition (especially in the
USA) which deprives men and women of choice and control over their
lives and deaths alike:
What the inmates of the concentration camps were deprived of was the
very possibility of having control of their own deaths, of playing, even
gambling with their own deaths, making their deaths a sacrifice: they were
robbed of power over their own deaths. And this is what is happening to all
of us, in slow, homeopathic doses, by virtue of the very development of
our systems (Baudrillard 2010, 44).
The development of “our systems”, i.e. the (social and value) systems
of Western civilization, is still based on binary oppositions; the only thing
that has changed is a certain “mobility” within property based social
classes, which is praised by Mamet. Such mobility, in his case, is proof of
the feasibility of the American Dream, but in many other cases it also
proves quite the opposite: existential instability and anxiety, compulsive
acquisition, security and safeguarding. The society that Baudrillard called
“anorexic”, “obsessive”, and “phobic” (Ibid., 40-41) developed to the
extreme and idolized the concept of private property. Private property, not
the Jeffersonian concept of the right of every individual to seek personal
happiness is what the Constitution, the Government and the Military
protect; the categories which have recently grown close(r) to the
playwright’s heart, together with ideas around Friedman’s economy and
large corporations. Mamet shows the enthusiasm surrounding the
especially mystified and glorified third member of the “trinity” in the
television series The Unit, which is a panegyric in episodes to the Delta
Special Forces of the U.S. Army. It is clear that Mamet knows his film
audience and that commercial entertainment for the masses is no stranger
to him.
Although America and Americanness have recently become more
inclusive, and minorities protected to the point that defense turns into
attack and retroactive revenge (Race), one thing has not changed: the
society is based on the concept of oppressor-oppressed, which is basically
phallocratic. Human nature, judging by Mamet’s characters, has not
reached the point that goes beyond revenge and the abuse of newly
acquired power. When the oppressed person comes into power, they
mimic the patterns of behavior of their oppressors. This is what Carol does
in Oleanna. Suddenly gaining both eloquence and self-confidence, she
takes over John’s own “weapons”: she recognizes to whom he is in a
subordinate position in the phallic order, (the Tenure Committee) and
relentlessly attacks all his weak points until the Professor is robbed of all
the prerogatives of the patriarchal suburban paradise—a secure job, a new
54 Chapter Three
house in the suburbs and a docile wife. Carol’s gender otherness here is
just one form of her multiple “subjugation” to the Professor, which
enables her transformation into a radical feminist and makes her rape
allegations seem more valid, but the main conflict in this case concerns the
negotiation of power and influence over another human being. Carol’s
pedagogy is “repressive” (Skloot 2001, 99), as is John’s; she does not
liberate John the oppressor, but is instead herself transformed into an
advocate of the same oppressive structures, appearing in strict male
clothing, and invoking the power of the Tenure Committee, a higher
instance of male power. Although Skloot likes to read Mamet’s pedagogy
in line with Frier’s and bell hooks’ as a “liberating” pedagogy of “love”
(Ibid.), Oleanna gives absolutely no indication that such a development in
Mamet’s “teaching” is possible. It is more likely that Mamet still supports
Teach’s axiom that the only way to teach “them” (others) is to destroy
them, indeed to actually kill them.
On the other hand, there is an articulated need, never realized
successfully or on a long-term basis, for reaching out towards the Other,
for recognizing the need for and possibilities of overcoming their own
individual self and selfishness. This need is first recognized by Karen in
the corrupt film magnate Gould (Speed the Plough), then by Del (The
Cryptogram):
In trial...in adversity...(Pause.) and you can’t, you can’t go always

look...Go Looking for answers [...] In introspection [...] many times the
answer comes. In reaching out (Mamet 2001, 62).
And, finally, by the judge:
The faces. Lining the streets. [...] This man or that woman. Enemies, perhaps,
certainly no more than strangers. Reaching out (Mamet 2007, 6).
Mamet’s plays of the 1990s (Edmond, The Cryptogram, even The Old
Neighborhood) have something of tragedy within them, as does the
timeless play Faust (2004), while Boston Marriage (2002) and Romance
(2007) function as a Wildean play and a hilarious farce, respectively.
Provocation has been David Mamet’s trademark ever since Oleanna, and
political correctness his inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a kind of
travesty of his Lakeboat where the all-male cast of characters tries to hide
their vulnerability and existential loneliness behind an arsenal of curses
and insults against various forms of otherness, Romance, with all-male but
mostly homosexual characters, affirms and/or breaks stereotypes.
Homosexuals, Jews and heterosexual men are all objects, but also the
subject of stereotyping and prejudice. The central theme is a judicial

process in which the client, about whom we know only that he is an ethnic
Jew and a chiropractor, has been tried for an unknown offense.
The defense lawyer is a white Protestant; the Judge is a ridiculous,
ineffective figure with health problems, with an assistant functioning as a
(not very efficient) nurse; the eloquent prosecutor is a gay man who has
problems with his homosexual partner Bernard who, as we accidentally
learn in the course of the drama, cheated on him with the defendant while
vacationing in an exotic country. At the same time, there’s a parade
organized in the streets outside on the occasion of peace negotiations in
the Middle East.
During the trial we find out what some members of American society
think about others, what types of otherness are especially caricatured or
defended and how a gay partnership functions. What is hidden from us is
the reason for the trial, that is, the crime itself. No character is more than a
stereotypical caricature, and therefore all except Bernard are defined by
their jobs (“A man’s his job”, says Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross
(Mamet 1996b, 45)). The possibility of harmony in the world (America)
does exist, although it may be short-lived and is articulated by the Judge,
the person whose mind appears to be least stable. His authority is in
inverse proportion to the position he holds; he does not even dare claim
but only “guesses”:
I guess what I’m trying to say is this; We got caught up in the “form”, the
law, religion, nationality...uh...skin color. And then, and then miraculously,
miraculously, now and then, and by the grace of God, we are free, And see,
that, underneath. We love each other (Mamet 2007, 8).
The Judge articulates what Mamet thinks about the possibility of

human development towards mutual understanding, and that is apparently
not very coherent. If there is love, then it appears “now and then”,
sporadically – it is a rare jewel, a bonus, not a necessity. Sometimes it
feels as if Mamet would like to believe Pope’s classical “epiphany” on the
human condition, but applied to the USA: “Whatever is, is right” (Pope
1994, 79). But he is too much of a cynic and far too clever to believe so.
That is why he cannot help asking questions even though a set of
satisfactory answers is out of reach. He does not explain—he shows. There
is an element of Keatsian “negative capability” in the way he (re)presents
the world: he is highly receptive to what is going on around him, although
he cannot explain it.
The six men in Romance (2007) do not constitute a single homosocial
community, as is the case in Lakeboat; they are members of different
56 Chapter Three
communities that “feed” on prejudice despite two decades of the discourse

of political correctness. The courtroom is a place where speakers simply
modify their own idiom, in accordance with the requirements of this
discourse. If in the play preceding Romance (Faust 2004), the only four
letter word was soul, in this play Mamet again exploited to the maximum
the invective potential of his native tongue. Everything is subject to
ridicule, or at least irony: starting from religion (Christianity, Judaism or
Islam) through the common Jewish and Christian social practices and
customs, to the biologically-determined physical characteristic of a certain
race. The “religious war” between the defendant and the defense attorney
is kept out of the courtroom:
DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Christkilling, Jew, Cocksucking bastard [...]

Fuck you, greasy, hook-nosed, no-dick [...] son-of-a bitch...you rug
merchant...
DEFENDANT: Your fairytale...oooh, they rolled the stone away from the
cave [...] While the porridge cooled [...] Go back to the country club.
Drink, fuck each other’s wives, and increase the defense budget. Fuck you.
DEFENDANT: Oh. What will you do? [...] Hitch up your leather pants and
gas everybody?
DEFENSE ATTORNEY: ...You people can’t order a cheese sandwich [...]
Without mentioning the Holocaust (Race 2007, 20-21)
Still, while in the courtroom they all exercise political correctness,

except for the Judge himself who, in a fit of honesty caused by the
excessive use of drugs, thanks God for not being a Jew. Why Mamet
chooses the highest authority present in the room to utter these words is
self-evident: political correctness is no more than words—it does not
prevent or destroy prejudice: it merely sugarcoats it.
DEFENDANT: You’re not a Jew unless your mother was a Jew.

JUDGE: (Pause.) Thank you God. You do exist. There is God... (Ibid., 51)
Echoes of stereotypes which in earlier plays appear in a much darker

context are toned down by the situational comedy where the judicial
institution, as well as the serious subgenre of the courtroom, are subject to
ironic scrutiny. The racial stereotypes upon which Edmond ponders with
a man in the bar scene are here supported in the Judge’s intoxicated
philosophizing:
JUDGE: The white race is unsuited [...] to labour in that equatorial heat.
God, in His Mercy. God in His mercy, assigned this people to rule and that
to work. The darkies, in the field, bent over, singing, swinging their hips in
that rhythmic…that…that (Ibid., 37).
In addition to echoing Edmond in the eponymous play (Do you think I

am made of stone? (Mamet 1982, 37)), the Judge is one of his possible
incarnations, albeit a less curious one, staggering under the rich white
male “burden” and trying to confirm his basic humanity using Shylock’s
words:
JUDGE: Look, look, look, if you cut me, do I not bleed? (Romance 2007, 38)
In this play, Mamet is sufficiently politically incorrect to insult

everybody from the Vatican to the global Islamic community. Playing
with prejudices, he most exploits those related to Judaism, thus further
“exposing” these as empty stereotypes.
JUDGE: The question is: Was Shakespeare a Jew? [...] Or was he a normal
human being? (Ibid., 45)
Those who read Mamet’s interviews might find some of the

playwright’s own sentences quoted by the intoxicated Judge:
And that illustrates my point. That people [...] are fuckin’ basically good
(Ibid., 35).
From a comical standpoint, Romance shows what Race exposes in a

different, more poignant way, while in November (2008) Mamet leaves the
courtroom for the Oval Office, evoking various presidential scandals,
corruption and the ruthless struggle for power. The incumbent President
Charles Smith faces discouraging results in the pre-election opinion polls
but tries to win another term by relying on “people’s forgiveness” (“We’re
a forgiving people” (Mamet 2008, 9)), or to leave with as much personal
gain as possible (for example, by giving the Presidential Library to his
wife Cathy, taking money from the sale of an island to an Indian chief, or
abusing the funds for the traditional Presidential Turkey Pardon before
Thanksgiving). Charles clings desperately to the White House, trying to
exploit all the opportunities for the manipulation of American public
opinion, from “raising the panic level” (Ibid., 14), to artificial rain, which
would prevent the opposition from voting.
If in Romance Mamet failed to mention some minority groups in
America in a negative context, in November he expanded the list. This
time the targets are the Chinese and lesbians. In a comical comment on the
58 Chapter Three
latest trends among the American jet set, Mamet “sends” Ms Bernstein,
the President’s personal secretary, to China to adopt a child for her and her
same-sex partner. As is usual with Mamet, otherness is often multiple.
Ruth (American Buffalo) is a Jewish lesbian, Bernstein is a lesbian, and,
judging by her last name, probably Jewish as well. Charles’ insults derive
from racial, cultural and class stereotypes; they are an attack on political
correctness and the multiculturalism of America from the highest position
of authority.
CHARLES: Fucking chinks. They got all the time in the world...and they
don’t mind working themselves to death...Sell you the ground they walk
on, sell the various offspring of their wombs. [...] What in the world, do
you think, all these cute lil Chinese baby girls gonna do, when they grow
up, having eaten our food, learned to play the cello, bested all the white
children at math, and slurped up all the jobs, under affirmative action.
(Ibid., 17).
The president shows an equal amount of understanding towards sexual

otherness:
CHARLES: A harsh world, Bernstein, is it not...? [...] Harsh world.

Especially for you. Thus, your day, must abound with constant horrendous
disappointments, insults and betrayals. (Ibid., 38)
while at the same time taking advantage of weaknesses and imperfections

of potential voters:
[...] you’ve got to give them something to like better than the things they
like, OR something to HATE better than the things they like...You can tell
them a good IDEA, but that only works, if it lets them DO something,
which, they couldn’t, course of events, do. Like Free Love or something.
(Ibid., 42).
Charles plays on the contemporary discourse of the manipulation of the

masses, which is apparently well known to him, pretending to fall victim
of affirmative action. As is often the case with Mamet, ideas gain or lose
strength depending on the meanings the context informs them with. What
appears to be the comic insight of a half-drugged judge in Race is the
tragic fault of the white man in Edmond, while what is to become the
cause of an innocent man’s ruin in Race, is just the pathetic lament of a
white manipulator in November:
Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about my wife. We count for nothing.
We’re not human. We’re not homosexual. Or black. Or Palestinian, or deaf
[...] All we are is normal. Fuckin normal guy...(Ibid., 50)
6. Instead of a Conclusion: Subversion of the Subversive

In the plays that exploit otherness in contemporary America as well as
in the earlier anti-corporate, anti-capitalist plays of the 1970s, language is
a powerful weapon in the hands of the speaker. The plays of recent years
show another aspect that equates language with a weapon—the importance
of who uses it. Richard Roma (Glengarry Glen Ross) is a conman whose
arguments can be understood as fully plausible, even just, if one does not
know the non-linguistic context of his speech. The same goes for Charles
Smith: affirmative action may indeed turn into retroactive revenge (as is
made more clear with Race), but similarly to Roma, Charles is the least
invited to speak about it.
A variation of Teach’s (American Buffalo) definition of free enterprise
might be of help here. An American has the right to take “any (dis)course
that he sees fit […] in order to secure his honest chance to make a profit”
(Mamet 1994, 73). Discourse is, with Mamet, as neutral as weapons.
Words have “the meaning you choose to assign to” them, says Del to John
in The Cryptogram (Mamet 1995, 4). What is most important for Mamet
in this context is who assigns meaning to words and for what purpose. A
knife, warns Mamet metaphorically, can both release and kill.
Mamet defends himself from accusations of aggressive machismo with
plays in which both the norm and the “Other” are presented in a manner
calculated to provoke. His later plays underscore the exploitation of
recently acknowledged and legitimized forms of otherness through what
might be termed the retroactive revenge of minorities.
Mamet tends to “empower” others on his stage through both language
and context; what his theatrical “affirmative action” actually affirms is his
view of man in general. One of the few contemporary writers who is not
afraid to use the term “tragedy” for his plays wants us to believe that he
focuses primarily on a dramatic character as a human being, and that all
other characteristics do and must come second to this. Critically
examining the concept of political correctness, Mamet puts ethical
considerations above racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other issues.
Addressing at the same time groups as diverse as feminists, theorists of
social classes, anthropologists and philosophers, Mamet chooses
rebellious Carol in the most controversial of his plays to communicate his
perception of the human condition in contemporary America (although it
60 Chapter Three
is possible in this case to rise above the narrow concepts of local and
national) which is, essentially and exemplarily tragic:
CAROL: What has led you to this place? Not your sex. Not your race. Not
your class. YOUR OWN ACTIONS. (Mamet 1993, 63).
References
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London and New York: Verso, 2010.
Bean, Kellie. “A Few Good Men: Collusion and Violence in Oleanna.” In
Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet, Eds. Christopher C.
Hudgins and Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 109-23.
Bigsby, C. W. E. Modern American Drama, 1945-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Mamet, David. Plays: 1 (Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago,
Squirrels, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness).
London: Methuen Drama, 1994.
—. American Buffalo. New York: Grove Press; 1994.
—. November. New York: Samuel French, 2007.
—. Oleanna. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
—. Plays 2. London: Methuen Drama, 1996.
—. Plays 3. London: Methuen Drama, 1996.
—. Race, New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2011.
—. Romance. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007.
—. The Cryptogram. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man and Other Poems. Dover: Courier
Dover Publications, 1994.
Quin, Michael. “Anti-Theatricality and American Ideology: Mamet’s
Performative Realism.” In Modern American Drama. Ed. Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea Publishing House, 2004): 191-209.
Skloot, Robert. “Oleanna, or, The Play of Pedagogy.” In Gender and
Genre: Essays on David Mamet, Eds. Christopher C. Hudgins and
Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 95-107.
Walsh, David. “Writer David Mamet: Man overboard.” 31 March 2008
World Socialist Web Site 6 May 2011.
<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/03/mame-m31.html
Notes
1
Since the 1990s Mamet has increasingly been interested in Hebrew issues. The
Old Religion published in 1997 was followed by Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly
Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), and
The Wicked Son (2006), all exploring different conflicting facets of American
“Jewishness”.
2
Non-male here refers not only to women but to everyone other than heterosexual
Anglo-Saxon males
3
Edmond’s prison mate/rapist/lover at the end of the play is also black.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TALES SAM SHEPARD TELLS

ABOUT AMERICA: MEXICO
RADMILA NASTIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF KRAGUJEVAC
“You thought Mexico could hide

you – from yourself...Mexico is very harsh
on liars.”
(Shepard, 2002, 138)
1. Introduction
Sam Shepard tells many stories about America in his plays, and some
of them involve Mexico. Mexico is the setting of such early plays as La
Tourista (1967) and Seduced (1978), but reappears in his later plays, Eyes
for Consuela (1998) and The Late Henry Moss (2000), though in the last
play with a slight modification: the setting is New Mexico, the symbolic
geographical and metaphysical borderland. In these plays Mexico figures
as the topos of the unrealistic desire for escape from America, as a natural
world radically different from and opposed to the technological world of
the United States. For Americans, the possibility of escape proves to be
illusory. “You thought Mexico could hide you – from yourself...Mexico is
very harsh on liars,” (Ibid) says Amado, a character in Shepard’s Eyes for
Consuela (1998), to the self-exiled American, Henry. This sentence sums
up the theme of the play but also outlines the way Shepard constructs
Mexico as a kind of test for his insecure American protagonists.
Sam Shepard has been recognised as the all-American playwright and
public figure, the chronicler and critic of the American way of life, both
fascinated and repelled by its customs and extremities. His early interest in
anthropology has been productive for the comprehensive picture of
America emerging from his diverse opus. Apart from his knowledge of
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 63
and interest in the various aspects of modern and traditional American life,
Shepard shows a remarkable knowledge of ethnology, especially of Indian
and Mexican peoples, some of it evident in the plays dealt with in this
chapter. The correspondence between Shepard and Joseph Chaikin
between 1972-1984 reveals that Shepard owes his initial interest in the
subject to an acquaintance with Carlos Castaneda’s books, especially
concerning the way he comes to terms with death as the ultimate test of
life, his identification of the seeker for knowledge and the one who
possesses knowledge, and the insistence on the internal causes of emotions
and events (Chaikin and Shepard 1989, 8).
Castaneda was preoccupied with metaphorical journeys and the
sharpening of ways of seeing beyond physical reality. In several of his
books he described what he claimed were his own adventures with Juan
Matus, the alleged shaman who based his knowledge on ancient Mexican
wisdom and ritual. Castaneda’s experiences are summed up in the last
book he wrote before his death, his spiritual autobiography, The Active
Side of Infinity (1998). In this book he recounts his initiatory preparations,
surveyed by Juan, leading to the achievement of that inner silence required
to reach the breaking point where the person rejects everything that is not
his authentic self but is imposed from the outside. Castaneda’s Juan calls it
“foreign installation.” When the person manages to get free from this
imposition, he becomes capable of using his own dormant energies and
living a full life (Castaneda 1998, 7, 9, 103, 104, 105).
Shepard acts as a kind of shaman in his plays imagined as journeys,
obviously partly dramatizing his own experiences. His plot-lines resemble
initiation rites, and their Mexican settings are not incidental. He was called
the playwright-shaman by his colleague Jack Gelber, who described
Shepard’s plays as trips. “Not only are the characters in them on trips, for
they tell us as much, but also the shapes of the plays themselves are in the
form of trips, quests, adventures,” wrote Gelber (Gelber 1981, 46). Like a
shaman, Shepard confronts his characters with supernatural experiences
which are supposed to provide cures for their various diseases. His
technique was appropriately called by some critics “shaman dramaturgy”
(Nordman and Wickert 1998, 45). Laura J. Graham compares the rites in
Shepard’s plays with Joseph Campbell’s depiction of the rituals related to
the hero myth. She observes that in his earlier plays Shepard repeatedly
uses surrealistic elements to describe a complete journey which is
metaphorically enacted on stage, while in his later plays only the final
phase of the journey is depicted. The journey is actually an inward one, as
the protagonist moves within his inner landscapes. Shepard frequently
inverts the ultimate effects of the rites of passage so that, instead of growth
64 Chapter Four
and maturity, they end in the refusal to grow and the resulting frustration.
Though the protagonist in Shepard’s plays attempts a transition to
adulthood, it is the family and the society who thwart him, because they
are too stultified to allow change and transformation (Graham 1995,
115,116). Campbell referred to this phenomenon as characteristic of the
United States, where the frequent aim of people is to remain young and
not to grow old (Campbell 1949, 11).
2. Eyes for Consuela

The ritualistic structure is most conspicuous in Shepard’s Eyes for
Consuela. It is a dream-like play, where in the opening stage directions,
the Mexican context is suggested by a guitar heard, “in the Mexican
corrido ballad style”. It is further reinforced by the Mexican name of the
boarding-house owner, Viejo (Old Man), and the “Mexican girl Consuela”
who emerges from the nearby jungle in a kind of “dream ritual”, seen only
by her husband Amado (dear, beloved), unseen by Viejo and the American
tourist Henry (Shepard 2002, 119-121). Shepard uses the name Henry for
his protagonist in a number of plays. In so doing, he consciously or
unconsciously alludes to the long patriarchal tradition with a sharp critical
edge. The etymology of the name is “home ruler”1, and the name was
especially popular among German, French and English royalty. Leslie A.
Wade notes that Henry, in this play, at times attempts to play the role of a
patronising, patriarchal American, and even takes the prerogative of
asserting American supremacy over the Mexican characters, but ultimately
accepts Amado’s pronouncements about life in general, America and his
own crisis (Wade 2002, 272).
One underlying motif in the play is the Shakespearean preoccupation
with eyes and seeing, which goes further back to Greek drama. The world
on-stage in Shepard’s play is very much like the absurdist, non-
communicating and non-communicable world of strangers who seem to
inhabit different space and time in Harold Pinter’s plays. There are two
parallel, contrasting realities: the one seen by the natives is likened to a
“singing jungle”; the one seen by the modern American businessman
Henry is the loud nightmare. This separateness is emphasized in the stage
directions, which state: “When (Henry) passes Viejo (who is constantly
rocking in his chair) it’s as though they are in different worlds, making no
acknowledgment of each other” (Ibid, 123). The drama is about two
families, one American, one Mexican, whose male representatives are
Henry and Amado; it is told in two acts. The first act deals with Henry’s
impotent complaints and the assaults he suffers from the Mexican
characters, while in the second act Henry undergoes a ritual of reconciliation

with himself and the Mexicans, resulting in the intimation that he will
return home, and will be able to see his life with new eyes.
Speaking in the first person plural, Henry of the first act wakes up from
a sweaty nightmare in the hammock. Plagued by insects and jungle
sounds, he admits that he came to Mexico led by the desire to bring his
body and his mind in touch again, during what he intends to be his
vacation. Instead of relaxing in what is obviously a green paradise, he
continues his compulsive monologue, addressing the audience but actually
speaking to his wife. He acknowledges the growing coldness between
them, partly caused by her decision to move north, contrary to his own
alleged desire “to be in the sun” (Ibid). Listening to these lines, what
comes to mind is another play by Shepard, Operation Sidewinder, which is
also about the split between head and body and the healing/wholing
process that the focal character Mickey, half-Apache, half-Mexican,
manages to undergo successfully. This detail was shrewdly observed by
Laura J. Graham in her study of Shepard’s “vision of the mythic” (Graham
1995, 133). As if materialising out of Henry’s purpose “to come to
himself”, Amado appears behind Henry and starts following him,
allegedly with the aim of taking his blue eyes out, in order to make his
beloved, grieving wife, Consuela, happy. He had accidentally shot her
father (Viejo) in the eyes during the village fiesta (allusion to Oedipus is
perhaps not quite accidental here), and killed her with the same bullet.
While Amado pursues Henry for his “blue eyes”, the two men
exchange stories of their lives, Henry always trying to avoid the whole
truth, Amado forcing him to say it. Thus, both men become engaged in a
parallel ritual, leading to the revelation of the true causes of their
respective personal crises. Amado narrates his failed attempt at becoming
a true North American, which he tried to accomplish by fleeing to the
United States and marrying a “gringa” blonde with blue eyes. It could
have been a happy symbiosis – “She wanted my darkness. I wanted her
light”, but it never happened (Eyes for Consuela, 132). “I left a trail of
blood”, continues Amado, “I was grieving for my homeland ...Most of all
it was bleeding for—Consuela” (Ibid, 134). While the two men proceed
with their stories, Amado is in fact teaching Henry how to see properly
and become capable of saying the truth of the heart. “You don’t know
your heart”, says Amado. “Your mind is American. Like a scorpion. Love
is outside your language. You have lost this word.” “You believe nothing.
Nada” (Ibid).
Gradually, Henry begins to uncover the sadness and grief of his heart,
and Amado reassures him that his heart is coming back to him, here and
66 Chapter Four
now, while facing both the beauty and the brutality of life, embodied in
Mexico. “In America,” proceeds Amado, “everything is easy,” “until one
day ... you discover you are swimming alone at night in a deep black sea.
There is no shore. No light. No sound. You are worse than alone. You are
removed from life itself” (Ibid, 149). The problem that Amado diagnoses
is that the body and the heart have been split apart and are crying to be
reunited. That is the reason Amado himself returned to Mexico, and that is
the reason Henry has come to Mexico—to gain insight, to learn not only
how to look, but more importantly how to see. Act One of the play ends
with Henry’s assertion that this might be possible, addressed to his
invisible wife.
Act Two appears to be Henry’s exorcism, his redemption and
reconciliation through the progress he makes towards seeing and accepting
the full truth of his heart. Amado, however, instead of being only the
shaman in this ceremony, becomes himself the subject of initiation as well.
Consuela is a ghost of a dead woman and a female guide. The act begins
with Amado’s instructions to Henry how to open his eyes wide enough so
that he can gouge them and ends with Viejo presiding over Henry’s
liberation. In the meantime, Amado is shown questioning the apparently
fixed notions of “America“and “home”, while Henry narrates his dreams,
which ultimately reveal the unpleasant truth he was trying to repress. He
thought he loved his wife so much that he tried to imprison and possess
her. He cut her off from all other human contacts, removed her deep into
the country. But, unlike him, his wife knew who she was: “she belonged to
herself”, and therefore she rebelled (Ibid, 161). In response to that, Amado
maintains that the dreams are based on a lie of the past and is sorry for
Henry and his whole country, because they do not realise the basic thing
about love. “Love needs a sacrifice... Without sacrifice there is no love”
(Ibid, 165). “But I am here to deliver you”, continues Amado. “I have been
sent to you and you to me”. When Henry responds that this was not his
reason for coming to Mexico, Amado tells him that “[t]here are forces
beyond reason” (Ibid, 166). Amado picks up the passport Henry dropped,
and sees that in the photo of some years ago Henry did have blue eyes, but
now they are brown. Not being able to persuade Amado that his eyes are
not blue, Henry tries to escape from the jungle, but he only runs in a circle,
while silent Consuela watches. Henry finally turns to Consuela for help,
though her father informs him that she is just a sombra, fantasma—a
ghost. Henry’s panicky rationalism, insisting upon returning to the “known
world” of an ordinary American, the “real world” free from madness,
ghosts and sacrifice, superstitions and visions, on the eve of a millennium,
globalisation and the explosion of information, is countered by Amado’s
reminder of Henry’s blue eyes in the passport, his vulnerability and

culpability.
The symbolism of blue eyes, although they remain a powerful image in
the play, might perhaps have been developed further. It is not quite clear
what they stand for: typical North American male beauty, hope without
motive, sadness, unmotivated jealousy, the male gaze, violence and
revenge? Pulling a sky-blue silken scarf out of Henry’s bag of “valuables”
at the closing of the play might indicate that this symbol stands for hope,
“a constant blue motion” (Ibid, 182). At the height of his passion Henry,
the typical American businessman, offers a “deal”: to give up all his
“things and valuables” for what he sees as his chance of rescue. It appears
that Henry and Consuela do speak a common language after all, and that
the language in question is the language of sorrow they both share. When
Henry is grabbed by both Viejo and Amado for the “sacrifice rite”,
protesting that he will be “blind” forever, Amado simulates gouging out
his eyes with a blade. Henry follows it with his eyes, and goes through the
process of feeling the sensation of blindness. At that moment Consuela
steps in and passes judgment: “They are not blue. They have never been
blue” (Ibid, 179), thus proclaiming Henry to be one of her kind, one who
feels and suffers, who is not the patriarchal Henry of the blue-eyed master
race. Before they send Henry home in a taxi, Henry has to give up all the
material things he possesses, and thus free himself from the bonds of
materialism, as Amado has done before. Free of this obstacle, he will
return to Michigan with nothing, and will be able to see the world with
new eyes. The play closes with the previously mentioned scene of the
“constant river of blue motion” in the form of the scarf coming out of
Henry’s bag.
Viejo keeps rocking in his chair–life goes on in Mexico as if
uninterrupted. The fact that the play is an adaptation of a short story “The
Blue Bouquet”2 by the famous Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998),
may throw further light on its meaning. The narrator of this story,
implicitly a stranger staying in a boarding-house in a Latin American
country, awakes in the middle of the night covered in sweat, and jumps
from his hammock. He can hear “the breathing of the night, feminine,
enormous”. He hurries out, past the morose one-eyed owner, against his
warnings that it is dark and dangerous out there. He plunges into the
darkness, which is suddenly lit by moonlight. He savours the night “full of
leaves and insects”, “a garden of eyes”, contemplating the universe as “a
vast system of signs”. Out of the darkness a small man with a sombrero
and a machete comes out of a doorway, demanding to take out his “blue
eyes” as a present for his girlfriend who has expressed her wish to have “a
68 Chapter Four
bouquet of blue eyes”. The narrator ultimately manages to persuade the

man that his eyes are not blue, but leaves town the next day. Shepard has
borrowed several motifs from the story. His protagonist Henry also wakes
up in the middle of the night in a strange Latin American environment,
and jumps from his hammock covered with sweat. “It must be a woman”,
comments the Mexican character Viejo, on the cause of the supposed
sweaty nightmare. As in the original, Shepard’s Henry also manages to
persuade his hosts that his eyes are not blue, and is confronted with the
fact that the world consists of “a garden of eyes” or multiple points of
view. With the newly acquired knowledge of different ways of seeing, he
returns home.
3. La Turista
A ritual similar to that in Eyes for Consuela, is described in Shepard’s
play La Turista. This strange play, one of Shepard’s earliest, has an
unusual form and unusual history. When it was premiered in the American
Place Theatre in New York City in 1967, Shepard did not allow critics to
attend. It has remained a critical controversy ever since, and one of the
author’s most puzzling plays. In this play Shepard reversed the order of
the two acts so that the second act chronologically precedes the first. This
second act ends with the male protagonist Kent opting out of his
unsatisfactory American life by symbolically leaping off the stage and
onto the ramp running behind the audience right through the set wall,
leaving “a cut-out silhouette of his body in the wall” (Shepard, 1981, 298).
The first act, set in Mexico, ends with Kent’s death under the supervision
of a witchdoctor, brought about by a severe case of dysentery known
among the locals as la turista, but also, significantly, as “Montezuma’s
revenge”. It is “the colloquial term for any cases of traveller’s diarrhoea
contracted by tourists visiting Mexico. The name refers to Monctezuma II
(1466–1520), the Tlatoani (ruler) of the Aztec civilization, who was
defeated by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador”,3 and implies
revenge of the native culture against the foreign invader. At the opening of
the act we see the married couple, Salem and Kent in a Mexican hotel
discussing Mexico and Mexicans, (their dark skin etc.), in a disparaging
way. Kent has come there to “relax and disappear” (La Turista, 257) like
so many of Shepard’s Americans in various plays, but is affected by the
unpleasant disease instead, a sign that Mexico rejects him.
Characteristically for Shepard’s dramaturgy, which frequently uses the
figure of the cowboy to represent the false image of American identity,
Kent is first shown coming out of the toilet carrying a pistol on his hip.
Immediately after this funny scene, he is given a monologue in which he

complains of his home country, the USA, and its failure to immunize
people against the health hazards of foreign environments. “Everything is
so clean and pure and immaculate up there that a man doesn’t even have a
chance to build up his own immunity. They’re breeding a bunch of lily
livered weaklings up there simply by not having a little dirty water around
to toughen people up... An isolated land of purification” (Ibid, 265). The
speech is highly ironic, though the situation gradually slips into tragedy.
The Boy who has intruded upon the couple’s bedroom suggests that
“with poison you have to work from inside out”, which is the definition of
the play’s central theme and of Shepard’s major theme in general, which
underlines the belief that the sickness is inside you. Stephen J. Bottoms
observes the anthropological dimension of the ceremony performed on
Kent, which resembles other Mexican Indian traditions of male initiation
rites that transform boys to men (Bottoms 1998, 56). Immediately after the
Boy’s suggestion, a dark skinned Mayan witchdoctor and his son enter in
order to administer a traditional cure of purification from inside. The ritual
is accompanied by chanting and beating, until Kent is physically dead. He
was tested and quested by Mexico, and did not survive. His wife, however,
embraces Mexico and the young Mexican in a somewhat Mother Earth
manner.
Shepard’s biographers have observed autobiographical elements in this
initiation story, which was confirmed by Shepard’s erstwhile girl-friend
Joyce Aaron, and partly by Shepard himself. Shepard and Aaron went
together on a trip to Mexico. They travelled there by plane through a
terrible storm, which made Shepard swear he would never board a plane
again, a vow he has kept, according to Ellen Oumano, the author of one of
the most enchanting of Shepard biographies (Oumano 1986, 45). As a
consequence, they continued their journey through Mexico in dilapidated
buses and slept in shabby hotels. It took them four or five days to travel
back from Mexico City to New York City by bus. Aaron recalls being so
sick with dysentery in a hotel that she was not able to speak. Shepard
nursed her back to health and language like a baby.
Some critics, however, discovered a strong political undertone in the
play. Thus Helen Easton, one of its first reviewers, interpreted it as an
allegory of the American involvement in Vietnam. According to this
author, the two Americans named Salem and Kent allude to two
significant locations in American history, one from its early days, the other
referring to the tragic contemporary event related to the Vietnam crisis.
The Mexican boy stands for a Vietnamese, or any other boy of an
American-invaded civilization, who refuses to take a bribe. When he steps
70 Chapter Four
into the bed of the Americans, he symbolically occupies his own country.
In Part II of the play, claims Easton, we are in the US, where the American
Man has the sleeping sickness: “he doesn’t want to stay awake”. This
scene reflects the general state of a nation that did not want to see the real
truth behind its humanitarian wars (Easton 1967).4 There is also, in the
names Kent and Salem, an obvious allusion to the popular cigarette
brands, signalling the influence of popular culture on the formation of
what was supposed to be American identity. In spite of differences, all the
interpretations underline the presence in the plays of an individual and
collective quest for identity rituals, Shepard’s favourite theme.
4. Seduced
In Seduced, a later play, there is a similar situation, as well. There is a
dying (or already dead) American tycoon, Henry (Hackamore), paranoidly
self-confined in Mexico, though this time in a simulated Mexican
environment in a tall building, his own penthouse. Critics have observed
the similarity to the well-known American billionaire, Howard Hughes.
Henry is hysterically trying to clean his emaciated body of invisible dirt.
He is served by a loyal Mexican man, Raul, who is, nevertheless,
distrusted and humiliated as a member of the race in Henry’s eyes inferior
to the Americans (Shepard 2006, 235). The declining man has a last wish:
to see the fabulous women with whom he has had affairs. So Miami and
Luna appear, young as they once used to be. There is no sign of mutual
recognition or of any closer communication between them and the man.
Seduced as a young boy by the American Dream, Henry reinvented
himself to fit it, only to realise, ultimately, that his dream has become a
nightmare: he was “taken by the dream”, while all the time thinking he
was taking it. He has turned into “the nightmare of the nation,” the demon
they invented (Ibid, 274, 275). He has become bloodless, quite in the
power of his servant Raul, who makes him finally sign his life over to him.
Raul shoots at Henry while Henry is singing “I’m dead to the world but I
never been born”, in a parodic Christ-like attitude (Ibid, 276).
Seduced has certain affinities with one of Shepard’s major plays, Curse
of the Starving Class, first performed in 1978 (written the year before), the
same year that Seduced was written. In this play Shepard uses the term
“escape artists” (Shepard 1981, 194) for those who try to escape from their
problematic US lives to Mexico. In this play almost all the characters,
members of the same family, see Mexico as just such an escape route. The
girl Emma dreams of disappearing in Mexico like the author of The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The father of the family, Weston, wishes to
buy land in Mexico, believing that his past sins cannot touch him “down
there”. Emma imagines that her mother Ella and the lawyer Taylor “are
half way to Mexico” and has a fantasy of meeting up with them there.
Only the son, Wesley, the most emotionally starved of them all, but also
the only one who has a vision of how to transform his life for the better,
has a different wish–to go north to Alaska, the undiscovered country, the
frontier, full of possibilities. The root of the escapist fantasy lies in the
“poison” that has infected the family, referred to several times, with slight
modifications by all its members. Weston claims he is full of poison, Ella
calls it a “a curse”; it is also called “a creeping disease”. The family
disease is alienation, resulting from the refusal of its members to face their
own personal demons and then each other. It ends the moment the father,
Weston, decides to quit running away from home and stay and embrace
his family. Because his past misdemeanours do not allow him to carry out
his decision, his role is ultimately taken over by his son, who puts on his
father’s clothes and continues to act in his name (Ibid, 149-193).
In these two 1978 plays, as in the majority of his other plays, Shepard
exposes as an illusion the concept of “American identity”, represented by
the images of the cowboy, the pioneer, the farmer and the self-made man
(Madachy 2003). In Seduced, he deconstructs this image of the self-made
man, showing the American hero to be “the nightmare of the nation”.
Shepard even wrote a piece entitled “The Self-Made Man” (1996), in
which he described this type of character in more detail. He defined him as
one who has “a long-cherished notion of himself as a distinct individual;
an American entity... “The image rests on an archetype going back to the
Civil War, and even further back to nineteenth-century concepts of
Manifest Destiny and beyond that to the founding fathers (Shepard 1996,
3). In the interview with Roudané, Shepard criticised the negative role of
advertising campaigns in the formation and propagation of such false
identity images. “So we’ve always been seduced by advertising [...] We’ve
fallen into that thing, you know. So the American Dream is always this
fantasy that’s promoted through advertising. We always prefer the fantasy
over the reality” (Roudane 2002, 27). In Seduced we have Henry
Hackamore, one such character seduced by the false dream. He is
supposed to be a modern version of a founding father, but is in fact a ruin,
a pornographer and a racist, plagued by fear and full of spiritual and
emotional poison.
72 Chapter Four
5. The Late Henry Moss

The play The Late Henry Moss is set in New Mexico, which can be
seen as the borderland in Shepard’s imagery. The protagonist of the play is
again called Henry. He is a drunkard and a bully and is fashioned after
Shepard’s father. The character of the son is split in two, as in True West
and some of Shepard’s other plays. When the play opens Henry is already
dead but will reappear in flashbacks, most frequently in an embrace with
the Indian woman Conchala, “too much woman to be resisted” (Shepard
2002, 108). He engages in a dialogue with his sons focused on their dead
mother and his wife, whose memory haunts all three of them. Her husband
beat her, one son was too small to protect her, the other ran away not to
watch. Henry, too, ran as far as New Mexico–the testing ground, but did
not achieve either complete forgiveness or redemption. As is the case with
the other plays discussed here, there is no reconciliation between the
members of the family, although there is a hint of it. The female character,
Conchala, similar to Consuela from the earlier play, has a special role in
the drama, that of a spiritual guide and comforter. The play has one more
strong female character, the late wife and mother. Another significant
subsidiary character is Esteban, the kind Mexican neighbour, whose role is
that of a nourisher and sustainer. He regularly brings Henry his vegetable
soup in a green bowl, and thus belongs to the feminine and not to the
violent masculine world represented by Henry Moss. He believes that all
living things are to be fed, and for him feeding Henry is like feeding the
livestock or birds (Ibid, 85).
The last day of his life Henry Moss shows up with a lot of money,
which seems to have been his demise. He has the beautiful, robust and
strong Indian woman Conchala with him. Later they leave in a taxi and he
is never again seen alive. Esteban describes Henry as a heart-broken man,
who at moments was in such pain that he went mad and could not eat. He
also had days “when he thought the world was trying to eat him”, and days
when he thought he was “doomed“ (Ibid, 33). What he did to his wife and
his sons was the poison that ate him alive. After he has beaten his wife to
death, Henry is haunted by her eyes. They were full of grief for him, not
for her own lot. She “saw” him for what he really was – a dead man. She
emerges from the play as a compassionate mother figure, and the world
she created for her family as paradise lost. In the brothers’ reminiscences
she always kept the house clean, had meals ready, and was constantly
waiting. While they thought it was for them, they ultimately realized it
was for her husband, the love of her life. When he killed her, he in fact
killed himself. Conchala is the embodiment of the feminine. Her function
is not to bring Henry back to life, but to make his physical death easier.
The ritual she performs on him is similar to that described by Castaneda in
The Eagle’s Gift, where the women warriors teach initiates how to die for
the material world (Castaneda, 1981).
6. Conclusion
In his interview with Sam Shepard, published in The Cambridge
Companion to this author, one of the questions Michael Roudané asked
Shepard concerned the fact that “Mexico as place, as metaphor for the
mind, seems to play an important role in [his] dramas”, quoting La
Turista, Seduced, and Eyes for Consuela. “‘What is it about Mexico”,
wondered Roudané, “the air, the colours, the land, the culture, the history
– that engages you?’” Shepard’s reply gives a valuable insight into the use
of the symbolism of Mexico in his plays:
Mexico is what America should have been. Mexico still has heart. It still
has extraordinary passion; it still has a sense of family and culture, of deep,
deep roots. Some of it is awful – the poverty level, the oppression’s awful,
and stuff like that – but there are places you go in Mexico that just make
you feel like a human being. The Indian culture is what I think does it for
me. We just got back from Tulum. It really is paradise (Roudane 77).
In the same interview Shepard commented on the American Dream as

something everybody quotes but nobody comprehends:
Nobody has actually ever succinctly defined “the myth of the American
Dream.” What is the American Dream? Is it what Thomas Jefferson
proposed? Was that the American Dream? Was it what George
Washington proposed? Was it what Lincoln proposed? Was it what Martin
Luther King proposed? I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do
know that it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the
American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our
demise (Ibid, 69-70).
In his Mexic plays Shepard juxtaposes the image of Mexico (what

America should have been) with that of America and the “American
Dream”, the vague and discredited idea which nobody fully understands,
and which will, he believes, ultimately destroy the nation. Though these
plays might not be among his greatest, they do each possess a degree of
originality and contribute to the rich texture of Shepard’s overall opus,
especially with the way they render and criticize the theme of American
escapism and the cures proposed for the “disease”. The better cure,
74 Chapter Four
Shepard believes, lies in the wisdom of the ancient peoples of Mexico.

Like Castaneda, Shepard saw these peoples as much closer to nature and
its mysteries, which is forcefully expressed through the image of the
people emerging from the earth. In one of his dreams Castaneda dreamed
he was in a Mexican town waiting for Juan. The town had a market place,
and farmers brought their produce there to be sold. What fascinated him
the most was the paved road that led to it. At the entrance to the town it
went over a steep hill. Sitting on a bench and looking at the hill, he would
see the people coming to the town with their loads. But he would first see
their heads, then their entire bodies, so that it appeared to him as if they
were emerging from the earth (Carlos Castaneda 1998, 114). Indeed they
did, as does their wisdom, which was Sam Shepard’s great inspiration.
References
Bottoms J., Stephen, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (New York: Abacus,
1949).
Castaneda, Carlos, The Eagle’s Gift, (London: Penguin Books, 1982).
—. The Active Side of Infinity, (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
Easton, Helen, “In response to ‘Word of Mouth’ from the April 6, 1967
issue,” New York Review of Books, June 1, 1967.
Gelber, Jack, “The Playwright as Shaman” in Maraca, Bonnie, ed.,
American Dreams,
The Imagination of Sam Shepard, (New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications, 1981), 45-48.
Graham, Laura J., Sam Shepard, Theme, Image and the Director, (New
York: Peter Lang, 1995).
Chaikin, Joseph and Sam Shepard, Letters and Texts, 1972-1984, ed.
Barry Daniels, (New York: Nal Books, New American Library, 1989).
Madachy, Paul Seamus, “The Nightmare of the Nation:” Sam Shepard and
the Paradox of American Identity, a dissertation, (The University of
Maryland, English Department, 2003),
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/323
Maranca, Bonnie, ed., American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam
Shepard, (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1981).
Nordman, Alfred and Hartmut Wiekert, “Shamanism Vilified and
Redeemed: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock,” Contemporary Theatre
Review, Volume 8, Issue 4, 1998, 41-54.
Oumano, Ellen, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American

Dreamer, (London: W.H. Allen & Co Plc, 1986).
Paz, Octavio, “The Blue Bouquet,”
http://lisabloomfield.net/occ/193/weekly_html/bluebouquet.pdf
Roudané, Matthew, The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Shepard, Sam, Cruising Paradise, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
—. Three Plays: The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the
World Was Green, (New York: Vintage Books, 2002).
—. La Turista in Plays 2, (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
—. Seduced, in Fool for Love and Other Plays, (New York: Dial Press
Trade Paperbacks, A Division of Random House, 2006).
Wade, Leslie A., “Shepard in the 1990s,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Sam Shepard, ed. Michael Roudané, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 257-278.
Notes
1
http://www.behindthename.com/name/henry
2
Octavio Paz, “The Blue Bouquet,”
http://lisabloomfield.net/occ/193/weekly_html/bluebouquet.pdf
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler%27s_diarrhea
4
Easton responded to the article by Elizabeth Hardwicke, the first enthusiastic
critic of the play’s formal qualities, NYR, April 6, 1967.
CHAPTER FIVE
WINGS OF DESIRE:
PLEAS FOR HUMANITY IN MARK RAVENHILL’S
FAUST IS DEAD AND SARAH KANE’S CLEANSED
TIJANA MATOVIĆ
1. Introduction
In his international message on World Theatre Day in 2009, Augusto
Boal expounded his views on the significance of playwriting in the
contemporary age: “What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre
throws light on the stage of daily life” (Boal 2009). As in the argument by
John Berger, who in his seminal work Ways of Seeing stated that “[t]he
way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe”
(Berger 2008, 8), Boal reminded us of the ideological coffins that entrap
our perception and conceptualisation. The task of providing the means for
re-envisioning the hidden aspects of the intricate reality we share Boal
placed within the domain of human creativity which constitutes (dramatic)
art. His call to action runs parallel with Naomi Wallace’s idea of
playwriting being an “act of transgression” (Wallace 2008).
In this chapter, two late 20th-century plays by Mark Ravenhill and
Sarah Kane will be examined within the framework of postmodernist
thought and trauma theory, alongside Wim Wenders’s unique cinematic
and literary encapsulation of contemporary issues which coincide with the
warlike, totalitarian, and media-populated scenarios of the plays. Within
their work, the act of seeing with new eyes becomes inextricably woven
into bringing to the fore the violence, at times unbearably brutal, which
has saturated our realities, but which remains outside the acceptable levels
of artistic representation. Their work also centres on questioning the
groundwork of humanity and humanism in an environment of post-
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 77
prefixed cultures, which they attempt to shock and provoke into

uneasiness and, possibly, action.
Kane’s and Ravenhill’s dramatic techniques are most commonly
subsumed under the title in-yer-face theatre, a coinage of Alex Sierz, who
applied it to the 1990s British playwrights who exemplified in their work
the new sensibility of “producing ways of seeing that affect the wider
culture”, with a new linguistic paradigm, which emphasised this kind of
theatre’s “intensity, its deliberate relentlessness and its ruthless
commitment to extremes”1 (Sierz 2001, xiii). Although a number of
controversial labels were initially attached to Kane and Ravenhill
concerning the shocking nature of their plays, such as the New Brutalists,
the School of Smack and Sodomy, the Blut unt Sperma School (Ravenhill
2006b), neither of them readily assumed such categorisation, in order to
avoid limitations placed on their artistic authenticity and individual
progress. As Hadley pointed out,
The writers [of in-yer-face theatre] drew on theatrical legacies as diverse as

Edward Bond’s social realism, Harold Pinter’s comedy of menace, and
Peter Brook’s experiments with the work of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt
Brecht, and in some cases also developed contemporary inflections of
classical and Shakespearean themes. (Hadley 2008: 260)
Highly influenced by Edward Bond, whose play Saved (1965) was for
a time banned from the British stage on account of its provocative
depiction of the social causes of violence, Kane and Ravenhill, each in
their own manner, explored the potentials for justice and love afforded to
humankind in the contemporary world. On one occasion, Kane shared
with Ravenhill that you could “learn everything you need to know about
playwriting […] by studying Saved,” while Ravenhill admitted to
recognising and identifying with Bond’s artistically shaped “world of
listless, rootless youth, casual acts of sex and random acts of violence”
(Ravenhill 2006a). Bond’s outspoken views on the injustice permeating
the economic network of capitalist societies and its consequences found
their way into both Ravenhill’s and Kane’s oeuvres. In his study The
Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State, Bond claimed that the core
issue of all drama ought to be justice, in itself a paradoxical notion, given
that, as is the case with all human behaviour, it “is not derived from
mechanical whats but from existential whys” (Bond 2000, 66). For a
playwright, imagination should aim to be limitless in its creation of a
home for a lost humanity, which is why plays must seek to provide the
setting for the exploration of radical innocence (Bond 2000: 122). In its
pure form, radical innocence can only belong to a pre-self-conscious child
78 Chapter Five
that considers its well-being to be the well-being of the entire world, but to
tackle its representation is required if a vocabulary suitable for dealing with
the phenomena of justice and love is to be established. Mark Ravenhill’s
Faust (Faust is Dead) (1997) and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998) make
attempts at the embodiment of this notion of radical innocence, which
emerges as the only possible voice of sense-making in realities structured
as intentionally fragmented, alienating and without valid storytellers.
2. Wim Wenders’s creative vision of humanity restored

The search for the childlike, radical innocence as the source of
recuperation, which makes Ravenhill’s and Kane’s artistic worldviews
comparable, is also the leitmotif of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire,
originally produced under the title Der Himmel über Berlin. In cooperation
with Peter Handke, who contributed greatly to the poetic language of the
film (Wenders 1991, 110), Wenders wrote and directed Wings of Desire,
which came out in 1987, two years before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The
Fall marked the collapse of what was still, physically and symbolically,
keeping the world divided and simultaneously preventing its global
identification with itself—the way postmodernism, on a theoretical plane
at least, subsequently united everything in a chaotic simulation of itself.
The film opens with the images of a divided Berlin and Bruno Ganz,
playing the role of the angel Damiel, who, depicted with white wings,
observes the city from above. The narrator quotes from a poem2 Handke
composed for Wenders’s film, which opens with the following lines:
When the child was a child

it walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.
When the child was a child,

it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
(Handke 1987)
Moving away from the image of the all-seeing angel, Wenders takes us
through the unified totality of a child’s perception of the world and its
place in it. The child’s innocence, which does not divide, but envisions
spiritual wholeness in humankind, forms a prelude to the black-and-white
reality of the two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, who inhabit Berlin alongside
other angels, taking note of people’s actions and thoughts, placing
importance on sometimes unexpected parts of human existence. The
children are the only ones who can see them, though they pay no
significant attention to them, preoccupied with their own grand projects.
The two groups share an all-encompassing perception of reality, although
with angels the perception is rational, while the children grasp it in a
synesthesia of senses and emotions.
The reality in question is contemporary Berlin, a locus burdened by its
history, which we glimpse through the angels’ insight into introspective
narratives of its residents. Another locus integrated into the chaotic
crossroads Berlin had become is the circus, populated by those without
roots, whose history is never situated, and therefore provides a contrasting
paradigm to the human urge to define oneself through constancy. Marion,
a circus trapeze artist, is disenchanted with the rootless life and desires to
be tied to a place, to be at home in the world, although she realises that it
is the all-too-human fear that prevents her from immersing herself
completely in fluidity—which is reality. Her job is dangerous in its toying
with mortality and the human dread of it for the sake of entertainment,
purposefully so created by Wenders, so that “she would charm Damiel,
who was never himself in any danger of falling” (Wenders 1991: 111).
Some angels, one of them being Damiel, though safe within the Babylon
Tower of pervading comprehension, form a desire to abandon their
omniscient roles for the fleeting, yet unbearably tempting, experience of
being human. For an angel, the consequences of the transition into a
human being entail new visual and sensory spectres of existing in the
world. To see colours, to taste blood and coffee, to feel the cold and the
fearful uncertainty of not knowing but only guessing, to never again be a
self-sufficient entity—it all comes to be worthwhile. The basic premise of
Wings of Desire is that pure consciousness, an overarching rational
comprehension devoid of sensation and feeling, which bring the previous
into a chaotic state of indecipherable paradoxes, is ultimately undesirable
and worthless. Perfect salvation produces a stoppage—forever excludes
the now, and therefore everything that is life. Damiel confides in Cassiel
that he desires the “now and now and no longer forever and for eternity”
(Wings of Desire 1987). The privileges of mortality outweigh its cost,
while the symbiosis Damiel and Marion achieve in the end, which is
indefinitely deferred with the credits “to be continued…”, is also marked
by a remainder of the self—one is alone as well as together,
simultaneously rootless and rooted.
80 Chapter Five
The storyteller character in the film is suitably named Homer, who

appears in the form of an old man rummaging through the public library in
search of lost places and stories untold. His claim is that “once mankind
loses its storyteller, then it will have lost its childhood” (Wings of Desire
1987). The stories we tell, the narratives we construe, all come to shape
our cultures and the ways we interact with the world. Bond emphasised a
similar notion: “Stories structure our minds. In fact we are our story, it’s
what we live” (Bond 2000, 3). Once reality becomes disconnected from
the stories we tell about it, humanity loses its capacity to relate to itself,
and its ability to love. Ultimately, the impetus toward the radical
innocence of a child lies in the realm of love. Marion explains to Damiel,
who has become human: “We’re representing the people now. And the
whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are
deciding everyone’s game” (Wings of Desire 1987). Unity with the
dislocated self is temporarily restored, but only as a consequence of
allowing oneself to love, which is a notion woven into the fabric of both
Faust is Dead and Cleansed. All children and those in love are fallen
angels—the ones who approach the state of intense relatedness with the
other and, by doing so, redeem humankind’s sins.
Another work by Wim Wenders which will be beneficial primarily for
the analysis of Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead is his poem “The American
Dream”, published in 1984, in which Wenders expressed his views on the
manipulation of the idea of the American Dream and its consequences.
The poem begins with a quotation from a song by Bob Dylan: “All he
believes are his eyes, / And his eyes, they just tell him lies” (Wenders
2001, 123). In the visual age of hyperreality and simulacra, the eyes are
bombarded with images of what has come to constitute reality, without
referencing it at all. Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation and
simulacra, which permeate our present meaning-construction patterns,
shed light on how Wenders poetically deconstructed the nation that had
dreamt itself out of existence. Simulation is, in Baudrillard’s paradigm,
“the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”
(Baudrillard 2001, 166). Representation ceases to exist, given that reality
is no longer relatable—only a “precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard
2001, 166) remains. The unseen becomes enmeshed in the seductive layers
of simulation, which only ironically addresses humanity’s previous
attempts at narration, settling for advertisement, which is built into every
form of the massive entertainment industry. American society is,
according to Wenders, used to “everything BEING SHOWN to them” and
has thus “forgotten how to see” (Wenders 2001, 129). “Whatever the
‘American Dream’ once was,” concludes Wenders, “nobody dreams it any
more. / It’s only dreamt out loud / by the advertising industry” (Wenders
2001: 149). Such a spectacle is not a mere illusion, not something easily
unmasked, for it has exchanged roles with reality. “The spectacle cannot
be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a
product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images” (Debord
1994, 12-13), emphasised Guy Debord. “It is far better viewed as a
weltanschauung that has been actualised, translated into the material
realm—a world view transformed into an objective force” (Debord 1994,
13). It is a paradigm of interacting with the world and seeing oneself in
it—precisely the point of interest for both Ravenhill and Kane, although in
somewhat different modes.
3. The hyperreal now and the ending of a myth

in Mark Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead
Mark Ravenhill’s creative output veered toward more overt
experimentation near the end of the 1990s, while that decade had been
reserved primarily for his exploration of the contemporary British society
and its issues. Ravenhill’s Faust (Faust is Dead) (1997) was
commissioned by Nick Philippou for the Actors Touring Company, as one
of their representative radical revisions of classical works—in this case
Faust (Sierz 2001, 134). What Ravenhill did was to treat the controversial
postmodernist views on subjectivity and morality in an intertextual and
often parodic mode, thus reshaping the groundwork of the Faustian myth.
Faust is Dead is a play set in the United States of America, in the
contemporary age of pop culture, the entertainment industry, consumerism
and virtual reality. The main protagonists are Alain and Pete. Alain is a
French university professor, a unique amalgam of several postmodern
icons—Michael Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, and Francis
Fukuyama (Hadley 2008, 262)—who has recently come to America to
promote his new book The End of History and the Death of Man. The
book’s title is almost identical to Fukuyama’s book The End of History
and the Last Man (1992), in which Fukuyama proposed the completion of
the idea of man, and liberal democracy as the ultimate political system—
notions which Alain supports, though from which he also distances
himself, in the vein of more pessimistic postmodernist perspectives. The
play, however, tells a story which ironically takes up both of these
worldviews. As Meštrović pointed out, “Francis Fukuyama revitalised
Hegel’s concept of ‘end of history’, which might be subtitled the ‘end of
emotion’ due to the triumph of rationality.” (Meštrović 1997, 25) This
postemotional state of the nation, particularly overt in America, though far
82 Chapter Five
from non-existent in other parts of the world, is where Ravenhill’s play

situates its protagonists and from which it draws its force. Pete, on the
other hand, is the son of a software magnate called Bill, whose name and
occupation allude to Bill Gates and his Microsoft empire. Pete is in poor
relations with his father, whose plan is to populate every American home
with his product and create a network of chaos to be controlled only by
those in power. This process is obstructed by Pete and a virus implanted
into the software system, which can only be eliminated by what lies on the
disc Pete has with him throughout the play.
Initially, Pete is interested in Alain because he believes Alain to be a
talent agent who could sign his “friend” Stevie, a musician. Having given
up on his father as a role-model, Pete potentially finds one in Stevie,
whose lyrics are blatantly empty and, as such, highly marketable. Stevie
stands for the new age of pop consumerism, which is why he is highly
appealing to his generation, who idolise celebrities surrounded by auras of
divinity (Benjamin 1969, 221). Upon Stevie’s suggestion, Pete attempts to
find a way to please Alain, but Alain is too drunk to have intercourse and
rambles about America’s cultural advantage over European tradition:
For me, and for so many children of this twentieth century, it is only in
America that we really believe that we are alive, that we are living within
our own century. In Europe, we are ghosts, trapped in a museum, with the
lights out and the last visitor long gone. (Ravenhill 1997, 5)
Alain decided to come to America because he wanted to “live a little”

(Ravenhill 1997, 3), feeling trapped under the weight of European culture.
Wenders recognised the same pattern within himself—the one of ascribing
“the concept of pleasure” (Wenders 2001, 133) only to what America as
the epitomised “land of dreams” could offer, although the overarching
Dream eventually proved to be a mirage. Alain’s motives clearly reflect
the Faustian impulse to escape erudition and to experience life without
mediation. However, while Faust from the classical tale has to sell his soul
to the devil in order to fulfil these aspirations, such a transaction never
takes place in Ravenhill’s play. It has been suggested that “Faust is Dead
in fact depicts a whole society that has sold its soul to consumer
capitalism, all the characters bearing the cost of the death of God,
progress, man, humanity and reality” (Hadley 2008, 263). That the
Western world had sold its soul would then have occurred long before the
action of the play takes place, while the role of the devil would belong to
the seductive philosophy of postmodernism, which, as exemplified
through Alain, stands for a conception of an insubstantial, fluid
subjectivity, a disbelief in absolutes and unified identities, as well as an
inclination toward a glorification of discourse over action. Ravenhill never

completely dismissed these propositions, but he did put them to test within
the confines of the relationship Alain and Pete enter.
Upon realising Alain does not work for a record company but comes
from a European university, Pete coolly rejects any further contact.
However, Alain manages to spark Pete’s interest with one of his two
riddle-stories, which Ravenhill borrowed from Baudrillard’s book Final
Strategies (Hadley 2008, 265). The one he first tells Pete is about a woman
who wants to know what her lover finds most attractive about her and
later, after discovering that her eyes are most appealing to him, cuts them
out and sends them to him in a box. The other one concerns a Japanese
businessman and a Dutch businesswoman who, while in Japan, accepts his
invitation to dinner and reads him her poetry inspired by him. The
Japanese man then kills and eats her, declaring his love for her throughout
his cannibalistic act. Both stories are followed by Alain’s questions of who
the seducer is and who the seduced within each couple; who between the
two is cruel. The narratives rely heavily on Baudrillard’s notions of
seduction and simulation. Seduction, according to Baudrillard, is a
phenomenon where emphasis is placed on the superficial aspects of
discourse, on appearances, in order for our inability to acquire complete
knowledge to be nullified, by not recognising or dealing with the
boundaries that prevent us from peering through the all-pervading net of
signifiers in order to directly grasp what is signified (Baudrillard 2001,
149-154). As a result, interpretive discourse loses advantage over
seductive discourse because the latter possesses what the former lacks—
the appeal of a pragmatic approach to reality and visual/sensory stimuli.
On the other hand, Baudrillard claimed that we “must not wish to destroy
appearances (the seduction of images)” for the sake of preventing “the
absence of truth from exploding in our faces” (Baudrillard 2001, 154).
Schopenhauer’s veil of Mâyâ, Derrida’s jalousie of signifiers, and
Baudrillard’s simulacra all point to the impossibility of the utopian
synthesis with the Lacanian Real, which, if reached, would deny the
subject-object distance and bring about cessation—death. Interpretive
discourse is thus never fully successful, but to be seduced by
words/images without recognising that seduction is present leads to a free
discursive play that admits no moral implications. Wenders posited that in
America one gets “SEDUCED BY PROJECTION” (Wenders 2001, 129),
which is what Baudrillard warned against in his book entitled America
(1989), published after his journey across the United States. For
Baudrillard, “America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is
a hyperreality because it is a Utopia which has behaved from the very
84 Chapter Five
beginning as though it were already achieved” (Baudrillard 1989, 28). In

such a hyperreality only second-hand experience goes—Pete informs
Alain: “I can do watching, I can do recording, I just don’t do doing”
(Ravenhill 1997, 10). After listening to Alain’s story of the woman who
cuts her eyes out, he does not dwell long on the seducer/seduced
conundrum but asks a practical question, wondering how she could have
found the mailbox if she was blind. Pete’s sensitivity to the implications of
violence is still operative, but Alain shuts him up with, “That is not
relevant. It is an example, a model. The details are not relevant”
(Ravenhill 1997, 10). All of postmodernism appears to be a kind of model,
grappling with reality, but ending up far from it. For Alain, the reality of
blood in his stories, which disturbs Pete, is boring (Ravenhill 1997, 12)—
the abstract and metaphorical is given precedence. However, the corporal
and the material become irrelevant only when the shell of civilisation
affords a vacuum state, in which the human body becomes a side-effect of
the ultimate priority of discourse3. Eagleton points out that, although
“discrediting the idea of totality” might be in vogue for postmodernist
intellectuals, still, there are those “who are not quite so fortunate”
(Eagleton 1996, 10) as to be able to follow the latest fashion, having to
deal with more pressing preoccupations, e.g. where to sleep and what to
eat. Postmodernism could have, indeed, on a theoretical plane, surpassed
the idea of man, but if that truly is the case, what good is it to us? Or does
that question not matter anymore, when the idea of “good” has become so
diluted that we cannot distinguish it from its alternatives? Ravenhill gives
us two glimpses into the innocence that could reinstate a belief in a force
of good, or suffer extinction—Pete’s rejection of Alain’s essentially
amoral worldview and the narrative of the Chorus, whose developmental
progression we shall soon address.
Pete accepts Alain to be his companion on the road while he tries to
escape his father, mostly out of a need for a father-surrogate, one who
could teach him how to think and then, possibly, how to live—a dilemma
Marion from Wings of Desire also goes through. The locus where self-
examination takes place in Faust is Dead is the desert, similarly unstable
as the circus in Wings of Desire. But while Pete experiences a vague
longing to be filled with knowledge, Alain is sick of it and wants physical
contact, which he manages to force Pete into. For Pete, however, physical
and unpredictable experiences are tolerable only through the lens of his
camcorder because he is used to “reality” being on TV, mediated and
nonintimidating. “I kind of prefer it on the TV. I prefer it with a frame
around it” (Ravenhill 1997, 16), he informs Alain before Alain begins to
orally pleasure him. This act is performed against Pete’s will, but he
succumbs to Alain’s influence, and in order to bear the consequences, he

displaces the event into another, simulated realm, where there is complete
desensitisation. In addition to their mollification through simulation, real
experiences are also no longer desired on account of their not being
marketable. If they get recorded, however, they gain commercial value,
having in the process of simulation lost their transitory nature and,
therefore, whatever made them real in the first place, ungraspable and
ultimately indecipherable. Pete is proud that he did not feel anything when
he orgasmed, proud of a complete dissociation from reality, which is
symptomatic of the state of the nation. Meštrović stressed that it “is not
cultural sterility, but emotional sterility that plagues our present fin de
siècle” (Meštrović 1997, 26). And Wenders agreed when he discerned that
America is plagued by “the national disease of / SHAM FEELING,”
which he defined as “a narcissistic gesture / of self-dramatization, / no
longer capable in any way / of registering pain or sorrow for another or for
the world” (Wenders 2001, 142).
The “totally real experiences” (Ravenhill 1997, 16) Pete is interested in
purchasing in exchange for the disc that holds the key to his father’s
software chaos are banal. In his attempt to define them, he can do no more
than imagine a number of encounters with the media-produced celebrities
of his time, regardless of the type of fame they possess4. In Wings of
Desire, Damiel considers the angels’ participation in the lives of human
beings to be pretence because it is with the knowledge of the absolute. To
participate in the living reality as a mortal, in the ever-occurring now, and
not in the angelic forever, is for Damiel the ultimate embodiment of
happiness, of the ecstasy which only a mortal without the all-
encompassing answers could experience. But for Pete in Faust is Dead,
the living reality is unliveable, the now no longer capable of being
experienced because it has (de)evolved into a simulation of itself—a
mediated, recorded now, which is less intimidating, and therefore less real,
breaking into the hyperreal. The now through a camcorder becomes a
forever, thus giving the impression to the cameraman that the now is
repeatable, recursive, always accessible, and therefore boring. The fun is
elsewhere, within the “real experiences,” which are nowhere to be found,
except in the realm of dreams—prefabricated, sterile, and mesmerisingly
entertaining.
Faust is Dead begins with the words of the Chorus, which speaks via
the voice of a child growing up. Though not overtly communal, as the
Chorus traditionally is, the voice is evocative of an individual speaking on
behalf of a group of others who share its fate. As in Wings of Desire,
which opens with the worldview of a child who still does not recognise the
86 Chapter Five
boundaries between the self and others, and therefore cares for the other as
it does for the self, the voice of the Chorus which introduces the action of
Ravenhill’s play is the voice of a child who cries itself to sleep every
night, “crying for the world, because the world is such a bad place”
(Ravenhill 1997, 1). The child with its radical innocence retains an
incorrupt emotional intelligence that does not allow it to dismiss the pain
of others as irrelevant. However, the consolation which the mother offers
is seen through as empty and the parent as incompetent and insufficient.
The child does not believe the world is going to get better; it just learns to
“cry in a special way” (Ravenhill 1997, 1) so that it is not heard.
Throughout the play, the child from the Chorus matures and so does
humanity with it. It participates in violent looting and steals a VCR instead
of necessary food, already showing an inclination toward simulation
instead of reality. “Momma, what is the point of food in the house when
you have nothing to watch while you’re eating it?” (Ravenhill 1997, 11), it
argues. Even the Church pushes the children into a software-engineered
virtual reality. Then the Chorus assumes the voice of Donny, a young man
who cuts himself in order to feel alive. His mother worked night shifts in a
store to support them, where Donny spent his childhood drinking cherry
slushies, which coloured his tongue and earned him the nickname Red.
When the slushie machine, as a mechanical surrogate-mother, present
throughout his childhood and symbolically affording him a name, gets
taken away, Donny begins experiencing outbursts of violence. “I wasn’t a
kid anymore” (Ravenhill 1997, 29), he admits. And when his actual
mother dies too, of cancer, Donny begins cutting himself, partly because
he admires Jesus and his sacrifice. Corporal pain becomes the only
confirmation of existence in a world of simulated hyperreality. Ontology is
inscribed into the body as into the body of Jesus, which is a theme present
in Kane’s Cleansed, as well. Donny cannot accept that his life is a series
of coincidences and believes there must be some purpose to his suffering,
while his identification with Jesus ascribes him the role of a potential
redeemer of humankind’s sins.
Also a subscriber on Pete’s website, which gathers young people who
perform self-mutilation, Donny enters a quarrel with Pete over the
credibility of his wounds. And given that, for these young people, cutting
oneself is not only an escape from simulation, but the only imaginable
reality, this is the worst insult Donny could have been exposed to.
Therefore, he decides to prove himself by performing the ultimate act—
cutting his jugular vein. The audience never gets to actually see Donny
when he performs his final cut in Pete’s kitchen, but only to witness Pete
showing the video of Donny’s death to Alain in the middle of Alain’s
sermon on how reality is dead and how somewhere in 1987 “we began to
live this dream, this lie, this new simulated existence” (Ravenhill 1997,
30). Pete’s prelude to the video is to respond to Alain with, “Reality just
arrived” (Ravenhill 1997, 30). Donny’s “totally real” is the only real left—
to end, to cease, to die. But even that is mediated by technology and then
“turned into a marketable commodity” (Kostić 2011, 170) when his death
is exploited as a televised fad. Even dying is simulated to the point of the
actual death being left out. The final address of the Chorus is of the child
grown up, the adult disappointed by the status quo of a world not getting
better, but not collapsing either—”It’s just going on, on and on and on”
(Ravenhill 1997, 35). The child who felt the weight of the world’s pain,
now, as an adult, does not “feel a thing” (Ravenhill 1997, 35). Innocence
has been destroyed.
Pete’s fate is somewhat less bleak. He rejects Alain’s indoctrination
and shoots him when Alain refuses to hand over the disc to Pete and
continue their road trip. Alain ends up in a hospital, while his verbal
participation in the final scene, when Pete comes to visit, is reduced to a
minimum. During the visit, Pete informs Alain that he has reconnected
with his father and that he does not believe in Alain’s philosophy. He
elaborates: “See, I can do the whole Death of Man speech thing, you
know? But where’d it get us? It got us Donny. And I don’t want that
anymore” (Ravenhill 1997, 37). Postmodernism fails because it has
reached its limits—it no longer needs humanity, and, therefore, humanity
can only reject it.
America in Faust is Dead appears to be populated by those who would
gladly exchange their souls for what the media-produced or academia-
produced hype may offer. The entire country, along with the rest of the
Western world, provides a suitable setting for differently oriented Fausts
who are allowed to enjoy its hyperreal experiences and dispose of a sense
of ethical ambiguity, which is replaced by an ambiguity of pre-emptied
discourse units. In an ironic twist, Alain’s fate is ultimately left
ambiguous, as was his philosophy, given that we are not sure whether he
dies or not. As Hadley noticed, “Alain in Faust is Dead misses his
moment. He does not find redemption, only the blind folly of that final
fatal strategy, the gift of Donny’s eyes” (Hadley 2008, 272), which are
given to him by Pete in a material reclaiming of Alain’s metaphorical
seduction narratives. It is left unclear whether the rising beeping sound
which closes the play, reminding Alain to take his pills, is meant to be
taken as his confrontation with the unresolved contradictory basis and
superciliousness of his proclamations, or as his refusal to respond to the
world if that world is not one he could explain and accept. On the other
88 Chapter Five
hand, even though Faust, as embodied individually, may not be physically

dead, he appears to be killed off as a mythical protagonist, given that the
Faustian myth is unsustainable in the world that Ravenhill’s characters
inhabit. Laurens De Vos proposed that “[m]aybe in a world of hyperreality
there is no more room for tragic heroes like Faust. The Faust myth might
still be caught in terms of simulacra and simulation, but apart from that, as
the subtitle in parentheses contends, it is dead” (De Vos 2012: 654).
Faust is Dead functions as a warning to a civilisation which has lost all
moral guidance and whose people are having their souls sold for them in
exchange for corrupt conceptions of power and knowledge. The Faustian
archetype is transformed in order to address the systemic transformation in
our paradigms of meaning-construction, which have led us into either
abstract idealism (Eagleton 1996, 11) or blatant pragmatism (Baudrillard
1989, 23), in each case disregarding the emotional over either arrogant
rationalism or sham simulations. The hyperreality built out of simulated
versions of existence produces desensitised individuals incapable of
empathy and love. Ravenhill warns against this collapse of humanity, and
by letting the corrupt system destroy the innocence of his protagonists,
makes us see that we might still have a chance of going the other way.
4. The resurrection of the traumatised “self”

in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed
Throughout her short life (1971-1999) Sarah Kane was obsessed with
extreme situations, which she then incorporated into her controversial
plays. Her debut play Blasted was met with a vicious outcry and was to
become “the most notorious play of the decade” (Sierz 2001, 93). The
plays that followed continued in the same vein, if not more brutal and
disturbing. After reading her play Cleansed (1998), Mark Ravenhill
commented that “there were plenty of violent bits for her detractors to
criticise, but what was extraordinary about the play was its faith in the
overwhelming redemptive power of love” (Ravenhill 1999).
Aside from being inspired by the extreme, Kane’s protagonists are
almost without exception people burdened by trauma. Therefore, the
postulates of trauma theory, a relatively recently established stream of
literary and cultural criticism, will be beneficial for the analysis of the
play. Onega and Ganteau point to a development in critical thought in the
1980s, as a reaction to the relativism of radical postmodernist tendencies
and certain strands of deconstruction, which gave rise to trauma theory in
an attempt to revive interest in ethical and hermeneutical criticism (Onega
and Ganteau 2011, 7). The work of these critics, who drew inspiration
from the teachings of Paul de Man, “combines resources from a number of

critical schools, including Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, New
Historicism, and deconstruction” (Onega and Ganteau 2011, 8-9). Trauma,
as an isolated event or a specific long-term period which is not subsumed
under recognisable patterns of experience, forces an individual to
reconceptualise the sole idea of experience and its transmission. As Kali
Tal pointed out, trauma “is enacted in a liminal state, outside the bounds of
‘normal’ human experience, and the subject is radically ungrounded” (Tal
1996, 15), relying on Cathy Caruth’s claim that the “traumatized person,
we might say, carries an impossible history within them, or they become
themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess”
(Caruth 1991, 4). Memory enters a crisis, and, therefore, the traumatic past
refuses to be conventionally transmitted. Caruth’s study Unclaimed
Experience (1996) set the ground for trauma criticism as “a psychoanalytic
poststructural approach that suggests trauma is an unsolvable problem of
the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience
and language” (Balaev 2014, 1). This essentially Lacanian approach is
supported by the argument that the Real is unreachable and the Symbolic
tentative, where trauma is treated as an experiential symptom causing the
collapse of the idea of the given nature of the Symbolic and thus, as a
potentially subversive phenomenon, which can serve as criticism of
oppressive ideologies. On the other hand, there emerges the problem of
expressing trauma, which “cannot be simply remembered, it cannot be
simply ‘confessed’: it must be testified to, in a struggle shared between a
speaker and a listener to recover something the speaking subject is not—
and cannot be—in possession of” (Felman 1993, 16). One of the possible
modes within which this complex process of trauma testimony can be
performed is fiction, which figures as a reminder that there are always
limits when it comes to representing lived experience. “Literary
verbalization […] still remains a basis for making the wound perceivable
and the silence audible” (Hartman 2003, 258).
Kane was provoked into writing Cleansed by a claim made by Roland
Barthes that being rejected by the one we love is comparable to the
experience of being in a concentration camp (Sierz 2001, 116). At first she
was repulsed by the comparison, by Barthes claiming that the “amorous
catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain,
an extreme situation, ‘a situation experienced by the subject as
irremediably bound to destroy him’; the image is drawn from what
occurred at Dachau” (Barthes 2002, 48-49). However, Kane soon became
inspired by the provocation when she agreed with Barthes about both
experiences being “panic situations: situations without remainder, without
90 Chapter Five
return: I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I
am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost,
forever” (Barthes 2002, 49). In Cleansed, the extremity of being in love is
portrayed through forms of non-institutionalised relationships—an
incestuous bond between Grace and Graham, two siblings with overlapping
identities; a homosexual couple, Rod and Carl, who make up the classical
dyad, the rational and the idealistic; tyrannical Tinker who falls in love
with a prostitute; and a boy, Robin, whose capacity for love seems
immense, although he used to be tortured by thoughts of suicide, which he
eventually does commit.
The setting of Cleansed is ironically a university campus—another
locus which implies, or should imply, instability and fluidity of what
constitutes one’s perceived identity. Not just a nuclear unit of civilisation,
not just an institution, but a place of learning, of producing established
mindsets and computing schemata, is the setting for acts of cruelty
inconceivable (and yet, somehow designed to be staged), toward both the
corporal and the psychological. Meštrović located “the origins of
postemotionalism in the most other-directed geographical locations of the
United States […] and to university campuses” (Meštrović 1997, 123).
Therefore, it is not surprising that in Faust is Dead the university setting is
likewise the original source of Alain’s loss of faith in the progress of
humanity and its capacity to do good, which, within a postmodernist
framework, becomes a category interchangeable with evil. Alain
sanctimoniously advises Pete: “We must be cruel, we must follow our
desires and be cruel to others, yes, but also we must be cruel to ourselves.
We must embrace suffering, we must embrace cruelty” (Ravenhill 1997,
24). Eagleton strongly criticised this academia-induced ambivalence,
given that “this—the final identity between the system and its negation—
is so cynical a suggestion that it is remarkably hard to picture” (Eagleton
1996, 19). But it is with a different kind of cruelty that Kane attempts to
disturb the status quo. Ken Urban pointed out that cruelty has a
transformative potential, unlike violence, because the former does not
imply senselessness and futility: “Cruelty is the force that violently
awakens consciousness to a horror that has remained unseen and
unspoken, or wilfully repressed” (Urban 2004, 363). Kane wrote Cleansed
to help her audience confront the systemic annihilation of nonconformity
and unlearn the lessons which are taught in the language of power, in the
manner proposed by Ursula K. Le Guin to graduates of Bryn Mawr
College, when she advocated a return to what had been systematically
squeezed out of them—the innocence of the true mother tongue (Le Guin
1986).
Cleansed begins with Tinker, the authoritative figure at the university

campus, which is turned into a conglomerate of a prison, brothel, hospital
and school, resembling the social structure of a concentration camp.
Tinker is, as his name implies, a mender of sorts, a type of Big Brother.
However, unlike Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four character, Tinker walks
among people, washing his hands of all responsibility for what happens to
them, although the system he represents is what eventually destroys them.
In his study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel
Foucault provided a cross-section of contemporary societies, which are
rapidly taking the forms of prisons:
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of

the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social
worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is
based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his
body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The
carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of
insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest
support, in modern society, of the normalizing power. (Foucault 1995:
304)
Tinker complies with all the aforementioned judge-like characteristics,

which make him the ultimate totalitarian dictator. The play begins with
him injecting drugs into the corner of Graham’s eye; Graham is one of the
inhabitants of the university campus. Graham begs for a higher dose and
persuades Tinker to administer it, which is also a breaking point in
Tinker’s character development. Unlike an all-pervading ruler, Tinker is
portrayed as human, with certain ambivalences, which is how Kane avoids
his blatant demonisation. Tinker admits only to being a dealer, not a
doctor, and tells Graham a change will ensue. “You know what will
happen to me?” he asks Graham, to which Graham responds with “Yes”
(Kane 1998, 1). The two of them repeat, almost mechanically, that they are
not friends. From that divide, Graham ends up dead and later incinerated,
while Tinker emerges as a killer and, what is more, a systemic killer—a
“doctor”. The cleansing Tinker proceeds to conduct throughout the play is
very different from the cleansing that will eventually be performed. He
desires absolute conformity, while the progression of the play
demonstrates how “subjectivity emerges in the playtext as hybrid and
processual” (Delgado-Garcia 2012, 233).
Trauma instituted by the death of Graham haunts the play and is
embodied in Grace, his sister, who comes to the campus six months after
he dies, demanding that she be given his clothes and that she remain on
92 Chapter Five
campus, which Tinker eventually, though reluctantly, allows. On a

symbolic level, Grace arrives among the prisoners on campus as a
potential for a semi-religious salvation, which her name implies, while in
her gradual transition into Graham, she takes on a human form similar to
that of Jesus in the Biblical narrative. Only when she puts on Graham’s
clothes, which one of the prisoners, nineteen-year-old Robin, has to take
off and hand over to her, does Grace collapse and weep uncontrollably—
she physically projects the aching wound that Graham never got to heal.
Graham soon appears, though seen only by Grace, and sensed by the
overseeing authorities, who penetrate the mind as well as the body. He is
the traumatic memory that returns to help Grace come to terms with her
loss. The two of them make love in perfect harmony, after which a
sunflower bursts through the floor as a trope from romanticist poetry, a
floral hope in a better version of reality. However, Grace is soon punished
for her transgression with beating and rape by unseen Voices. Foucault
pointed specifically to this position in which the individual is trapped by
the tyrannical authority figure: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the
object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault 1995,
200), which is how systemic violence leads to mental incapacity. Having
listened to Graham’s advice, Grace numbs herself and begins to expect the
countless hits, no longer feeling the beating. Even when she is ultimately
exposed to gunfire, only the wall, representing the emotional wall erected
around her, gets shot. Grace stays alive. At that point, daffodils, another
romanticist trope, grow from the ground, to both Grace’s and Graham’s
pleasure. Precisely because of their intense cruelty, Kane’s plays verge on
the metaphoric and the symbolic. In Cleansed, the inclination toward
symbolism is apparent because certain elements function indisputably as
expressionistic—the flowers emerging after grand acts of love, the rats
which overrun the stage, the dead who reappear and interact with the
living, etc.
In a different section of the campus, a couple, Rod and Carl, interact
with contrasting presuppositions about what it means to be in love. While
with Grace and Graham we witness complete surrender to a shared
experience, the more realistic setting involves conflict about the limits of
human capacity to feel love. While Rod is the realist and claims he can
only promise the now and not forever, Carl does not save his words when
it comes to vouching for his loyalty to Rod. However, Carl is soon put to
the test by Tinker, who tortures him until Carl shouts, “Not me please not
me don’t kill me Rod not me don’t kill me ROD NOT ME ROD NOT
ME” (Kane 1998, 11). This scene is obviously influenced by the ending of
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when its protagonist Winston Smith
betrays his lover Julia when confronted with his most pronounced fear by
the ironically entitled Ministry of Love. The betrayal of everything aside
from the system in power is Tinker’s goal as well, in order to ensure
complete visibility, a god-like projection of control. Winston Smith is
addressed with these words prior to his betrayal, words which are
symptomatic of the atmosphere in Cleansed:
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything

will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or
friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or
integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we
shall fill you with ourselves. (Orwell 1961, 256)
The aim of the powerful is to administer control, not by overt

intimidation but by an instilment of what they believe to be the truth, the
right kind of behaviour, into every human being over whom they rule. The
love Carl professes for Rod does not prove sustainable, and as punishment,
Tinker cuts out Carl’s means of expressing such love—his tongue. On the
other hand, Eagleton stated that these extreme situations do not necessarily
drag the truth into sight, and wondered, “why should one assume that what
a man says when a starved rat is on the point of eating his tongue is the
truth? Personally I would say anything whatsoever” (Eagleton 1996, 54).
Kane seems to write in favour of Eagleton’s claim because Tinker in
Cleansed continues to punish Carl, even though Carl risks all he has left to
demonstrate his love for Rod—by writing his apology in the mud, before
his hands get cut off, and dancing “a spasmodic dance of desperate
regret” (Kane 1998, 30), before his feet are severed, and he is left a
miserable trunk of a man. However, this gradual maiming of the one still
intent on proclaiming his love for him helps Rod reach a realisation that
“[d]eath isn’t the worst thing they can do to you” (Kane 1998, 30), which
is when he makes love to Carl, promising everything he had been holding
back for the sake of staying true to reality. He realises that to be honest in
love, sometimes reality is warped and a now becomes a forever. But once
Rod perseveres in his loyalty to Carl and refuses to betray him to Tinker,
he is killed. There are no right answers. Under conditions of depravity and
systemic corruption, love is not capable of thriving. All behaviour is
punished if the system deems it necessary, regardless of its moral value.
In this elliptical play, it is difficult to decode specific utterances, but it
is highly probable that Kane purposefully wrote Cleansed as a symbolic
piece which could be ascribed diverse meanings, just as is the case in love
and life. Grace is the permeating force of the play, cleansing the characters
of their malformed conceptual and emotional persuasions. Yet, she is also
94 Chapter Five
vulnerable and, when it comes to Graham, all too human. Her influence on
young Robin is both positive and detrimental. Once they exchange clothes,
Robin becomes attached to Grace as both a motherly and an amorous
figure. At first looking forward to getting out of Tinker’s confinement,
Robin ends by not wanting to leave the prison-like campus because he has
fallen in love. The torture of being held in captivity is no longer an
obstacle to happiness because happiness is present in the form of Grace.
His entire worldview acquires meaning on account of her, which diverges
from Tinker’s imposed pattern of thought. Therefore, Robin is tortured
and his innocence stifled: when he draws a flower, Tinker burns the paper,
and when he gets Grace a box of chocolates, Tinker makes him eat all of
them until Robin throws up and wets himself, which he is forced to clean
up with the books used by Grace to teach him how to read; later he is
made to burn them. Robin slowly matures, learning how to write and
count, discarding his child-like perception of the world, and after seeing
the dancing prostitute Tinker usually goes to visit, he “cries his heart out”
(Kane 1998, 28), disturbed by the sight. Like the child in the Chorus in
Faust is Dead, Robin becomes sufficiently familiar with the ways of the
world to turn to utter disillusionment. Once he realises how long 30 years
is—the time he has left in Tinker’s prison—Robin commits suicide by
hanging himself by Grace’s tights. Grace cannot help him, since she is too
numb from the electrocution Tinker has applied to her, too numb from
trying not to feel, so that she would not get hurt in a world which has
already killed her brother and is likely to kill everyone who dares diverge
from the conventional.
In Cleansed, identity is represented as fluid, in need of detachment
from the established modes of expression. Tinker’s relationship with the
erotic dancer in the peepshow shows that Grace has not left him
indifferent. He maps her identity onto the dancer, who might only be a
product of his imagination, his last chance to prove himself human. He
says to Grace, “I am here to save you” (Kane 1998, 27), before he
lobotomises her, preparing her for a sex-change operation which will
finally turn her into Graham. The electrocution transfers even to the
setting, which lights up, purifying its inhabitants. Graham is reborn
through Grace/grace, who is given Carl’s penis and is thus completely
transgendered. Tinker, on the other hand, makes a final visit to the erotic
dancer, whose name also turns out to be Grace, and to whom he makes
love, though it turns into vulgarity and partial disappointment, which
marks Tinker’s inability to imagine pure love. But he does cry and he does
smile, which signify the beginning of change.
There is perhaps no salvation in the proclamation of one’s love, but

there is the love. Survival appears to be greatly beyond the characters’
control, and therefore, though vital, not a measure of one’s humanity. But,
regardless of those circumstances, the choice pertaining to love is theirs,
and it makes life worthwhile. Otherwise, it becomes reduced to mere
survival. Once Grace is transformed/transgendered into Graham, or what
appears to be Graham, the consequence she/he experiences is to feel.
“Giving yet another blow to the fixity of individual identity, Cleansed also
proposes that subjectivation continuously fails to produce selfhood”
(Delgado-Garcia 2012, 236). The “self” in love is no longer a self
perceived as unified and separate from the other, but a crossroads of
potential connections. Quite opposite to the ending which plagues
Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead, where the adult Chorus representative cannot
feel anything after all emotion has been systemically squeezed out of him,
Grace-in-Graham and Graham-in-Grace thaw and reconnect with the
world through feeling. In itself, to feel seems to bring about a purpose, a
propelling force. Grace/Graham proclaims:
Felt it.
Here. Inside. Here.
And when I don’t feel it, it’s pointless.

Think about getting up it’s pointless.
Think about eating it’s pointless.
Think about dressing it’s pointless.
Think about speaking it’s pointless.
Think about dying only it’s totally fucking pointless.
(Kane 1998, 43-44)
However, after her/his final speech, Grace/Graham sees Carl crying

and is immediately overcome by a need to ask for help. To feel is to be
vulnerable; to feel is to have hope, to believe, in love at least; to feel is to
open oneself to pain and suffering, on which is the worldview Cleansed
operates. But to feel is also to be alive—without it, humanity is no longer
human, reduced to desensitised shells of emptiness. The traumatised are
cured through suffering and cruelty but only if they decide it is worth
enduring. On the other hand, the system tortures the impulse toward
innocence and hardens it so that it suffocates, if not physically, then
mentally. If the systemic aggression is not stopped, the individual has little
chance of survival. In Kane’s imaginative world, humanity succeeds in
staying alive through self-cleansing, a ritual of rebirth which reinstates
human authority over the system. It is “only” a question of remaining so.
96 Chapter Five
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have analysed two plays by renowned playwrights of
the 1990s British scene, incorporating such analysis into the framework of
Wim Wenders’s creative output, as well as postmodernist thought and
criticism, and trauma theory. Mark Ravenhill’s and Sarah Kane’s shock
tactics proved to exceed their surface value and to pierce profoundly into
the systemic injustice that plagues contemporary existence. The simulated
hyperreality of technologically grounded civilisations combined with the
institutionalised violence of an off-the-scale capitalist, consumerist, and
deeply desensitised society in the plays Faust is Dead and Cleansed are
brought to the front and deconstructed via a cruelty-infused testing ground
for love, empathy and innocence. The plays abound in provocation, which
is why their methods of dealing with the issues they set out to tackle are
powerfully audience-oriented. Both Kane and Ravenhill plead for humanity
to be restored or reborn by reconnecting with itself, with the human core it
has thrown away or misplaced. It is no longer a question of how intelligent
or rationally capable we are. What is lost is our ability to relate to each
other, our emotional intelligence—we have forgotten how to feel.
Sometimes it takes representation, as opposed to simulation, to re-evoke
such basic human instincts—those of radical innocence—and that
representation which helps us see the unseen is what makes art. As
Edward Bond so effectively putit, “Theatre has to confront us with our
innocence. It can do it only by making us responsible for our crimes.
Tragedy is the search for innocence” (Bond 2000, 191). And so is all art.
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Notes
1
Sierz’s most quoted definition of in-yer-face theatre from his eponymous study is
that it comprises “any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and
shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors
and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking
alarm” (Sierz 2001: 4).
2
The poem was originally written in German, but was subsequently translated into
English and entitled “Song of Childhood”.
3
In her study Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler claimed that the body is “bound up
with signification from the start” (Butler 1993: 30). However, she distanced herself
from one-sided criticism of the primacy of the material, by stating that to think of
the body as discursively marked “is not to say that the materiality of bodies is
simply and only a linguistic effect which is reducible to a set of signifiers” (Butler
1993: 30). What she did was to emphasize that “to think through the indissolubility
of materiality and signification is no easy matter” (Butler 1993: 30) and that
materiality is only perceptible via discourse, though not subordinate to it.
4
Pete lists examples of his version of “totally real experiences” as “I’m gonna
work alongside Mother Theresa. I’m gonna take Saddam Hussein out for a pizza.
I’m gonna shoot pool with the Pope and have Boris Yeltsin show me his collection
of baseball stickers” (Ravenhill 1997, 16).
CHAPTER SIX
THE SINISTER FACES OF IRELAND

IN MARTIN MCDONAGH’S LEENANE TRILOGY
BILJANA VLAŠKOVIĆ ILIĆ

1. Introduction
“The critic’s first duty is to admit, with absolute respect,
the right of every man to his own style.”
—G. Bernard Shaw
(Shaw 1985, 460-461)
In the 2001 interview pertaining to his new play The Lieutenant Of

Inishmore, Martin McDonagh stated that in his plays he “walks that line
between comedy and cruelty … because … one illuminates the other”
(O’Hagan 2001). Although hailed by many as a playwright who breathes
novelty and freshness into the stale theatrical values of the postmodern
age, McDonagh’s representation of comedy and cruelty, life and death,
good and evil, as complementary rather than opposing forces has not
agreed with certain critics. McDonagh’s exploration of such forces against
the backdrop of rural West Ireland is often perceived as an exploitation of
Irish stereotypes in a calculating way (O’Byrne 2013, 5), purposefully
done to satisfy those who yearn for a Syngean successor (McDonagh
2006, 225). The playwright’s frankness about his lack of theatre-going
does not help either. “I doubt I’ve seen 20 plays in my life”, he stated for
Evening Standard in 1996, “I prefer films. I only started writing for the
theatre when all else failed. Basically, it was just a way of avoiding work
and earning a bit of money” (Price 2008).
Whether it is “precisely McDonagh’s lack of theatre-going experience
that enables him to write in the way he does” (Ibid), just as it was
Shakespeare’s lack of formal education that arguably enabled him to write
as he did1, is open to discussion. It is possible, nonetheless, that
The Sinister Faces of Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy 101
McDonagh’s plays owe their freshness to his being unconcerned with the
strict demands of the dramatic profession, which enabled him to write
quickly and with ease just by “copying down a conversation between two
people” in his head (Hemming 1996). It comes as no particular surprise
that this conversation should be written down in an English that aspires to
reflect the authentic Connemara speech, since McDonagh used to spend
his holidays in the West of Ireland, where his parents come from. The
crude Hiberno-English of the plays is not without its inconsistencies and
“somewhat contrived linguistic constructions” (McDonagh 2006, 227), but
it perfectly serves the function of depicting the sinister side of everyday
lives in Leenane’s fictional world. Although McDonagh’s speech patterns
and ghoulish sentiment will inevitably remind one of Synge’s Playboy of
the Western World (226), they are at the same time infinitely different
from it, because McDonagh’s Ireland can be found in other corners of the
world as well, if interpreted on a larger scale as the study of human
behavior and the everlasting struggle between good and evil within Man.
With this notion in mind, the chapter offers a reading of Martin
McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy as the author’s comment on the
transformation and stagnation of contemporary Ireland and the Irish way
of life, and shows that they reflect the status quo in the rest of the world.
2. McDonagh’s “Irishness” as Part of In-Yer-Face Theatre

In the introduction for the Bloomsbury Methuen Drama edition of The
Leenane Trilogy, Fintan O’Toole describes Martin McDonagh as a
member of “a generation that has completely redefined the term ‘Anglo-
Irish’”, which has now come to represent “a new kind of fusion that arises,
not from ascendancy but from exile” (McDonagh 2013, ix-x). Yet there
were Irish exiles, Bernard Shaw being the most notable example, who
refused to be categorized within the “Anglo-Irish” literary tradition,
claiming that “[t]here was never any such species as Anglo-Irish; and there
never will be” (Gahan 2010, 4). The difference between Shaw and
McDonagh is that the latter was born in London and “[grew] up with all
the accents and attitudes of urban England” (McDonagh 2013, x), only to
make his own connections with Irish culture in the process, whereas Shaw
was born in Dublin and emigrated to London at the age of twenty, his head
still brimming with the dreamy Irish ideals from which he was attempting
to escape but never really managed. Thus, Shaw “never considered himself
English” and the fact that he was born an Irishman had always filled him
with a “wild and inextinguishable pride” (Gahan 2002, 203). But the
agreement as to what specifically comprises “Irish literature” has long
102 Chapter Six
been a bone of contention among scholars and writers alike. In 1907,

Padraic Pearse adamantly contested Shaw’s literary works being described
as Irish, claiming, quite simply, that Irish literature is literature which is
in Irish, whereas “literature which is not in Irish is not Irish literature”.
Hence, Shaw belongs to “the legion of the lost ones” and “the cohort of
the damned” (quoted in Gahan 2010, 4-5), since his plays are all written in
English, not Gaelic. Based on this, Martin McDonagh cannot
straightforwardly be categorized as an Irish playwright, yet he frequently is,
primarily because of his use of rural Ireland for the plays’ setting and the
use of Hiberno-English as a means of developing his characters’
“Irishness” more faithfully. According to John McDonagh (2006, 224), the
enormous success of The Beauty Queen of Leenane catapulted the young
playwright “into the unenviable role of the latest in a long line of “the next
big thing” amongst Irish playwrights, despite the fact that his distinctly
Anglo-Irish heritage calls into question the very nomenclature used by
critics to categorize him”.
Martin McDonagh, however, never felt the need to defend himself
either for being English or for being Irish, because, as he stated, “in a way,
I don’t feel either. And, in another way, of course, I’m both” (quoted in
O’Byrne 2013, 5). Born in London to Irish parents who had emigrated to
find work, McDonagh was exposed to both Irish and English tradition
while growing up, not only in his household, but also “within the strong
Irish community in the Elephant and Castle”, where the family were
living, which resulted in the “confused confluence of cultures”
(McDonagh 2006, 228) evident in the linguistic duality of his plays.
Furthermore, the essential part of his Irish heritage was Catholicism, the
faith he rejected early in life, but which remained “an integral part of his
childhood identity” (Pocock 2007, 62) and subconsciously influenced his
writing. But above all, one must not disregard the impact of American
popular culture on McDonagh, who has spoken on numerous occasions
about his fascination with film-makers such as Martin Scorsese, Sergio
Leone, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo (Price 2008). Fintan O’Toole’s
categorization of McDonagh as ‘Anglo-Irish’, meaning a child of Irish
emigrants, who is “finding or making [his] own connections with Irish
culture” (McDonagh 2013, x), should be clarified by recognizing the fact
that Martin McDonagh emerged as a curious blend of Irish tradition, the
British social and cultural milieu, and American pop culture.
The globalized nature of the latter is the linchpin of McDonagh’s
narrative strategy, which in turn blurs the borders between the English-
speaking countries, while the plays’ violent streak, reminiscent of the
aforementioned movie directors, blends perfectly with the typical Irish
setting. Because of this intertextuality, some regard him as a writer of

pastiche, “an enormous, but unfocused talent”, “a blend of Irish greats”,
but as Steven Price (2008) correctly notices, “instead of continuing a
tradition of Irish drama, [McDonagh] exemplifies that sense of
rootlessness in space and time, and the comparative unconcern with
tradition, characteristic of postmodernity”. His propensity for using
cruelty, pugnacity, and malevolence as the plots’ unifying factors puts his
drama into the realm of in-yer-face theatre, developed in Britain during the
nineties, with the primary purpose of shocking the audience by “bringing
taboos on stage” (Vanhellemont 2009, 9). Through the interplay between
the stage and the audience, which is “torn between horror and laughter”
(Ibid), in-yer-face theatre creates an atmosphere of disbelief, disgust,
disturbance, paranoia, claustrophobia and nausea. According to Aleks
Sierz (2000), a British theatre critic who coined the term in his 2001 book
In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, “the big three of in-yer-face
theatre are Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson”, while
Martin McDonagh belongs to the second group of playwrights, who were
influenced by the leading three. Sierz also briefly summarizes the main
characteristics of this type of theatre, which are easily recognized: “[T]he
language is filthy, there’s nudity, people have sex in front of you, violence
breaks out, one character humiliates another, taboos are broken,
unmentionable subjects are broached, conventional dramatic structures are
subverted” (Ibid). Tales of abuse are common, as well as the subversion of
theatrical form, with no traces of ideology, but with the stress on personal
politics. He concludes that “[a]t its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful,
so visceral, that it forces you to react – either you want to get on stage and
stop what’s happening or you decide it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen
and you long to come back the next night” (Ibid). McDonagh’s theatre is
precisely like that: shocking to a bearable extent, while bringing into play
the specific elements of the Irish nationalist theatre (Vanhellemont 2009,
10). He thus incorporates Ireland into the globalized world, where
violence becomes the necessary means of survival.
The blending of the Irish theatre (whose interest in Irish/Gaelic
language and folklore resulted in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in
1904) and the contemporary form of the British theatre reflects the mutual
connection between the two countries. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, Ireland appeared “as a matter of discontent and contradiction”
(Puebla 2012, 309), mostly because of its dissatisfaction with the English
colonization. Hence, a new form of drama was required—one that would
demythologize the idealism of the Irish nation. Bernard Shaw quickly
seized the chance of deconstructing Irish idealism in his play John Bull’s
104 Chapter Six
Other Island, which he wrote for the newly-founded Abbey Theatre at the
invitation of William Butler Yeats (Holroyd 1998, 303). Yeats
congratulated Shaw on having said “things in this play which are entirely
true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before” (306), but
eventually refused to stage the play, allegedly because of its length. Shaw,
on the other hand, recognized the real problem—his play was
“uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is
bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a
very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland” (Shaw 1908, v).
Other notable examples of the new theatrical representation of Ireland
include the plays of John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, which
paved the way for writers like Martin McDonagh, who “subverts and
unsettles the very foundational principles of Irish nationalism, starting
with the nuclear family” (310). Theatre continues to be “the location for
debating the meaning of the Irish nation” (Wilson 2011, 1), as it has long
been, but with a conspicuous change pertaining to the new postcolonial
status of Ireland. The economic boost of Ireland in the 1990s, known as
the Celtic Tiger, despite being “a sure sign of postcolonial success”, was
not enough to build “an equitable and liberated society”, leaving Ireland
““poor” in all the ways that really matter” (Ibid). This is McDonagh’s
Ireland from The Leenane Trilogy, as it comes close to showing that the
rest of the world also remains poor despite all its material wealth.
3. The Callous Fictional Worlds of The Leenane Trilogy

Each play of The Leenane Trilogy is centered on its own nuclear
family: Mag and Maureen Folan, a mother and daughter, in The Beauty
Queen of Leenane (BQL), Mick Dowd and the shade of his late wife Oona
in A Skull in Connemara (SC) and the brothers Coleman and Valene
Connor in The Lonesome West (LW). All three nuclear families are
disintegrated both from within and because of the intrusion of another
nuclear family (brothers Pato and Ray Dooley in BQL, Maryjohnny
Rafferty and her grandsons Mairtin and Thomas Hanlon in SC), or the
parish priest and the local pretty girl (Father Welsh and Girleen Kelleher
in LW). The twelve characters “live” in the limited fictional world of the
West-Irish village Leenane in Connemara, connected by the space and
time setting of the plays. Connemara, the Western seacoast of Ireland, is a
“rough, rocky terrain, divided into small fields by dry stone walls …
spectacularly picturesque”, but still “contains some of the poorest land in
Ireland” (O’Byrne 2013, 7). Set in “economically and socially depressed
1989” (McDonagh 2006, 231), immediately prior to the 1990s economic
boost in Ireland, along with the outlandish setting of the mythical Irish
West, the plays incite modern audiences to dismantle mythologies and
reassess the real, old Ireland from their new, postcolonial point of view2.
Following in the footsteps of Synge and O’Casey, who “turned Ireland
into the land of violent farmers and drunken peasants” (Puebla 2012, 309),
McDonagh relies much upon the setting itself to justify the outbursts of
violent impulses in a claustrophobic environment. Incessant rain and bleak
weather emphasize the extreme dullness of life in Ireland, as Ray Dooley
observes in BQL: “Who wants to see Ireland on telly? … All you have to
do is look out your window to see Ireland. And it’s soon bored you’d be.
‘There goes a calf.’ (Pause) I be bored anyway. I be continually bored”
(McDonagh 2013, 53). It is in an atmosphere of such continual boredom
that we meet Mag and Maureen Folan, a mother and daughter whose
strained relationship is apparent right from the onset of BQL. At the
beginning of the play, Mag, a stout seventy-year-old woman, is portrayed
as a demanding matriarch, looked after by her forty-year-old daughter
Maureen, who finds it difficult to cope with the role of caretaker while
leading the solitary existence of a spinster. The tension between Maureen
and Mag is complemented by the embroidered tea-towel hanging along the
back wall of the stage, bearing the inscription ‘May you be half an hour in
Heaven afore the Devil knows you’re dead’, as well as the heavy black
poker hanging next to it, which like Chekhov’s gun waits to smash
somebody’s head in.
Maureen is a typical example of McDonagh’s habit of portraying
characters as “victims of their own oppression … unable to achieve their
goals, for their circumstances are usually suffocating” (Puebla 2012, 310).
But although Maureen is at first seen as the victim, the victor-victim
relationship is reversed several times during the play. Emotionally
unstable and fragile, Maureen finds a much needed outlet for her
frustration in the constant surges of anger at and physical abuse of her
mother. During such moments, the audience may sympathize with Mag,
only to be reminded, as the dialogue continues, of her selfish and cruel
treatment of Maureen. Their bickering over everyday annoyances, such as
Mag’s urinating in the kitchen sink, Maureen leaving lumps in Mag’s
Complan3, or the dispute over whether they should speak English or Irish
in Ireland, takes a turn for the worse after Maureen reunites with her old
acquaintance, Pato Dooley, at a farewell party for his American uncle.
Following her unsuccessful attempt to prevent Maureen from going to the
party, Mag is dumbfounded when she encounters the half-naked Pato in
her house the following morning. For Maureen, the nascent relationship is
a way out of her present misery, but her excitement is short-lived as Mag
106 Chapter Six
reveals to Pato that Maureen spent some time in an English psychiatric

hospital when she was twenty-five. The family secret, however, does not
deter Pato from writing to Maureen after going back to England, but the
letter is intercepted by Mag, who reads it, realizes that Pato and Maureen
did not have sex that night after all, and then burns it. Towards the
ominous climax, as Maureen brags about her imaginary sexual affair with
Pato just to provoke her mother, Mag accidentally reveals that she knows
the truth. Finally, in a happy and somewhat deranged daze, Maureen starts
torturing her mother by scalding her with boiling oil, only to smash her
head with the poker after learning the contents of Pato’s letter.
In psychological terms, the play focuses on the dynamics of power
between Mag and Maureen. While the daughter tries to distance herself
from the mother “to assert her own identity, she paradoxically mimics the
behavior of her progenitor frequently” (Vargas and Vargas 2013, 146).
Ultimately, even after the murder, Maureen fails to break free from her
mother and slowly descends into madness, merging her own identity with
that of her mother in the process, so that she never overcomes the famous
Lacanian “mirror stage”4. Upon seeing Maureen sitting in her mother’s
rocking chair in a complete daze, Ray exclaims, “The exact fecking image
of your mother you are, sitting there pegging orders and forgetting me
name!” (McDonagh 2013, 60). Not that Maureen cares: she “quietly gets
up, picks up the dusty suitcase, caresses it slightly, moves slowly to the
hall door and looks back at the empty rocking-chair a while” (Ibid), then
exits into the hall, leaving us with no clear resolution and a question:
“Who is the real monster, Mag or Maureen?” (Castleberry 2007, 53).
According to Puebla (2012, 311), McDonagh’s intent was to portray
Maureen as the victim, the abused daughter, and “the stereotype of the
Irish maiden waiting for [her] lover (Pato) to rescue her from
subjugation”. As such, she would be “the point of identification in the
story”, so that her cruel treatment of her mother and eventual murder
would “no longer be object of any moral judgment” (Ibid). If indeed
Maureen is to be seen as the sole source of morality in BQL, one must
wonder about the ultimate meaning that McDonagh wanted to convey,
which is certainly not intended only for the Irish people. By combining
Maureen’s physical abuse of Mag with the audience’s sympathy for the
murderer, McDonagh points our attention to a global problem. Connemara
of The Leenane Trilogy thus symbolizes the whole world, which is, as
Marion Castleberry (2007, 52) brilliantly summed up, “a world where
torture and murder define the ethical state of humanity”. At the very
ending of BQL, the last thing the audience sees is Mag’s empty rocking-
chair, still rocking gently, reminding us that murder is futile and that the
solution to global issues lies in the eradication of brutality and a

reassessment of human moral ethics.
McDonagh’s underlying dramatic principles of morality take shape in
the other two plays of The Leenane Trilogy through the repeated
metaphorical representation of gratuitous violence. In A Skull In
Connemara, Mick Dowd, a widower, has the unsavory duty of annually
clearing the cramped cemetery in order to make room for new corpses.
The action of the play begins one month after the gruesome murder of
Mag Folan, so the graveyard clearance is requested earlier in the year. For
Mick, that means having to face his demons sooner than expected, since
one of the graves he has to dig up is the resting place of his wife, Oona,
who died in a car accident seven years prior to the action, while Mick was
drunk and driving. The ominous tone of the play is heightened by the local
aspersions that Oona’s death was not simply a matter of DUI, but that her
husband cracked her head in two before the accident happened. Much of
the play is focused on Mick’s trying to deal both with these aspersions and
with the upcoming chore of disinterring Oona’s bones.
The three other characters who stir Mick to eventual violence are
Thomas Hanlon, the local guard who vehemently believes Mick to be
guilty of killing Oona; Mairtin Hanlon, Thomas’ brother, who is
commissioned to help Mick with the disinterring; and the Hanlons’
grandmother, Marryjohhny Rafferty, whose favorite pastime is stealing
bingo books. Their malicious remarks are meant to provoke Mick into
telling the truth about his wife’s death, but instead bring even more
confusion into the play. The most conspicuous ambiguity concerns the fact
that Mick never reveals what he actually does with the bones after he digs
them up, claiming at one point, “I’ll tell you what I did with them. I hit
them with a hammer until they were dust and I pegged them be the
bucketload into the slurry”, and soon afterwards, “Maybe it’s in the lake I
put them, aye … I seal them in a bag and let them sink to the bottom of the
lake and a string of prayers I say over them as I’m doing so” (McDonagh
2013, 73-74). His irreverent disregard for the feelings of the dead’s
relatives is, however, the most innocent aspect of McDonagh’s startling
dark humour which dominates the rest of the play.
With the action transferred to the eerie, rocky cemetery in Scene Two,
the feeling of claustrophobia deepens. As Mick prepares to dig up Oona’s
bones, Mairtin, a disturbed and somewhat dumb teenager who tortures
animals for fun, idles around with the already exhumed skulls, “placing
them against his chest as if they’re breasts at one point, kissing them
together at another” (85). Mairtin desecrates the one possible holy space
in the play—the cemetery, which is, for Foucault (1984), “a place unlike
108 Chapter Six
ordinary cultural spaces … a space that is however connected with all the
sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each
family has relatives in the cemetery … where each family possesses its
dark resting place”. Located on the outskirts of cities since the nineteenth
century, cemeteries have become heterotopias, places that are “outside of
all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in
reality” (Ibid). In this “other city”, Mick scrapes the dirt from the coffin,
but to his astonishment, Oona’s bones are nowhere to be found. Enraged,
he brings the exhumed skulls into the “heart of the city”—his house, to
exact a little revenge of his own. In the following scene, three skulls and
their sets of bones lie on Mick’s table, as he prepares to do some skull-
battering with the overexcited Mairtin, in a scene which has shocked and
sometimes literally injured audience members:
Yet, there is something perversely de-ritualistic about this scene,

something deviant is being revealed in their obsession and indifference
towards the dead. By the end of the scene there are pieces of shattered
bone everywhere, and … Mick also stamps on the bits of bone that have
fallen on the ground. Fragments at times have the potential to fly into the
audience. Ben Brantley opens his New York Times review of Roundabout
Theatre Company’s production of the play directed by Gordon Edelstein,
at the Gramercy Theatre, tongue in cheek: “Excuse me, but is that a piece
of tibia that’s just landed in my lap?” He reports: “it’s only natural that
some of those soiled white fragments would fly beyond the proscenium
arch. Audience members should be prepared to duck,” adding, “Who could
possibly take his eyes off such a mordant, morbid and oddly ecstatic
spectacle?” (Jordan 2012, 69)
Not only does Mick kill the dead a second time, but he destroys them
“in such a way that they are not afforded a dignified re-location, but
scattered unceremoniously in a slurry pit, along with the waste from
farmyard animals” (72). The skull-battering scene foreshadows subsequent
violent scenes between the characters, triggered at first by Mairtin, who
blurts out the truth about Oona’s missing bones:
Mairtin Maybe a favour it was they did you so, the fellas went and stole
her on you?
Mick No favour was it to me, and if I had the feckers here, then you’d be
seeing some fancy skull-battering. I’ll tell you that. Battered to dust they
would be!
Mairtin Good enough for them, the morbid oul fecks. And not only
stealing your missus then, if that weren’t enough, but to go pinching the
locket that lay round her neck too, a locket that wouldn’t fetch you a pound
in the Galway pawn, I’d bet.
Mick has stopped hammering on the locket’s first mention and stepped
back a pace, staring at Mairtin whose hammering continues unabated,
entirely unaware of his faux-pas.
Mick The rose locket, was it?
Mairtin The rose locket, aye, with the picture of you.
(McDonagh 2013, 108-109)
The last we see of Mick in Scene Three is him picking up a mallet and
rolling it around in his hand for a while, while drunk Mairtin is heard
laughing in the background and starting the car, on his way to get rid of
the smashed bones.
When Mick appears next, his shirt is covered in blood, but neither
Maryjohhny nor Thomas takes any notice of that. Determined to get a
confession out of Mick, Thomas “takes a skull with a large forehead-
crack out of his bag” (115), claiming it to be Oona’s battered skull. Mick
agrees to write his confession, but remains adamant: “I didn’t butcher my
wife. Just like for seven long years I’ve been saying I didn’t butcher my
wife. I never butchered anybody till tonight” (118). However, in a
tragicomic twist, Mairtin enters the stage, “somewhat concussed, a big
bloody crack down the centre of his forehead, dripping onto his shirt”
(Ibid). McDonagh skillfully resolves the plot, with Mairtin confessing he
caught his own brother “carving a hole in Mick’s missus’s skull” (120),
which only prompts more violence as Thomas “smashes Mairtin twice
across the head with the mallet” (121).
The enormous amount of violence and many ambiguities in the play
make one question the veracity of anybody’s claims, especially those of
Mick, who maintains that “tonight was the first night ever that hammering
happened” (125), and that he never touched Oona (126). Left alone with
Oona’s cracked skull, he “stares at it a while, feeling the forehead crack”,
then “rubs the skull against his cheek”, caresses it, and “kisses the cranium
gently” (Ibid) as lights fade to black. Unlike BQL, no actual murder takes
place in A Skull in Connemara, but the audience is left with a growing
sense of unease, though the reason for it is difficult to pinpoint. As
opposed to BQL, the action is transferred from a feminized kitchen space
to the graveyard, which is “the Irish omphalos”, “the centre of continuity
and the meeting place between the worlds” (quoted in Jordan 2012, 69).
This brings a certain metaphysical note into the play, making it engaging
to worldwide audiences, while at the same time exhibiting one of the main
features of the Irish theatre—”obsession with death and dying, more than
with living” (64).
110 Chapter Six
The themes of death and finality, death in life, unbearable boredom,

petty jealousies, and dissension within the nuclear family, are all present in
the final, and arguably the best and most disturbing play of The Leenane
Trilogy:The Lonesome West. Brothers Coleman and Valene Connor are
McDonagh’s supreme anti-heroes. All social values and norms are
reversed to such an extent that, instead of trying to be better than the other
brother, the two are constantly attempting to be crueler towards one
another. McDonagh uses the leitmotif of incessant and growing cruelty
primarily to comment on the practices of the Catholic Church. He does so
by introducing the character of Father Welsh, who is frequently mentioned
in the other two plays as well, in which none of the characters can
remember his proper name and always refer to him as “Father
Walsh/Welsh”. This conspicuous error points to Father Welsh’s inability
to control his flock, which he readily admits: “I’m a terrible priest, so I
am. I can never be defending God when people go saying things agin him,
and, sure, isn’t that the main qualification for being a priest? … I’m a
terrible priest, and I run a terrible parish, and that’s the end of the matter.
Two murderers I have on me books, and I can’t get either of the beggars to
confess to it” (McDonagh 2013, 135). The “two murderers” referred to
here are Maureen Folan and Mick Dowd, and on top of that Father Welsh
later informs the brothers that Tom Hanlon, the guard from A Skull in
Connemara, has committed suicide (147).
These remarks ingeniously connect the three plays and make them
parts of a whole. With two murders and a suicide in his small parish,
Father Welsh experiences a deep crisis of faith and cannot help but wonder
“[w]hat kind of town is this at all? Brothers fighting and lasses peddling
booze and two fecking murderers on the loose?” (140). His dirty language
is the most innocent of his flaws: he is also a drunk and eventually
commits suicide. According to Stephanie Pocock (2007, 61), “[t]he fact
that Father Welsh is deeply flawed and perhaps ultimately ineffectual does
not undermine his value as a positive character, but rather reveals that, at
the core of McDonagh’s vision, hope and despair are ultimately
inseparable”. Hope, the ultimate promise of Christianity, is also
problematized and satirized in the play. Even Father Welsh makes a
sarcastic remark on the Catholic power of confession and repentance: “It’s
great it is. You can kill a dozen fellas, you can kill two dozen fellas. So
long as you’re sorry after you can still get into heaven. But if it’s yourself
you go murdering, no. Straight to hell” (McDonagh 2013, 154).
Based on this Catholic feature, Valene and Coleman are able to
rationalize their mutual cruelty and repent for each wicked act until they
commit the next. The real focus of attention is their strange relationship,
which is slowly revealed during the play. The action begins right after
their father’s funeral, and the tension between Valene and Coleman is
immediately sensed. At first, Valene is portrayed as the selfish and spiteful
brother: a long row of dusty, plastic Catholic figurines, each marked with
a black ‘V’ to indicate that they belong to Valene, can be seen lining a
shelf on the back wall; Valene forbids Coleman to read his magazines, eat
his crisps, drink his poteen or use his new stove, stressing that everything
in the Connor household belongs to him, not Coleman. But very soon the
audience’s sympathy for Coleman slowly begins to fade as his true nature,
much more vicious than Valene’s, is revealed. He is seen secretly drinking
his brother’s poteen, eating his crisps, and throwing all his treasured
figurines into the heated stove. These acts are not a simple matter of petty
revenge for which Coleman should be applauded, but acts of a callous and
psychopathic mind, which the theatregoers realize when Valene reveals
the truth about their father’s death: “A pure accident me arse! … Didn’t
dad make a jibe about Coleman’s hairstyle, and didn’t Coleman dash out,
pull him back be the hair and blow the poor skullen out his head…” (157).
Feeling no remorse whatsoever, like a true sociopath, Coleman answers:
“Of course I shot me dad on purpose … I don’t take criticizing from
nobody. ‘Me hair’s like a drunken child’s.’ I’d only just combed me hair
and there was nothing wrong with it! And I know well shooting your dad
in the head is against God, but there’s some insults that can never be
excused” (157-158). For Coleman, the inexcusable insult was his father’s
negative remark about his hairstyle. But Coleman’s murderous act is not
the most absurd act in the play. The most ludicrous point is reached when
we find out that Valene, “with his dad’s brain dripping down him” (158),
promised Coleman not to tell anybody about the murder, so long as there
and then Coleman signed over to Valene everything that their father left to
Coleman in his will. With this, one finally understands the context of the
power play between Valene and Coleman.
Ironically, Father Welsh’s Catholic medicine backfires: instead of
repenting and changing his ruthless behavior, Coleman realizes that “[i]t’s
always the best ones go to hell. Me, probably straight to heaven I’ll go,
even though I blew the head off poor dad. So long as I go confessing to it
anyways. That’s the good thing about being Catholic. You can shoot your
dad in the head and it doesn’t even matter at all” (181-182). Thus, the act
of killing another human being is transposed from being a gruesome act to
being insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The fact that
Catholicism offers one salvation even after murder on condition that one
repents, has a reverse effect, and killing somebody becomes a much easier
and more tolerable act to commit. Eventually, with three murders and a
112 Chapter Six
suicide in his parish, Father Welsh realizes that his ineffectiveness in the
small town of Leenane derives from the fact that he is not a killer himself:
“Maybe that’s why I don’t fit into this town. Although I’d have to have
killed half me fecking relatives to fit into this town. I thought Leenane was
a nice place when first I turned up here, but no. Turns out it’s the murder
capital of fecking Europe” (162).
As his last effort to fit in, Father Welsh assumes a Christ-like role, and
commits suicide so that he can save Valene and Coleman’s souls. His last
wish is simple:
Couldn’t the both of ye, now, go stepping back and be making a listen of
all the things about the other that do get on yere nervs, and the wrongs the
other has done all down through the years that you still hold against him,
and be reading them lists out, and be discussing them openly, and be taking
a deep breath then and be forgiving each other them wrongs, no matter
what they may be? (170).
Father Welsh’s suicide letter, which pleads for forgiveness, paradoxically

leads McDonagh’s trilogy to a majestic spectacle of cruelty. At first,
taking deep breaths and forgiving is not at all difficult for either of the
brothers, but as their wrongs start to accumulate and become more vicious,
the atmosphere begins to burst with hate and is about to explode. It finally
does so when Coleman admits to having cut the ears off Valene’s dog and
puts the dog’s big black fluffy ear on the table to torment Valene. The
brutal life-and-death struggle that ensues ends with their mutual realization
that the one thing they love more than killing one another is a good fight
(194).
4. Conclusion
McDonagh thus leaves us with “no moral alternative to the violence
and chaos” that his three plays “so bitingly capture” (Pocock 2007, 61).
Apart from the specific Irish dialect of English used in the plays, all the
other occurrences can be seen as having a universal value. Even the
references to the Irish national food and drink products, such as Complan,
Tayto crisps and poteen, could easily be replaced in another setting with
different national products. Above all, in all three plays “violence appears
as a common frame to understand the world today” (Puebla 2012, 317).
By depicting the sinister faces of rural Ireland, and by focusing on nuclear
families that can be found anywhere—mother-daughter, husband-wife,
brother-brother—McDonagh conveys a more global message. If we are to
accept Turney’s claim that “McDonagh’s Ireland is a violent revival of
Beckett’s world in Waiting for Godot: liminal, bleak, purgatoryish/hellish”

(Turney 2010, 43), then McDonagh’s Ireland becomes a universal symbol.
Exile, frequently mentioned in BQL, is not the answer to the characters’
woes, as Pato explains: “[W]hen it’s there5 I am, it’s here6 I wish I was, of
course. Who wouldn’t? But when it’s here I am … it isn’t there I want to
be, of course not. But I know it isn’t here I want to be either” (McDonagh
2013, 22). If McDonagh’s Ireland stands for the world, how can one
escape such a brutal world if not through death?
Nonetheless, it would be entirely wrong to think that McDonagh’s
view of the world is nihilistic to such an extent; it’s rather the opposite.
The overall sentiment of the trilogy is beautifully summarized by Girleen,
the beautiful lass from The Lonesome West, who explains why she likes to
visit cemeteries at night:
“It’s because … even if you’re sad or something, or lonely or something,

you’re still better off than them lost in the ground or in the lake, because …
at least you’ve got the chance of being happy, and even if it’s a real little
chance, it’s more than them dead ones have. And it’s not that you’re saying
‘Hah, I’m better than ye’, no, because in the long run it might end up that
you have a worse life than ever they had and you’d’ve been better off as
dead as them, there and then. But at least when you’re still here there’s the
possibility of happiness…” (166-167).
Acknowledging the possibility of happiness and being curious to see

what our lives will amount to are the two most essential morals of
McDonagh’s trilogy, not that he necessarily intended to give his audience
any moral guidance. Those who see Martin McDonagh as “a challenging
postmodern deconstructor of rural Ireland” and those who see him as “a
playwright who ‘traduces rather than represents western people’7“
(McDonagh 2006, 227) are both right. His plays owe their freshness
precisely to this duality within him, whereas the whether-to-laugh-cry-or-
gasp-with-horror feeling (225) fulfills its purpose of shocking, awakening,
and stirring the theatregoers into action, with endless possibilities.
References
Castleberry, Marion. “Comedy and Violence in The Beauty Queen of
Leenane.” In Martin McDonagh: A Casebook, ed. by Richard Rankin
Russell (New York: Routledge, 2007): 41—60.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture,
Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46—49. Accessed January 17, 2015.
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html.
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Gahan, Peter. “Things Irish, The Matter with Ireland, second edition by
Bernard Shaw; Dan H. Laurence; David H. Greene, Review by Peter
Gahan.” In Shaw, 22 (2002): 200—208.
Gahan, Peter. “Introduction: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary
Tradition.” In SHAW, The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 30 (2010):
1—26.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Ignorance of the Learned.” Table Talk, Essays
on Men and Manners (1822). Accessed February 3, 2015.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/hazlittw/ignrnc.htm.
Hemming, Sarah. “ARTS: Gift of the gab.” The Independent, December 2
(1996). Accessed January 15, 2015.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/arts--gift-of-the-gab-
1312654.html.
Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw, The One-Volume Definitive Edition.
London: Vintage, 1998.
Jordan, Eamonn. “Heterotopic and Funerary Spaces: Martin McDonagh’s
A Skull in Connemara.” In Focus, Papers in English Literary and
Cultural Studies, Issue on Interfaces between Irish and European
Theatre, ed. by Mária Kurdi (Pécs: Institute of English Studies,
Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Pécs,
2012): 63—76.
Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” (1949) Accessed January 11,
2015.
http://faculty.wiu.edu/D-Banash/eng299/LacanMirrorPhase.pdf.
McDonagh, John. “‘When it’s there I am, it’s here I wish I was’: Martin
McDonagh and the Construction of Connemara.” In The Theatre of
Martin McDonagh, A World of Savage Stories, ed. by Chambers, L. &
Jordon, E. (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006): 224—236.
McDonagh, Martin. Plays: 1, The Leenane Trilogy: The Beauty Queen of
Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West. London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013.
O’Byrne, Deirdre. ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ Programme. Leicester:
Curve Theatre, 2013.
O’Hagan, Sean. “The wild west.” The Guardian, March 24 (2001).
Accessed February 3, 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/mar/24/weekend.seano
hagan.
Pocock, Stephanie. 2007. “The “ineffectual Father Welsh/Walsh”?: Anti-
Catholicism in Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy.” In Martin
McDonagh: A Casebook, ed. by Richard Rankin Russell (New York:

Routledge, 2007): 60—76.
Price, Steven. “Martin McDonagh: A Staged Irishman.” Cycnos, 18 (1)
(2008). Accessed February 4, 2015.
http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1682.
Puebla, Esther de la Peña. “Performing the Real and Terrifying Domestic
Crisis in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” Epos,
XXVIII (2012): 307—322.
Shaw, Bernard. Bernard Shaw Collected Letters: 1874-1897 (Vol. I), ed.
by Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985.
Shaw, Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara. New York:
Brentano’s, 1908.
Sierz, Aleks. “What is in-yer-face theatre?” In-Yer-Face Theatre (2000).
Accessed January 11, 2015.
http://www.inyerfacetheatre.com/what.html.
Turney, Aaron Daves. The (De)Evolution of the Irish Anti-hero from
Oisin’s Fabled Isle to McDonagh’s Lonesome West (2010). Accessed
March 5, 2015.
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/2811/1/etd.pdf.
Vanhellemont, Rhea. Martin McDonagh’s freewheeling and slightly
surreal Irish national theatre, in-yer-face!. Ghent: Ghent University,
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, 2009.
Vargas, Juan Carlos Saravia & Vargas, José Roberto Saravia. “Abuse and
Theater: The Dynamics of Power in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty
Queen of Leenane.” Revista de Lenguas Modernas, 19 (2013): 145—
159. Accessed February 5, 2015.
http://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/rlm/article/view/13820/13125.
Wilson, Christina. “‘Because We Are Poor’: Irish Theatre in the 1990s, by
Victor Merriman, a review.” Postcolonial Text, 6 (3) (2011). Accessed
January 11, 2015.
http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1370/1210.
Notes
1
In his essay “On the Ignorance of the Learned”, William Hazlitt claims that
“[u]neducated people have most exuberance of invention and the greatest freedom
from prejudice. Shakespeare's was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the
freshness of his imagination and the variety of his views; as Milton's was
scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare had not
been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To
116 Chapter Six
this we owe the unaffected but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to
know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the
insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators” (Hazlitt
1822).
2
BQL was first performed in February, 1996, and SC and LW in June, 1997.
3
A powdered milk energy drink.
4
Lacan stated that human identity is decentred and exemplified this by the
‘jubilant activity’ of infants the moment they recognize their own image in the
mirror: that is the first anticipation of oneself as a unified and separate individual.
Lacan further claimed that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an
identification, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes
an image” (1949: 503).
5
England
6
Ireland
7
John McDonagh is quoting Declan Kiberd’s article “The Real Ireland, Some
Think”, from The New York Times, 25 April 1999.
CHAPTER SEVEN
REPRESENTATIONS OF MARRIAGE
AND RELATIONSHIPS IN CONTEMPORARY
ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA
SONJA NOVAK
UNIVERSITY OF JOSIP JURAJ STROSSMAYER IN OSIJEK
1. Of marriage: An introduction
In general, marriage is viewed as a formalized union of two people
functioning as partners in a relationship. Any further attempts to precisely
define marriage make one’s head spin, since there have been many
different notions and definitions of this union in terms of what it is based
on (love, economic reasons, political reasons, etc.), whether the partners
are of the same sex or not or whether the union is formalized in legal or
religious terms. Each of the definitions is open for debate in a certain part
of the world at a certain time in history.
The chapter discusses marriage and relationships in Anglo-American
drama after the 1950s, based on historical, sociological, anthropological
and psychological research and arguing that the social changes the
institution of marriage has undergone over the years are shadowed by
changes in dramatic representations of marriage and relationships on stage.
The analysis focuses on American plays by Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? 1962), Christopher Durang (The Marriage of Bette and
Boo, 1976), Paula Vogel (Desdemona. A Play about a Handkerchief,
1993) and David Mamet (Boston Marriage, 1999), and British plays by
Harold Pinter (Betrayal, 1978), Peter Nichols (Passion Play, 1981),
Alexander Kelly et. al (Presumption, 2007) and Enda Walsh (Penelope,
2010).
The research first addresses the issue of how and why the myth of the
male breadwinner and female homemaker marriage model was shattered;
118 Chapter Seven
secondly, it reflects on the societal emphasis on marriage being presented

as hard work and not as an institution that can survive on love alone.
Finally, the chapter explores the types of marriage models as identified in
psychological research in the US.
Views and definitions of marriage have changed considerably over the
centuries, but one constant feature remains. According to Stephanie
Coontz (2005), marriage crises have, contrary to common belief, always
existed, and there is no golden era of marriage in the history of humanity
(1). In her overview of marriage history, Coontz (2005) focuses on the
institution of marriage in the West, i.e. in the United States and Western
Europe. In doing so, she stresses the idea that marriage is becoming more
optional and more fragile: this change in the notion of marriage is caused
by the fact that “relations between men and women are undergoing rapid
and at times traumatic transformation” (Coontz 2005, 4). The reasons for
such fragility of marriage are various – from economic reasons on the
level of the whole society to highly personal reasons on an individual
level. Thaddeus Wakefield (2003), for example, states that the new
capitalism-oriented culture of consumption had a large impact on the
twentieth-century family in terms of profit and economic growth, resulting
in family members not valuing each other through intrinsic humanistic
values but rather being “objectified and commodified by economic
standards” (2). In his analysis of the twentieth-century family in plays, he
explains that
[t]he twentieth century American marriage relationship is based on

economic factors, not religious or romantic factors. Twentieth century
ideologies of capitalism covertly work themselves into the marriage
‘contract’, resulting in the spouse being seen as a ‘thing’ to make money
rather than an intrinsically valuable human being. (5)
Wakefield’s views are supported by some sociological research, for

example, that of Val Gillies (2003) and Annette J. Saddik (2007). Gillies
(2003) states that
[f]rom the perspective of Fevre and other authors (Lasch 1977; Sennett
1998) the economic rationality of late capitalism has pervaded the
domestic sphere and corrupted the way in which intimate social relations
are experienced. Trust and social cohesion are identified as the casualties
of this cultural shift. (11)
As opposed to Wakefield (2003), Gillies (2003) and Saddik (2007),

Coontz (2005) explains how the crumbling of the institution of marriage
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 119
from a sociological, historical and anthropological point of view has been

caused by the influence of the pursuit of romantic love and personal
satisfaction getting in the way of the durability of marriage. Coontz’s
(2005) work explains “why the revolutionary implications of the love
match took so long to play out and why, just when it seemed unassailable,
the love-based, male breadwinner marriage began to crumble” (9). In the
last chapters, Coontz (2005) describes “‘the perfect storm’ that swept over
marriage and family life in the last three decades of the twentieth century
and how it forever altered the role that marriage plays in society and in our
daily lives” (9).
The evolution into a love-based alliance occurred in Western Europe
and North America in the Age of Enlightenment with a “gigantic marital
revolution” (Coontz 2005, 5) and reached its peak in the 1950s when “for
the first time, a majority of marriages in Western Europe and North
America consisted of a full-time homemaker supported by a male earner”
(Coontz 2005, 4), which was viewed as an ideal marriage at that point, or
as Coontz (2005) puts it, as the “culmination of a new marriage system”
(4). Unfortunately, the ideals of a happy marriage based on love,
friendship, mutual understanding, deepest loyalty, open communication
etc., as Coontz (2005) goes on to emphasize, are rare and exceptional
worldwide. The source of disharmony in marriages in Western Europe and
North America today includes a set of new values about expectations from
marriage in terms of sexuality, satisfying the psychological and social
needs of partners, intimacy and affection (23). In a word, individuals have
too high expectations from marriage or a relationship, expectations which
then put a strain on its stability and continuity.
When it comes to contemporary drama in the UK, Aleks Sierz (2011)
notes in Rewriting the Nation. British Theatre Today that “Britain in the
2000s was a place where love not only tore you apart, but also scattered
the fragments to the winds. Marriage was never less popular” (163). In
describing the current situation in British society in terms of relationships,
family relations, youth, roles and tendencies, he continues
In 2007, for the first time the number of births to unmarried couples
exceeded those to married ones. If the traditional family was dead, the new
extended families developed in eye-wateringly complex ways, with a
plethora of relationships, from single motherhood to multiple varieties of
step-parenthood. … Old divisions take new forms: boys, with their toys,
were kidults. Girls were loud, or cheeky, had one-track minds, and
wouldn’t be held down. Women enjoy their middle youth. Female bloggers
such as Bitchy Jones and Belle de Jour developed clit lit with online sex
stories. Speed dating became popular. But despite the bootie calls, what
120 Chapter Seven
most people were looking for is love, actually. In the sex war, both women
and men claimed victim status. Desire continued to diversify. So
metrosexuals, transgendered queens, gays, queers and post-gays partied on,
and many were now in civil partnerships. (Sierz 2011, 163)
Sierz (2011) states that family plays made a comeback on British stages,
but the plays focusing on couples in crisis still remained of interest both to
the playwrights and to the audience. “The idea of crisis-struck couples
took many different shapes” (175), claims Sierz (2011) and goes on to list
a number of plays focusing on love, marriage and relationship problems,
such as mid-life crises of one of the spouses, unsuitable couples, desperate
women and worried men, anxieties of failed marriages, lies and deception,
infidelity, lack of communication, well-kept secrets suddenly emerging
and seeping out of dinner conversations “like a bad smell” (176), even
incest.
2. How the male-breadwinner and female homemaker

marriage model was shattered in the West
The male breadwinner and female homemaker model of marriage was
perceived as the ideal type of relationship in the post-war period of the
1950s. To cite Coontz (2005), this kind of marriage experienced an
“unprecedented surge”, and the 1950s were the “golden age of marriage”,
accompanied by the “post-war baby boom” (226-227). The collapse of this
type of marriage started soon after the 1950s for various reasons: from the
emerging desire for greater personal satisfaction among partners through
convenience, as a result of economic growth, industrialization and
innovations in domestic appliances, which made it easier for bachelors to
stay bachelors, to the invention of the birth control pill, which allowed
more sexual freedom. The biggest change occurred from rising
dissatisfaction with the assigned roles of male breadwinner and female
homemaker when, owing to inflation or higher education and better job
opportunities women started (in)voluntarily assuming the breadwinner
roles and taking an interest in the world outside of their marriage. At the
same time, “[t]he idea that marriage should provide both partners with
sexual gratification, personal intimacy, and self-fulfilment was taken to
new heights in that decade [the 1950s]” (Coontz 2005, 233).
Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? openly
challenges the male breadwinner and female homemaker marriage model.
The summary of the play is all too familiar. The main problem the play
addresses is the overall dissatisfaction with marriage on the part of both
spouses and too high expectations by one of the partners (Martha), to

which the other could not conform (George). Martha was obviously, in
addition to being dissatisfied with George’s work success, dissatisfied
with their sex life, as well and thus started openly showing an interest in
Nick, George’s young colleague. She provokes George in order to restore
their lost intimacy. Albee’s play was written in 1962, right after the
“golden era of marriage” (Coontz 2005) where the male partner has the
role of breadwinner and the female partner has the role of homemaker. In
Albee’s play this myth is abruptly ruined: George is a university professor
and Martha a stay-at-home wife. As such, she needs to fulfil the only role
she knows, the “Earth Mother” (Albee 1984, 189) and creates an illusory
son for them in order to fill the void of whatever they are missing in their
marriage. The myth of the perfect marriage model is shattered in the end,
but with an affirmative idea that there is no need for this “picture-perfect”
illusion of the male breadwinner and female homemaker marriage model.
Saddik (2007) describes the couple of
George and Martha (with echoes of America’s ‘founders’, George and

Martha Washington). … [as] a married couple whose sadomasochistic
relationship is held together by, once again, an imaginary child who
completes the fantasy of the ideal family in an American dream that has
gone perversely wrong. (37)
Christopher Durang’s play The Marriage of Bette and Boo was written
in 1985, at a time when both male and female spouses showed open
resentment towards the roles imposed on them by the ideal marriage
model . Coontz (2005) stresses that the adoption of a “traditional” division
of gender roles often causes much discontent (25); in fact, “the more
traditional the role, the more dissatisfaction” (296) in the relationship. This
is quite visible in Durang’s play. This sarcastic black comedy begins with
the wedding of young Bette and Boo and depicts their marriage and life as
well as the life of their families, as narrated from the perspective of their
first and only son Matt, nicknamed Skippy. The main issues addressed are
the collapse of a marriage in the midst of unfulfilled expectations, both
inside and outside of the marriage. Namely, Bette wants a big family, but
after their first son Matt, they have only stillbirths (the multiple births of
stillborn babies serve as running gags in the play, contributing to the
darkness of the comedy). Boo takes to drinking and towards the end, they
divorce, but the play ends on an affirmative note, since Boo continues to
care for Bette and visits her in the hospital. Bette’s biggest problem seems
to be the fact that she is unable to fulfil her role as female homemaker, and
Boo’s drinking stops him from fulfilling his role of a caring and loving
122 Chapter Seven
male breadwinner. Other depictions of dysfunctional marriages are also

represented in the play. Boo’s parents live in a patriarchal establishment,
with the male spouse acting as tyrant; Bette’s meddling and overbearing
mother smothers her and her sisters into rivalry (Bette and her sister Joan)
and a state of neurosis (Bette’s sister Emily). Bette’s mother constantly
ignores her husband Paul, who has suffered a stroke and is now physically
unable to communicate, nor does his wife allow him to speak, and Bette’s
sister Joan has also separated from her husband. Not one of these
marriages is functional.
At around the same time, i.e. in the 1970s and 1980s in British theatre,
the main topic of interest was marital infidelity. Harold Pinter wrote
Betrayal in 1978, Peter Nichols wrote Passion Play in 1981 and Tom
Stoppard wrote The Real Thing in 1982.
Betrayal is “Pinter’s most dramatically adventurous and emotionally
probing examination of sexual and emotional infidelity” (Raby 2009, 205).
The intensely personal dialogue between his protagonists reveals intimate
states of the betrayed and those of the adulterers. Emma has cheated on
Robert with his friend Jerry, which has violated both their marriage and
their friendship. Pinter’s play is also saturated with strong emotions, but
they play out in calmer, much more repressed dialogue than Albee’s or
Durang’s. Harold Clurman (1966) explains the reasons:
There can be no Othello or Iago in such a situation because modern men

(and women) disapprove of jealousy and the acts of violence arising from
it. They therefore attempt to repress them so that finally they (and we)
begin to doubt the reality of their feelings. (109)
The spouses Robert and Emma, are quite a young couple (in their thirties
or forties), married with children, and Robert’s friend Jerry, in his forties,
is a friend of the family and Robert’s colleague. Interestingly enough,
Pinter does not build his dramatic conflict on the moment in which Robert
finds out about the affair, but begins the play with scenes among the
adulterers after their affair had ended and provides no clear explanation or
reasons for the affair.
On the other hand, Peter Nichols’s Passion Play depicts events in the
life of middle-aged married James having an affair with the recently
widowed Kate, who is half his age and offers him casual sex with no
strings attached. James’ wife Eleanor also admits having had an affair with
Kate’s late husband and James’s friend only after finding out about
James’s fling, bringing their 25-year marriage to the verge of collapse. In
addition to marital infidelity, the play addresses problems such as male
midlife crisis and betrayal among friends, female victims of adultery etc.
Basically, it seems that everyone is having an affair and it is acceptable,

since the mistress and the wife regularly see each other and are aware of
what is going on. What Nichols does ingeniously is to add doubled
characters for the spouses, who act as their alter egos expressing what they
truly think and feel: mainly resentment and bitterness, lack of passion,
problems with living up to societal expectations, inability to maintain the
façade of living a happy married life and boredom within marriage.
The collapse of lifelong, universal marriage also began with the
challenging of traditional norms and the “traditional” marriage by the
feminist movements, Gay Liberation Front, sexual revolution, birth control
development, all of this “forever altering the relationship between sex and
reproduction” (Coontz 2005, 254). The male breadwinner and female
homemaker model of marriage began to shatter on the grounds of
women’s later reactions to the “ideal marriage” as wanting their daughters
to be more than just housewives/homemakers, and men’s complaints about
becoming “trapped breadwinners” (Coontz 2005, 251). So, beneath the
picture-perfect image of marriage lies dissatisfaction on both sides. These
signs of rising discontent can be proven by the extreme rise in the rate of
“no-fault divorce” (Coontz 2005, 252) and the redefinition of “marriage as
an association of two equal individuals rather than as the union of two
distinct and specialized roles” (Coontz 2005, 255).
Suddenly, marriage was no longer the only option, and many people
opted for staying single or long cohabitation before deciding to marry.
Prior to the 1970s, people who stayed single by choice were considered
“sick”, “neurotic”, “immoral” or “deviant”, but “[b]y 1978 only 25 percent
of Americans still believed [this]” (Coontz 2005, 258). This shows that
there was a significant drop in conforming to the norms of a “traditional”
marriage-based society. Coontz (2005) explains that tensions started
rising: women complained that modern men were afraid of commitment,
while men complained that “modern women demanded the same respect
as men at work but still expected a man to pay for dinner” (Coontz 2005,
260). She adds the fact that discontent with marriage had already been
expressed in the “golden” era of marriage in the 1950s, especially by
“happily married women” in beauty parlours, but in the 1970s the
discontent was expressed openly by both men and women, and there was
much anger, tension and distrust, for example, concerning family issues,
especially about the division of chores around the house. “[T]he 1980s and
1990s [were sure] to create ‘the perfect storm’ in family life and marriage
formation” (Coontz 2005, 261).
This collapse of marriage, as shown in these plays of the 1980s,
continued in the 1990s, as well but in a somewhat different form. For
124 Chapter Seven
example, David Mamet in Boston Marriage and Paula Vogel in

Desdemona. A Play about a Handkerchief address relationship problems
by using dramatic techniques such as temporal distance and displacement.
Both works from the 1990s reach into a completely different era, setting
their plot in the late sixteenth century (Vogel’s Desdemona with its pre-
text being Shakespeare’s Othello) and nineteenth century (Mamet’s
Boston Marriage).
Mamet’s play Boston Marriage1 shows two upper-class women, Anna
and Claire, who in living together encounter financial difficulties in 19th-
century America, and in order to maintain their lifestyle, Anna takes a
male married lover for a stipend. At the same time, Claire’s interest is
aroused by a young girl who in the end proves to be the daughter of
Anna’s lover. The intricacy of the play is supported by Mamet’s authentic-
to-the-time-setting dialogue. It depicts the supressed female sexuality and
social circumstances of nineteenth century America in both the upper and
lower classes, since there is another female character in the play – the
maid, whose function will be explained later. Even though Mamet’s
Boston Marriage does not represent the traditional male-breadwinner and
female-homemaker marriage model, it is indicative of its collapse. It
indicates that problems of traditional marriages happen in same-sex
relationships as well, e.g. infatuation with younger lovers, struggling
against assigned and imposed roles of partners (e.g., Anna, who assumes
the role of breadwinner, complains about domestic life and chores and
about getting cold tea etc.) and the impact of outside factors, such as
society, on a relationship. Coontz (2005) mentions that in the Victorian era
the differences between the sexes “made men and women complementary
figures that could be completed only by marriage, it also drove a wedge
between them. Many people felt much closer to their own sex than to what
was seen as the literally ‘opposite’–and alien–sex” (184). Furthermore,
[b]ecause the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted
than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were
common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual
connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of
affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. (Coontz 2005, 184)
Mamet deliberately chose to portray a same-sex relationship with its

problems displaced in time in order to identify the problems as universal,
because at the time such cohabitations were more frequent than one might
expect.
In Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief Vogel turns the idea of
the innocent and virtuous tragic character Desdemona upside-down and
inside-out and comically portrays her as the insatiable harlot of Cyprus.

Similarly to Mamet, Vogel depicts women experimenting and playing
with sexuality, shifting from men to women and vice versa. In line with
the 1990s, this play also signals a break with the traditional thinking and
archetypal roles of women. Vogel’s Desdemona has slept with Othello’s
entire crew and brags about it to her friends–the prostitute Bianca, whom
she sometimes replaces, and her servant Emilia, the wife of Iago. The play
focuses on the female perspective of marriage dissatisfaction and boredom
as depicted by Desdemona’s marriage, which is a male-breadwinner and
female home-maker marriage model in upper-class society. Desdemona
complains that her husband has not lived up to her expectations: “I can
leave the narrow little Venice with its whispering piazzas behind –I can
escape and see other worlds. (Pause.) But under that exotic facade was a
porcelain white Venetian” (Vogel, 1994, 20). The play also describes the
situation for marriages in the lower classes, where marriage is often a
financial union where women have to work as well and where there is no
more love. Emilia explains, “For us in the bottom ranks, when man and
wife hate each other, what is left in a lifetime of marriage but to save and
scrimp, plot, and plan? … I says to him [Iago] each night, ‘I long for the
day you make me a lieutenant’s widow!’”(Vogel 1994, 14). The prostitute
Bianca is, ironically, the only one who still believes in relationships:
Why that ‘new woman’ kind o’ fing’s all hogwash. [...] all women want t’
get a smug, it’s wot we’re made for, ain’t it. We may pretend different, but
inside very born one o’ us want smugs an’ babies, smugs wot are man
enow t’ keep us in our place. (Vogel, 1994, 38)
Coontz (2005) calls the period after the golden era of marriage, i.e. the
1950s, “uncharted territory” and all of us “pioneers” in search of the
perfect relationship, since the old rules no longer apply and there are no
more “reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure
foundation for marriage” (283). In addition to this, it is perfectly normal at
the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century to make
individual decisions on becoming a partner and/or a parent, which makes
marriage, cohabitation or relationship even more optional and fragile.
Gillies (2003) adds that “de-traditionalisation and the concomitant process
of individualisation have undermined the values and identities associated
with family life, thereby weakening social ties and damaging societal
cohesion more generally” (15). This seems to have happened to Vogel’s
Desdemona—she has broken the chains of her traditional role as faithful
wife and homemaker and embarks on a search for sexual liberation equal
126 Chapter Seven
to what men had at the time, but this endangers not only her marriage but
her life as well.
On the other hand, Gillies (2003) notes that this democratisation can be
viewed in a positive light, as it creates room for unions that are more equal
for both partners, freeing
people from the fixed, constrained social roles of the past, allowing them to
create new, more fulfilling relationships based on mutual satisfaction rather
than contractual obligation. …Thus increases in divorce and separation
reflect the rise of the ‘pure relationship’, with people striving for new
associations based on democratic values of respect and negotiation. (15)
This kind of ‘pure’ relationship is depicted in the play Presumption, which

is a collaboration among Alex Kelly, Chris Thorpe and Rachael Walton,
written in 2007 in the UK.
Kelly, Thorpe and Walton’s play Presumption focuses on a generic
couple of thirty-year-olds in a long-term relationship who repeatedly
replay and relive situations from their personal everyday life together–
having dinner and/or drinks, hypothesizing about affairs, contemplating
flirting with others and so on. There seems to be no dramatic conflict, no
catastrophe in sight, just plain endurance, at certain moments maybe a
slight feeling of imprisonment in this long-term relationship, repetition,
intimacy, all spiced with humour. The play depicts what Gillies (2003)
describes as “intimate relationships placed at the centre of human life,
traditional, [thus] contractual notions of family are regarded as having lost
their relevance” (15). Presumption’s couple (in the script version named
Chris and Lucy, in staged versions named Beth and Tom) shows what has
occurred according to Gillies (2003):
With roles and identities no longer fixed, individuals generate their own
relationship rules, leading to a wide diversity in the way intimate
associations are expressed and lived.... ‘Pure’ or ‘confluent’ relationships
are seen as having transcended the instrumental, interdependent
characteristic of previous, traditional social ties. (15)
Their love is not bursting with passion; she is not a stay-at-home wife
waiting for her husband to bring home the bacon every night. She works
and goes out with friends and colleagues. He annoys her sometimes and
she irritates him, but they exist together; their relationship functions on
mutual negotiation and a sort of acquired comfortable intimacy. At the
same time, their union is fragile because they are both aware that things
have changed between them, but they are still not sure whether for better
or for worse–just as the institution of marriage has changed and we are

unsure of its future.
The most recent play analysed in this chapter is Enda Walsh’s
Penelope (2010). With its tentative title announcing to the reader/audience
that the play’s main character is an archetypal faithful wife waiting for her
warrior husband to return home so their happy family can be restored, the
reader/audience is in for a surprise. The play shifts the focus from
Penelope and Odysseus’ perspective of longing for the other to that of
Penelope’s suitors: four men rotting away at the bottom of Penelope’s
pool, trying to win Penelope. It is visible here that “[t]he crisis of
masculinity, a staple subject of much 1990s drama, continued to exert its
fascination, especially on male playwrights” (Sierz 2011, 186). The suitors
Fitz, Burns, Dunne and Quinn have lost their friend Murray to suicide the
day before, but this does not keep them from trying to win over Penelope
before Odysseus returns and takes his revenge. The puzzling setting of the
men in the pool and Penelope on a separate deck above adds to the
absurdist atmosphere of the play. The question is what has happened to
notions of love, marriage and relationships in the play. The suitors are
physically placed far from the unreachable Penelope, who watches them
through a screen projection filmed by a camera. Walsh depicts from the
male perspective the inhumane pursuit of the other half, which has turned
into a sport and a competition. Each of the men takes turns at the
microphone and tries to win Penelope, hoping that this will save them
from Odysseus’s revenge. Odysseus in the play represents the archetypal
strong, brave, cunning alpha male, an idol and role-model, whom the men
strive to be like and whose place they want to take, but with deception and
by trickery. The still young and beautiful Penelope is the prize, thus
holding power over the men. One of the men, Burns, who has been
different from the others all along, realizes in the end that their attempts
are in vain because they are all insincere. They go up in flames and, as
Burns states, “[l]ove is saved” (Walsh 2010, 50). The play tackles the
anxieties of men middle-aged and older who are in search of love or
something they consider to be love. In portraying them, Walsh unveils
their problems with masculinity at the feet of women who have for them
become objects of desire and sources of a renewed and/or prolonged
youth. They fear Odysseus, the cunning and brave hero, a supreme male
against whom the ordinary man has no chance and who will ultimately
destroy them.
128 Chapter Seven
3. Marriage is hard work, but with help, partners can

(in most cases) overcome their difficulties
Once entered, marriage has, according to Coontz (2005) but also to
Kristin Cellelo (2009), always been considered as hard work. In her work
Making Marriage Work Cellelo (2009) stresses that Americans view
relationships as “an institution that couples, and especially wives, needed
to work at in order to succeed” (3). In both Coontz’s (2005) and Cellelo’s
(2009) work, the stress is on people s aspiration to stay happily married or
in a relationship, with the emphasis on the words happy and stay. In the
1950s, the marriage-counselling experts
judged any marriage that did not end in divorce to be a success, and they
urged couples to strive for this goal. For white, middle-class women, in
particular, getting and staying married was an important achievement.
Indeed, the pressure to remain married was so intense that some wives
clearly sacrificed their personal happiness in order to keep their husbands.
In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists would begin to question
the validity of the assumption that marriage should be solely a wife’s job.
(Cellelo 2009, 101)
The plays under analysis will show that, in most cases, partners at least try
to work out their marital issues with or without the help of outsiders, that
women are mostly the initiators when problems are addressed and solved
and that the key to problem solving is communication.
Cellelo (2009) admits that, in referring to marriage counsellors as
experts, she uses the term broadly and loosely, because they have been
widely accepted by the American population as experts on marriage and
relationships even though they do not have standard credentials in
psychology, sociology or anthropology. In the plays, the helpers are also
not experts but often friends, other members of the immediate family or
people with leading roles within a certain social group (e.g., priests).
In most of these plays, attempts to save the marriage are visible.
Albee’s George and Martha are making their marriage work. They fight
intensely, but in fighting, they finally succeed in communicating more
efficiently and, in the end, they tend to resolve their conflict and forgive
each other, allowing themselves another chance. Nick and Honey function
as triggers or facilitators in the process, in a form of passive negotiation
needed to bring into the open the problems between Martha and George so
these can finally be addressed and solved. Coontz (2005) explains that
“[w]omen are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because
they have more to gain from changing these traditional dynamics of
marriage” (312) so, not surprisingly, it is Martha who dominates the action
throughout the play, and by provoking George, she initiates problem
solving, but in the end it is George who, by “killing” their son, allows the
emotional closeness that is still present to reassert itself. Mathew Roudane
(2006) explains,
Faced with the alternative (abandonment, aloneness, loss, rejection, anger,

and so on), George and Martha reformulate their own minimal but
important society among themselves. The fragility of their sanity, of their
marriage, of their very existences acknowledged, this couple reunites.
Forgiveness is brokered. Mixing self-disclosure with self-awareness,
George and Martha recognize their sins of the past and are, perhaps, ready
to live their lives without the illusions that have deformed their world for
the past two decades. They will, Albee implies, work within their own
freshly understood emotional speed limits to restore order, loyalty, and
perhaps even love to their world. In brief, their language at the play’s end,
I believe, privileges a grammar of new beginnings, however uncertain such
new beginnings may prove to be. (40-41)
Even though Durang’s Bette and Boo in the end get divorced, his play
also ends on a positive note, as Boo continues to see Bette in the hospital
towards the end of her life. In this play, it is also the female character
Bette that initiates problem solving by seeking help from outside their
marriage. Although there are no licensed marriage counsellors present in
the play, the priest, Father Donnally assumes the role of marriage expert
when he is called in, or rather, when he is visited by the spouses and their
whole family seeking help. Ironically, instead of helping, he performs an
act of imitating sizzling bacon in a frying pan, adding to the comic effects
and gags and making a mockery of the whole thing:
Young marrieds have many problems to get used to. For some of them
this is the first person of the opposite sex the other has ever known. The
husband may not be used to having a woman in his bathroom. The wife
may not be used to a strong masculine odor in her boudoir. Or then the
wife may not cook well enough. How many marriages have floundered on
the rocks of ill-cooked bacon? (Pause.) I used to amuse friends by
imitating bacon in a saucepan. Would anyone like to see that? (Durang
1985, 64)
Bette tries several times to get Boo to swear in front of Father Donnally to
stop drinking, to try to make his wife and son happy and to stand up to his
verbally abusive father, but unsuccessfully, and she files for divorce in an
attempt to reclaim her right to pursue happiness with someone else.
130 Chapter Seven
In Mamet’s and Vogel’s plays, the role of marriage counsellors or

helpers is assigned to maids and servants whose simplicity and directness
carry a certain wisdom in their statements. In Mamet’s play, the problem
in Anna and Claire’s relationship seems to be their communication.
Bigsby (2004) points out that they constantly compete to be heard by each
other and, at the same time, hardly look at each other, “rarely acknowledging
one another’s presence” (118).
Furthermore, the “Freudian-style psychiatric patient couch at center
stage” (Bigsby 2004, 119) creates an atmosphere of a therapy session at a
counsellor’s office for their relationship. Catherine, the maid, functions as
a helper or inadvertent counsellor by appearing at certain moments of
intense exchange and by absorbing some of the women’s, especially
Anna’s, frustrations. At the beginning of Act Two, Catherine stays to work
in the salon while Anna contemplates aloud and they start exchanging
genuine information about their feelings. Later, in a metaphor about
rowing, Catherine explains to the two women, “Because, miss, like many
things in life, a lack of form can be hid in the short run, its absence being
taken up by power” (Mamet 2000, 38), meaning that you need to
constantly work on something in order for it to succeed in the long run,
even after the initial strength is gone.
In Vogel’s play, a similar role is assigned to Desdemona’s servant and
friend Emilia and the prostitute Bianca. Vogel’s plot plays out in the
laundry room, where the women complain about their married life.
Interestingly, Coontz (2005) reports that even in the 1950s golden era of
marriage , wives complained about their lives in beauty parlors. In
Desdemona, Bianca tries to help Desdemona’s sex life by teaching her
some basics of S&M, the scenes of which largely make up the comedy of
the play, and Emilia tries to advise Desdemona to become a faithful wife
to Othello.
4. Marriage and relationship models and types

As opposed to Coontz’s (2005) and Cellelo’s (2009) sociological,
historical and anthropological research, David H. Olson’s (2000) research
from a psychological point of view focuses on the ways modern families
and marriages function. Olson’s (2000) circumplex model is based on
describing marital and family systems as being balanced or unbalanced,
with their central dimensions of cohesion, flexibility and communication.
Olson (2000) analyses each of the three central dimensions in terms of its
aspects, such as the level of cohesion and its dimensions such as emotional
bonding, boundaries, time, space and decision-making. Based on this,
Olson (2000) concludes that there are different types of families: disengaged
(very low cohesion), separated (low to moderate), connected (moderate to
high) and enmeshed (very high cohesion). The best of the four systems are
the separated and connected systems, since these are balanced and allow
both time apart and time together but also include emotional closeness and
loyalty. Disengaged as exhibiting emotional separateness, and enmeshed
relationships where complete emotional loyalty and closeness is demanded,
are extreme and thus unbalanced systems and prove problematic in the long
run.
In terms of relationship flexibility, Olson (2000) observes the amount
and role of leadership and rules in the relationships and identifies four
levels: rigid, structured, flexible and chaotic. Structured and flexible
marriages, being the moderate levels and thus balanced, are more likely to
succeed and overcome difficulties, while extremes such as rigid and
chaotic systems are unable to function.
When it comes to communication, Olson (2000) treats this as a
facilitating dimension and concludes that a balanced system has good
communication, since its members function well with regard to their
speaking skills (speaking for self and not for others) and listening skills
(empathy and attentive listening), self-disclosure (sharing feelings),
clarity, continuity tracking (staying on topic), respect and regard.
In addition to the circumplex model of family and marital systems,
Olson and Fowers (1993) identified five types of marriages: vitalized
couples, harmonious couples, traditional couples, conflicted and devitalized
couples.
“Vitalized” couples (12%) reported high relationship quality on all

dimensions. “Harmonious” Couples (11%) had relatively high relationship
quality. “Traditional” couples (16%) had scores that were slightly above
average with markedly higher scores on parenting and religious scales.
“Conflicted” couples (25%) were characterized by moderately low scores
on all but the roles scale. The “Devitalized” group (36%) had the lowest
scores on every ENRICH dimension. (Olson and Fowers, 1993, 196).
According to this research, the largest group are the devitalized couples,
who seemed pervasively dissatisfied with their marriage, and many of
these couples took the survey as part of marital therapy they attended
(Olson and Fowers 1993). The research also describes individual partners
in couples in terms of their income, level of education, (the importance of)
religion, age, time spent in marriage, time of acquaintance prior to
marriage, in order to depict all the factors that play important roles in the
success of a marriage.
132 Chapter Seven
Olson and Fowers (1993) describe the groups in more detail. The
devitalized and conflicted couples seemed to be younger and married more
recently, had a lower income and a lower level of education. The
traditional couples were also younger, but married longer and having
more children than the other types, had more education and income than
the less satisfied couple types, and the wives were less frequently
employed. Harmonious couples tended to be older, married for a shorter
period of time, and having the fewest children of any group; the
individuals were mostly more educated and had higher status jobs, and the
women worked full-time, even earned more money, while many men
worked only part-time. The vitalized couples had the highest level of
satisfaction with their marriage overall and stated that they were quite
satisfied with their spouse’s personality and habits and were happy with
their communication and problem solving. The members of this group
were mainly older, were married longer, were more educated and had
higher incomes. Olson and Fowers (1993) stress that “[a]ll of these
indicators are typically associated with higher marital satisfaction and less
stress on the relationship” (203). It can be concluded that better overall
living and social conditions such as higher income and job status play an
important part in marriage satisfaction, but it must be emphasized that this
study has limitations. The current sample is not representative since it
consists of about 6,000 couples who attended marriage therapy, and a
subset of couples was taken from a separate study of nonclinical couples
(Olson and Fowers 1993). Yet, this data can be indicative of several
things: Americans still consider marriage as work and resort to counselling
before divorce; the business of marriage counselling is still alive, and
marriage/relationship is still an important aspect of an individual’s pursuit
of happiness. Moreover, some of the problems identified in marriages in
Olson and Fowers’s (1993) research are communication and resolving
conflicts, which are largely the problems identified in these plays.
If applied to the analysis of the plays, it can be noted that the plays
depict several of these models and types of marriages, often shown at a
moment of breakthrough or progress/regress from one model to the other.
In Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha are
trying to maintain the façade towards the public that their marriage is
harmonious in Olson’s terms. They have been married for some time,
George has a high income and high job status, and they are both well-
educated. Such couples frequently have only one child (Olson and Fowers
1993), the same as Martha and George, at least at first sight. But this
façade soon collapses and their marriage goes through a storm. Over the
course of the play, their marriage system turns from an unbalanced system,
to be more precise, enmeshed, because Martha is very demanding, requires

closeness and emotional loyalty, into a balanced system. In terms of
flexibility, their marriage is chaotic, since George and Martha both fight
for their own stands, but unsuccessfully, partly owing to outside impacts
such as Martha’s extremely influential father, who holds George back
when he wants to publish a novel. There is a change in communication
between them in the play. At the beginning there is sarcasm, anger and
tension; the closing dialogues are calm, emotionally open and cathartic,
but in the end, real communication begins and the relationship might yet
be restored.
Durang’s play The Marriage of Bette and Boo depicts a devitalized and
conflicted marriage. Bette and Boo married young and had been married
only briefly when their problems started. Their families are middle-class:
Boo’s parents live in a predominantly patriarchal marriage, while Bette’s
family is run by her mother in what seems to be a highly religious
environment (religion is also important in Bette’s life as well, which is a
feature of partners in conflicted marriages (Olson and Fowers 1993). For
these reasons, all of the marriage models are unbalanced systems with bad
communication, rigid or chaotic levels of flexibility and disengaged or
enmeshed levels of cohesion.
In Mamet’s Boston Marriage, the circumplex model of the relationship
between Anna and Claire changes from enmeshed, where Anna requires
complete emotional loyalty from Claire, to separated in terms of cohesion
when she allows Claire to pursue her happiness with a younger partner.
Their relationship changes from rigid to structured in terms of flexibility,
since it is Anna who runs the show and makes decisions at the beginning,
but towards the end, their plan becomes mutual. In terms of
communication, their relationship at the beginning is unbalanced, as well;
they talk to each other but it consists of miscommunication, puns and
hurtful remarks. This communication later becomes more genuine and
with that their relationship becomes harmonized in the end.
As opposed to Othello’s marriage in Shakespeare’s play, which in
Olson’s circumplex model is a rigid system in terms of flexibility and
enmeshed in terms of cohesion because it is a patriarchal type of marriage
in which exclusive and complete emotional loyalty is demanded, Vogel’s
depiction of Desdemona’s marriage is unbalanced. It is disengaged in
terms of cohesion (neither of the spouses takes any interest in what the
other does, and they share no mutual interests or common activities) and
chaotic in terms of flexibility (no mutual decision-making or any type of
leadership is shown). In terms of marriage type, it is not quite possible to
identify it, since it is displaced in time into the late sixteenth century, but
134 Chapter Seven
the analysis based on the circumplex model alone shows it to be

dysfunctional and the reasons for that.
The relationship between the spouses in Pinter’s play Betrayal,
according to Olson’s (2000) circumplex model, seems to be a balanced
system: the spouses engaged in common activities that were of mutual
interest (Robert and Emma travelled), but they also had their own
professional domain, which made their relationship, in terms of Olson’s
(2000) circumplex model, separated and flexible, but at a certain point
Robert admits that he does not know his wife, indicating the lack of
emotional intimacy and closeness between them. Moreover, their
relationship is unveiled as dispassionate. Concerning the typology of their
marriage, they seem to be the harmonious type – individuals with higher
job status and income, with one child, but the ideal situation is ruined by
Jerry, Robert’s friend and colleague. Instead of providing reasons for the
infidelity, Pinter was far more interested in depicting the aftermath of the
events of betrayal among such a close and closed circle of individuals.
Passion Play by Nichols shows, at first glance, a harmonious and
vitalized couple of a painting restorer and music teacher, both well-
educated with substantial income, older and married longer (25 years).
Their children are grown and have left home. Such couples, according to
Olson and Fowers (1993) tend to show satisfaction across most or all of
the aspects of their marriage. In vitalized couples, the partners seem to be
especially comfortable with their spouse’s personality and habits, which
seems to be the case here: Eleanor and James are quite content, at first
glance, but Nell and Jim, the characters who stand for their true selves, are
not as we see them exhibiting their true emotions and hear them speaking
from the mind. After both of them have admitted affairs, Nell takes a full
bottle of sleeping pills but is saved by Jim, while Eleanor and James
discuss their relationship and marriage. The play ends with Eleanor and
James celebrating Christmas with their daughter and her husband, while
Jim and Nell in a dialogue with each other explain the real feelings behind
this scene: they are both discontented: Eleanor/Nell wants a lover, not an
old friend, and James/Jim wants both his wife and Kate (Nichols 2000,
109-110). Obviously, this can never be and it turns out that they live in an
unbalanced system with poor communication and disengaged cohesion.
In Kelly, Thorpe and Walton’s Presumption the couple have been in a
relationship for seven years, with no children. Their communication seems
to be off at times, but he still feels the need to tell her he loves her, maybe
in another language (Kelly et al. 2008, 2), making their relationship a
balanced system. Their fears, such as pregnancy and the changes it might
bring, or the what-ifs of affairs are revealed, but after all this re-
examination of their relationship, they conclude that “every single minute

of our relationship is precious” (Kelly et al. 2008, 34) and that “[s]he’s
[love] not gone” (35) and he “do[es]n’t not love her” (2).
5. Conclusion
No matter how one regulates marriage–as a private contract or as a
union recognized by the state or church–unpredictable situations will
occur. “Married life is not only deeply relational but also unpredictable.
Not all of what spouses may properly expect of one another can be
stipulated in advance” (Shanley 2004, 16), as we have seen in the plays,
especially in cases of marital infidelity or at moments of overall personal
dissatisfaction with the relationship.
The echo the plays have had with the audiences proves that we are still
interested in addressing the problems of marriage and relationships, even
though the notion of marriage has become fragile and has changed to a
significant extent in the twenty-first century. Cellelo (2009) asserts that
“[t]he project of working at marriage, together with the public’s
fascination with what makes marriage work, thus remains alive and well in
the early twenty-first century” (163). The most famous of all these plays is
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At the same time it is the oldest
and longest running of all the plays. It won the Tony Award and the New
York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play in 1962. Furthermore,
Durang’s play won a number of Obie awards and is still often staged and
popular, owing to its dark comedy and irony. Mamet’s play and Vogel’s
play are still being staged, as well as Pinter’s Betrayal, which received the
Lawrence Olivier Best New Play Award in 1979. Albee’s and Pinter’s
plays were also adapted for the screen and are still being performed on
stage. Recently, Nichols’s play was revived at the Duke of York’s Theatre
in London and received nothing but praise from critics of The Guardian
and The Telegraph. Third Angel’s collaboration on Kelly, Thorpe and
Walton’s Presumption has toured half of Europe (Florence, Lisbon,
Mannheim, Clonmel, Barcelona, Yerevan and Brussels) since its first
staging in May of 2006. Enda Walsh’s play Penelope won the Fringe First
Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and toured Helsinki, New York
and London. The awards, numerous stagings, revivals and tours prove that
the audience is still very much interested in the institution of marriage and
marital and relationship issues.
In terms of genre, the plays can be labelled as serious drama or drama
in the narrow sense (Albee, Pinter, Nichols and the joint work of Kelly,
Thorpe and Walton), (black) comedies (Durang, Mamet, Vogel) and
136 Chapter Seven
tragicomedies (Walsh), meaning that playwrights mostly deal with marital

and relationship issues not in tragedies, but at most in dramas in the
narrow sense, which are to a great extent interwoven with considerable
humour, sarcasm and irony and in comedies, most of which end on a
positive note.
The analysis of the plays has shown that the notion of marriage as it
was known in the past has irrevocably changed in terms of partner roles,
equality and values. The plays have also shown what Cellelo (2009) and
Coontz (2005) agree on–that “couples today do have to work to keep their
marriages healthy and mutually fulfilling” (Coontz, 2005, 282), with or
without help (of experts, friends or family). The typology of marriages in
the plays corresponds to a great extent to Olson’s (2000) circumplex
model and Olson and Fowers’s (1993) five marriage types.
The open-endedness of the future of the couples in many of the plays
corresponds to the fact that we live in uncertain times when it comes to the
future of marriage and relationships. Gillies (2003) identifies the current
tendencies in sociological research about marriage and relationships as
offering “three major perspectives on the state of contemporary personal
relationships. … breakdown and demoralisation, democratisation and
egalitarianism, or continuity and enduring power relations” (15). What
remains timeless and an unchanged constant is the search for the other
who would best complement us in life.
References
Adler, Thomas P. “Albee’s 3 1/2: The Pulitzer Plays.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006): 75-90.
Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Atheneum,
1984.
Kelly, Alexander, Chris Thorpe and Rachael Walton. Presumption. Full
performance text. Sheffield: Third Angel, 2008.
Bigsby, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Cellelo, Kristin. Making Marriage Work: a History of Marriage and
Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. University of North
Carolina Press, 2009.
Clurman, Harold. The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre.
New York: Macmillan Co, 1966.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Durang, Christopher. The Marriage of Bette and Boo. New York: Grove
Press, 1985.
Gillies, Val. Family and Intimate Relationships: A Review of the
Sociological Research. London: South Bank University, 2003.
Mamet, David. Boston Marriage. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service
Inc., 2000.
Nichols, Peter. Passion Play. London: Nick Hern Books, 2000.
Olson, David H. “Circumplex Model of Marital and Family Systems.”
Journal of Family Therapy 22 (2) (2000): 144-167.
Olson, David H., and Blaine J. Fowers. “Five Types of Marriage: An
Empirical Typology Based on ENRICH.” The Family Journal 1 (3)
(1993): 196-207.
Raby, Peter. The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge:
Roudane, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Toward the
Marrow.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen
Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 39-58.
Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. “Just Marriage. On the Public Importance of
Private Unions.” In Just Marriage, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 3-30.
Sierz, Aleks. Rewriting the Nation. British Theatre Today. London:
Methuen Drama, 2011.
Vogel, Paula. 1994. Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief. New
York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1994.
Wakefield, Thaddeus. The Family in Twentieth-Century American Drama.
New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Walsh, Enda. Penelope. London: Nick Hern Books, 2010.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IS THERE SUCH A THING

AS A POSTMODERN/IST (ANGLO-AMERICAN)
DRAMA?
A BOSNIAN AND HERZEGOVINIAN
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
IFETA ČIRIĆ-FAZLIJA
UNIVERSITY OF SARAJEVO
This chapter inspects academic discourses in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

endeavouring to respond to the enquiry into whether and to what extent
they problematize and discuss postmodern/postmodernist (Anglo-
American) drama. The author first takes a broader perspective, examining
various English language resources, starting from Bigsby (2000), and
moving to Johannes Birringer (1991), Jacqueline Martin (1991), Nick
Kaye (1994), Tim Woods (1999), and Brater and Cohn (1990), before
addressing more recent publications, such as those by Kerstin Schmidt
(2005) and Annette J. Saddik (2007). The chapter subsequently takes a
turn towards its major focus: books and articles published in the languages
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as texts by Gordana Muzaferija and
Marina Katnić-Bakaršić. Through this analysis, the author attempts to
foreground the fact that B&H discourse on postmodernist and Anglo-
American drama is significantly deficient, and to point to possible causes
of this conspicuous absence.
1. Introduction
When I began my doctoral dissertation in 2007, I was frequently asked
about the subject of my research. The response—which included the
postmodern/ists and drama, as well as British dramatist Tom Stoppard—
Is There Such a Thing as a Postmodern/ist (Anglo-American) Drama? 139
almost always provoked unambiguous reactions that usually fell within

three distinct groups. These varied from a very mild, “Why does that name
sound familiar to me, what did he write?” to the somewhat more
propitious, “What does postmodernist drama entail?” to an expressively
resolute, “There is no such thing as postmodern drama”. The first
response, although shocking to me, an aficionado of Stoppard’s work,
suggested that the author is still quite unknown to Bosnian and
Herzegovinian academic, theatrical and literary audiences. This is despite
the fact that Stoppard has written and had performed as many as forty-nine
dramatic pieces and several film scripts, won many awards (including The
New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Lawrence Olivier Award, and
American Academy [Oscar] Award) and been active in the political
sphere, for which he was honoured with the Pen/Pinter prize in 2013.
What this first response additionally implied was the ‘death of the author’,
not because of the web of literary theories and associations that go hand in
hand with any academic research nowadays—especially that which looks
into “postmodern/ist” literature—but related to an unconscious if
miscalculated assumption that the subject of a doctoral dissertation is more
frequently than not the work of a literary genius who is no longer living.
The second response further deepened my understanding that, of all the
major literary genres, contemporary dramatic texts are the least researched
within both theoretical and academic frameworks and that the genre,
regardless of its national prefix, is quite marginalised and still perplexes
many. The third response, no matter how definite and discouraging it
appeared, was based on a different perspective. While I was approaching
Stoppard’s plays as both texts and texts-in-performance, my colleague was
observing them as enacted plays (stage performances), and dismissed one
of my theoretical sources, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre
(1999), suggesting that, no matter how curious and fresh the title phrase
might sound, the true question lay in whether there was such thing as
postmodernist or postdramatic theatre. Although I had already gone
through a range of mandatory texts as part of the preliminary research for
my dissertation proposal, I wondered what might have caused such a set of
(uninformed) responses, and dug deeper into the “archaeological” work of
research, reading and re-reading any print and electronic material whose
title contained postmodern(ist) drama and/or theatre, performance and
similar. Then, in order to draw a parallel between English-speaking
countries (where Stoppard is more or less considered a native), and the
Bosnian and Herzegovinian context, I looked into academic texts of all
formats, whose authors were born or had lived and worked/published in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, I included all those articles and books
140 Chapter Eight
that not only discussed Stoppard—the focus of my interest—but any text

that looked into postmodern(ist) drama, theatre or dramatic pieces composed
by an Anglo-American author. This chapter outlines and attempts to
summarise the findings of that segment of my research, and as such is
inescapably theoretical. For the same reason, it takes a comparative
perspective, first discussing an array of authors for whom British and
American dramatic texts are part of the national literature, then focussing
on a series of texts by Bosnian and Herzegovinian researchers discussing
postmodern(ist) drama, and finally looking into all those who have
approached Anglo-American dramatic authors from any perspective,
regardless of the “postmodern(ist)” modifier.
2. On Postmodern(ist) Drama in English

In the second volume on American drama, Modern American Drama
1945-2000, published in 2000, British theoretician and professor of
American Studies, C. W. E. Bigsby, discusses the relationship of drama
critics with the dramatic genre. He observes that literary theorists and
critics have neglected this genre, and, despite some infrequent exceptions,
theatre and dramatic texts have been largely ignored, as if new plays were
no longer published or performed. As he claims: “[t]here is no single
history of its development, no truly comprehensive analysis of its
achievement. In the standard histories of American literature it is accorded
at best a marginal position” (Bigsby 2000, 1). Five years later, Kerstin
Schmidt, Professor and Chair of American Studies at the Catholic
University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, whose work The Theatre of
Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005) has been of
utmost relevance to my research, arrives at the same conclusion. Schmidt
maintains that the marginalisation of (American) drama is noticeable not
only in academic courses and books, but also in magazines and cultural
texts, the proof of which, according to Schmidt, is Susan Harris Smith’s
observation that in the period 1954–1989 no article centring on American
drama was published in the PMLA (Schmidt 2005, 10). This is
astonishing, considering the number of studies on the thematics of
postmodernism, especially postmodernist fiction. While presenting texts
relevant to her research, Professor Schmidt lists a range of articles by
Philip Auslander, works by Hans Bertens, Patrice Pavis, Steven Connor,
Rodney Simard, and a publication edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn,
whose title Around the Absurd, Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama
(1990) is suggestive of the perspective to be taken by individual chapters
and articles. Schmidt’s long list also includes books by Jeanette Malkin,
Stephen Watt, and Hans-Thies Lehmann, whose titles promise discussions

on postmodern(ist) drama. Schmidt rightfully criticises most of the
aforementioned authors and their elucidations, claiming that they remain
on the surface, lack clear critical or theoretical frameworks, or focus
narrowly on performance, use restrictive terminology, and in some cases,
are completely void of any discourse on the topic of postmodernism and/or
postmodern(ist) theatre and drama (Schmidt 2005).
To Schmidt’s catalogue of texts, titles may be added whose focal point
is performance. These include: Johannes Birringer’s 1991 book, Theatre,
Theory, Postmodernism, which looks into the choreographic work of Pina
Bausch and productions by Heiner Müller and Robert Wilson, among
others; Jacqueline Martin’s 1991 volume, Voice in Modern Theatre, which
examines the activities of the 1960s Group Theatre Movement, in
particular the productions of Chaikin, Schechner, Richard Foreman and
Robert Wilson; and Nick Kaye’s 1994 tome on Postmodernism and
Performance that analyses productions by Foreman, Kirby and Wilson, as
well as the work of The Wooster Group, and contemporary dance. Of the
same nature is Tim Woods’ Beginning Postmodernism from 1999, which,
in the vein of the above mentioned works by Auslander, Connor1,
Birringer, Martin and Kaye, directs its inspection at performance,
experimental drama, happenings and representatives of the contemporary
avant-garde (Woods lists these as follows: the ensembles Wooster Group,
Welfare State International, Brit Gof; directors Robert Wilson, Richard
Foreman, Richard Schechner and Grotowski; dramatist Heiner Muller, and
actor-director Robert Lepage) as proponents of postmodernist theatre.
Similarly, David Sterritt’s article “Expanding the Boundaries of Modern
Theater”, available in Christian Science Monitor (Sterritt 1999), examines
The Wooster Group performance; Dasha Krijanskaia’s “A Non-
Aristotelian Model: Time as Space and Landscape in Postmodern
Theatre”, published in Foundations of Science 13 (3-4) in 2008, examines
the work of directors Eimuntas Nekrosius (Lithuania) and Anatoly
Vasilyev (Russia); and finally, Patrice Pavis’ “Writing at Avignon (2010):
Towards a Return of Narration”, which, published in 2012, is more recent,
and discusses the comeback of narration in contemporary theatre. In his
analyses of The Man without Qualities, What’s the Nest For?, Rhinoceros,
Flip Book, My Secret Garden and The Death of Adam, Pavis employs the
jargon of postmodernist discourses, yet without prior theoretical
contextualisation.
One text whose title or subtitles might lead us mistakenly to conclude
that its theoretical foundation and/or introductory chapter would tackle the
issue of postmodern(ist) drama and that betray the given “horizon of
142 Chapter Eight
expectations”, is Barry Lewis’ text on postmodern literature in the

collection The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. Lewis, as a
justification for ignoring the dramatic genre in the chapter, quotes Chris
Baldick, who states that: “it [postmodernism] seems to have no relevance
to modern poetry, and little to drama, but is widely used in fiction”. Lewis
then contradicts this in the next sentence, as he determines that “it is
possible to find many of the features it discerns in other types of
contemporary writing” (Lewis 1998, 124). Among those works that ignore
(postmodern) drama and/or tackle it superficially is Lionel Abel’s
Metatheatre (1963), which mentions Living Theatre, but fails to provide a
clear-cut definition of metadrama in its approximately 140 remaining
pages. The aforementioned collection of texts edited by Brater and Cohn,
Around the Absurd, Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, fits into
the same category. This collection does not define or discuss postmodern
drama, perhaps because of Enoch Brater’s axiom that “[t]here’s no after
after the absurd” (Brater and Cohn 1990, 300), which concludes the
volume. Similar are Dominic Shellard’s 1999 British Theatre Since the
War; Christopher Butler’s Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction
(2002), which mentions visual arts and postmodern fiction, but fully
ignores poetry and drama; Tom Phillips’ 2002 article “Fifty Years of
British Theatre”, which introduces diverse modern and contemporary
British dramatists, yet contrary to expectations, does not use nor allude to
the term “postmodern”; or Hayman’s Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New
Movements Since Beckett (1979), which mentions Albee, Handke,
Shepard, Stoppard, and even Grotowski and Chaikin, yet on account of its
obvious thematic framework, does not stray from the elements of
Beckettian style as found and recognised in the work of these dramatists
and directors. Yousef Afarini’s equally illusive if more recent article “The
Non-hero of Postmodern Drama (i.e., absurd)” (Nature and Science, 2012:
75-77), proposes to analyse the new figure of the “non-hero” in
postmodern(ist) drama, while trying to differentiate between it, an
antagonist, and an anti-hero. In reality, it discusses the Theatre of Absurd
and finds examples for its theories in the characters of Vladimir and
Estragon from Waiting for Godot, Hamm from Endgame, and Berenger
from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
More informative are the articles of Brian Singleton and Elizabeth
Sakellaridou, (both available in GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and
Criticism [Volume 3, 1995]), Patrice Pavis’ 1992 works, Brian Richardson’s
2001 article, and Randall Stevenson’s 2005 work. In “Interculturalism—
Or the Rape of the Other: Some Problems of Representation in
Contemporary British Theatre” (Sakellaridou 1995), the problematics of
postcolonial criticism are conjoined with the concept of interculturalism

and key tenets of postmodernism. The author founds her examination of a
possible objective representation of the Other on Pavis’s notions of
interculturalism, in a selection of four British plays from 1990/1991
(Moscow Gold by T. Ali and H. Brenton, Mad Forest by C. Churchill, The
Shape of the Table by D. Edgar, and Three Birds Alighting on a Field by
T. Wertenbaker). Brian Singleton is more comprehensive: in his article
“Interculturalist Theatre Practice and the Postmodern Debate” (Singleton
1995), he uses the works of Lyotard, Baudrillard, Martin, Pavis, and the
artist R. Schechner, to position intercultural theatrical efforts within the
spectre of postmodernism (i.e., within the postmodernist discourse) with
relative success. Though Kerstin Schmidt found “The Classical Heritage
of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theatre” (Pavis 1992, 47-69)
to be problematic for her research because Pavis, in Schmidt’s words,
“features French examples only, and ignores American drama altogether”
(Schmidt 2005, 25-26), one cannot find much fault with Pavis. His text is
accurate, precise (although at times perhaps too detailed), and based on
relevant sources, and is directed more towards the performative aspect.
Pavis not only foregrounds the issues of postmodernism in drama and
drama in postmodernism, but also addresses interculturalism in drama,
translatability of the dramatic genre, and the cultural and socio-historical
contexts that might have caused a change of perspective and approach to
theatre and drama studies. Moreover, Pavis lists and explicates a range of
characteristic manifestations of postmodernist theory in dramatic text.
Richardson’s “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama” is more aligned
with than disparate from Stevenson’s The Oxford English Literary
History, Vol. 12 (1960-2000), The Last of England? Although directed at
different fields and levels of inspection, and aspiring to dissimilar goals,
both these marvellous reads give special attention and adequate space to
postmodern(ist) drama in general, and post-war, post-theatre-of-absurd
British drama in particular, including an extensive dissection of Tom
Stoppard’s plays (both claiming, just like Vanden Heuvel and Connor, that
the dramatist in question displays a range of postmodernist elements).
The turn towards postmodern(ist) drama, and drama in postmodernism
is distinctly observable in an array of more recent publications. Kerstin
Schmidt’s The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American
Drama (2005), Annette J. Saddik’s Contemporary American Drama
(2007), and a collection of texts edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Drama and
the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre (2008)2 attempt, and
are largely successful at, a discussion of postmodern(ist) drama and drama
in the postmodern period in a more substantial manner. All three books
144 Chapter Eight
analyse the individual performances and dramatic efforts of contemporary

European and/or American theatre practitioners, yet approach the larger
topic of postmodern/ist drama in such a way as to inspect its individual
generic traits, while simultaneously laying a much-needed theoretical
foundation from the relevant critical, theoretical, philosophical, literary
and cultural postmodern texts. Additionally, in the analytical segments of
their respective works, the authors delve into the field of “canonical”
drama, emerging with a (postmodernist) reading of dramatic works by
authors including Beckett, Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill, Albee,
Kushner, Shepard, Hwang, Vogel, Fornes, and Parks. All three authors
pass the same verdict given by Bigsby and Stephen Watt3: in the more
recent period4 discourse on drama has been marginalised in magazines,
and in academic and specialist publications, specifically in texts that
discuss the “postmodern condition”.
The dramatic genre’s “ancillary” position in postmodernism is
particularly intriguing; therefore, any attempt to demystify the causes of
this alleged “marginalization of drama”, and the claims5 that “classic
commentaries on postmodernism” (Schmidt 2005, 9) and more
contemporary Anglo-American postmodernist discourses ignore it, is of
vital importance. This is particularly true when considering Linda
Hutcheon’s assertion that, although “[i]n most of the critical work on
postmodernism, it is narrative – be it in literature, history, or theory – that
has usually been the major focus of attention ... [t]his does not mean that
postmodernism is limited to this one form in actual aesthetic practice (see
Mazzaro 1980 and Altieri 1984 for poetry; Schmid 1986 for drama; ...)”
(Hutcheon 1988, 5, 38; I.Č.F. emphasis). The text that Hutcheon refers to
as an example of discussion on postmodern(ist) drama is Herta Schmid’s
article “Postmodernism in Russian Drama, Vampilov, Amalrik, Aksënov”,
which was published in the proceedings of the conference on
postmodernism held at the University of Utrecht in 1984, Approaching
Postmodernism, as the only text focusing on the dramatic genre6 (Schmid
1986, 157-184). In this article (whose singularity in the given compilation
indicates the subsidiary position of the dramatic genre in postmodern
discourses) Schmid precedes her discussion by foregrounding the
domination of fiction in postmodern(ist) discourses and studies, with the
rare exception of Jolanta Brach-Czaina, who in 1984 analysed the avant-
garde, Grotowski and happenings. Taking her piece further, Schmid
attempts to establish a theoretical framework and simultaneously elucidate
why she prefers to approach the selected (Russian) dramatic texts through
the focal point of postmodernism: “My preference for the term
Postmodernism derives mainly from the important role of intertextuality in
the texts I shall discuss—references to preceding codes, not only the

Avant-garde but also earlier ones” (Schmid 1986, 163). Here, Schmid
displays a highly helpful tendency, which, as already intimated, has not
persisted in later discussions on postmodernist drama. That is, apart from
foregrounding the problematic absence of the dramatic genre in literary
studies and critical-theoretical literature on postmodernism, she points to
valuable exceptions to the general rule. However, it must be noted that
Schmid refers to an author who has dealt with performance and avant-
garde theatre, which is only one of many possible attitudes and approaches
one could apply in an analysis of postmodern-era theatre and drama.
Schmid explains her analytical foundations by subtly building on the
theories of Brach-Czaina, Mukařovský, Umberto Eco, Felix Vodička,
Jakobson, Lotman and Flaker, after which—through the study of works by
Vampilov, Amalrik and Aksënov—she synthesises a range of characteristic
traits of postmodern(ist) (Russian) drama. Although Schmid limits her
probing to the condition and generic traits of drama in postmodernism, she
succeeds in bringing a theoretical foundation to her analysis that advances
to quite a significant set of conclusions (Schmid 1986). Yet, this trend did
not endure in the literary-critical discourses on the topic of
(postmodern/ist) drama; hence, the previously outlined situation arose: a
researcher may come across a significant number of critical texts on the
topic of postmodernism that fully disregard postmodern/ist drama, and
even among those that address it, there is a long list of commentaries that
appear to tackle the problematics of postmodern(ist) drama, but do so
without a clear-cut theoretical foundation or framework. As a result, a
great number of these commentaries focus exclusively on performance, the
avant-garde, improvisation, and experimental theatrical forms. A third
group comprises all the texts that position their theoretical frameworks
within postmodernist critical theories, and which include not only
experimental or avant-garde drama and performance but also more
conventional, and mainstream dramatic pieces whose analysis is directed
at only a select postmodernist element, such as interculturalism,
intertextuality or self-referentiality. Thus, texts that discuss the topics of
(postmodern/ist) theatre and drama do exist, yet their quality and quantity
remain dubious.
There are researchers, including Watt, Auslander, Bigsby and Schmidt,
who have attempted to diagnose why drama (in postmodernism) is such a
rare and incomplete subject. Having lamented the knotty situation of
American drama and the ignorance with which it is treated by critics,
Bigsby states,
146 Chapter Eight
... though the intervention of the actor complicates the act of reception, the
process remains the same in that every ‘reading’, ‘contemplation’, or
‘enjoyment’ of a work of art represents a tacit form of ‘performance’: and
every performance a reading. That reader may, of course, be in the theatre.
He or she may be on their own, confronted with the printed word. ... But of
course the theatre’s attraction lies in its power to transcend the written
word. That is the key. It is physical, three-dimensional, immediate, and
perhaps that very fact itself intimidated the critic. It should instead have
challenged him [sic]. (Bigsby 2000, 2).
Or, more simply, critics have shied away from the pluralism and multi-
faceted nature of theatre and drama innate to the literary-scenic genre.
Bigsby continues, “On the whole, theatre has commanded very little
interest from the major theorists or those who have taken up their theories.
Not even the question of authorship seems to have stirred much interest,
...” (Bigsby 2000, 11), explicating that it is exactly because of the great
number of individual artists involved in the transposition of dramatic texts
from paper to stage that categories such as “authorship” and “ownership”
are frequently subjected to debate7 (Bigsby 2000, 11-12). Schmidt agrees,
adding that,
[t]he diffusion of the text by ‘outside’ forces and the complication of the
concept of a single author-creator figure result in a ‘worrying instability’
and the necessary incompletion of any dramatic work. ... The context of a
particular performance, the physical space on stage, and the event of the
individual show further complicate the issue. (Schmidt 2005, 10-11).
Yet, both the interrelationship between literary/textual and

scenic/performative aspects which “complicates the concept of authorship”,
as well as the duality of “character/actor” that is integral to any given
dramatic performance, constitute an argument for approaching theatre and
drama from a postmodern(ist) perspective (Schmidt 2005, 11).
Watt and Woods approach the problematics (the lack of application of
postmodern theories in drama) fairly differently, although they both
advocate that the reason is not an absence of postmodern(ist) drama, nor
the perplexing intricacy of the literary-scenic genre, but is rather caused by
readers’ incompetence8. Watt believes that the condition will improve
once the lesson on how to read the postmodern in theatre is learnt (Watt,
1998; quoted in Jernigan 2008, 2), or rather, as Woods points out, “[m]ore
so than fiction or poetry, drama tends to have difficulty in making a
straightforward distinction, between modern and postmodern theatre,
perhaps because what is modernist about theatre has a more vaguely
outlined history” (Woods 1999, 79). More clearly than any of the cited
authors, Woods explains why, when postmodernism in theatre and drama

is discussed, performance is in the spotlight:
Owing to its residual position within our culture, theatre is considered by

some to be a radical form. As it goes against the grain of our dominant
technological and cultural practices challenging the boundaries of what
constitutes classical drama, as well as the space in which that drama
occurs, much of postmodern drama might be called performances, or
happenings... (Woods 1999, 79-80).
Therefore, as it belatedly struts after other cultural products and

variations, which accumulate and resurface in a more concentrated and
intense form, theatre is observed as a radical manifestation of culture.
Additionally, Woods observes, postmodern drama is usually perceived as
performance because of its intrinsic propensity for innovation and
experimentation. Nonetheless, desiring to speak of theatre, and of an
established dramatist and/or impresario, or to make a literary-theoretical
commentary on drama, will inescapably lead to a discussion on
postmodernist influences in the work of the aforementioned dramatists,
impresarios, and commentators on postmodernist theatre/drama, rather
than on postmodernist theatre, postmodernist drama or a postmodernist
author/impresario (Woods 1999, 80).
Philip Auslander’s exposition on the marginalisation of (postmodern/ist)
drama and theatre embraces all of these. Auslander claims that the
problematic (inter)relationship of postmodernism and theatre/performance
—which results in the direct marginalisation and inadequate representation
of drama in postmodernist (whether academic or generally theoretically-
critical) discourse and surroundings—is caused by an “instability of both
terms, neither of which has a single, universally agreed upon meaning”
(Auslander 2004, 97). Furthermore, the author highlights that postmodernism
in performance is a relatively new phenomenon9 and is employed
uniformly, disregarding the specifics of drama, dance or any other
performance art. Auslander suggests it is difficult to enumerate and
elucidate distinctive features of postmodern(ist) theatre/performance,
because of a frequent hypothesis (taken as “fact”10) that postmodern
theatre is a reaction to modern theatre, which in itself is elusive and not
clearly described. The problem is evident: how can postmodern drama be
defined when modern drama has not been? To reduce the latter to realist
drama is restrictive, when we know that “antirealist theatre developed
alongside realist theatre in the 19th century [...] and really constitutes an
alternative strain of modern theatre” (Auslander 2004, 101). The
examination of postmodernism in theatre is additionally complicated by
148 Chapter Eight
the relationship between a text and its performance—the generic condition

of dramatic texts, and concurrently an ambivalent Wildean middle
ground11. Hence, we are offered “very few suggestions ... as to what may
constitute postmodern drama” (Auslander 2004, 102).
Contrary to this, Daniel Jernigan suggests that in contemporary literary
studies and theoretical commentaries on postmodernism, drama is rarely
discussed because the elements of postmodern(ist) style have not become
a norm in the dramatic genre. According to Jernigan, postmodernism in
drama has not come into standard usage because the estrangement
techniques one discovers in postmodern narratives and poetry were
employed in dramatic texts long before postmodernism became a separate
literary and cultural category. By the time postmodernism “appeared”, its
techniques had already been appropriated, and were habitual and
commonplace in theatre. For this reason, postmodernism lacks a
categorising function in the genre (see Jernigan 2008, 3-6), and thus, the
phrase “postmodern(ist) drama” is rarely seen.
3. On Postmodern(ist) Drama in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Academic and literary theoretical discourse on postmodernism in
drama and postmodern(ist) drama in Bosnia and Herzegovina appear to be
more focused, although they share the same general problem of a scarcity
of published works. As is the case with postmodernism in general, one has
to look to periodicals to find such works. A significant lack of
comprehensive books and collections of texts is evident, making books
such as Stilistika and Stilistika dramskog diskursa by Marina Katnić-
Bakaršić, published in 2001 and 2003 respectively, true gems, as will be
discussed in the subsequent chapter. It is quite discouraging that from 956
master’s theses and doctoral dissertations defended at the Faculty of
Philosophy, University of Sarajevo from 1954 to June 2015, (specifically,
from 1971 to June 2015),12 only 22 focus on the dramatic genre,
representing a meagre 2.3 percent of the total sum of research carried out.
Academic and literary periodicals are the biggest source of works on
drama and theatre, even if those that focus on the topic of postmodern/ist
drama and/or theatre are outnumbered. Nonetheless, it is praiseworthy that
those periodicals which provide literary and cultural critical commentaries,
and which have been considered in this research13, each14 published at
least one article on the dramatic genre. The greatest number was published
in Novi Izraz, where 22 articles focused on drama and/or theatre15. Of all
twenty-two in Novi Izraz, the articles authored by Sanjin O. Kodrić16, Sead
Šemsović,17 Dijana Pupić18, and the late Gordana Muzaferija,19 delve into
discussions on postmodernist drama and/or contemporary theatre. Whereas

Muzaferija, Kodrić, and Šemsović examine the postmodernist traits and
techniques of dramatic texts by Miro Gavran, Ivo Brešan, and Pavo
Marinković respectively, Pupić provides her readers with brief analyses
and reviews of contemporary performances (such as Erick Emmanuel
Schmitt’s 1993 play The Visitor, directed by Ljiljana Todorović and
performed in Sarajevo in 2008; or Aleksandar Ogarjov’s version of
Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, presented to Sarajevo audiences in 2007). Of
the remaining texts and analyses, disregarding texts by the author of this
chapter20, the articles that take postmodernist plays as their focus are as
follows: “Prikazivanje identiteta u postdramskom diskursu i eksperimentalnoj
poeziji“/“Presentation of Identity in Post-drama Discourse and Experimental
Poetry” by Dubravka Đurić, which explores the dramatic scope of Ivana
Sajko, and was published in Zeničke sveske: 6 in 2007; and Marina Katnić-
Bakaršić’s “Igra kao stilska dominanta”/”Play as Stylistic Dominant”,
published in Pregled: 1-2 in 2005, which is a review of a book by Gordana
Muzaferija21. Curiously, all aforementioned articles, critical commentaries
and/or reviews focusing on postmodern(ist) drama and theatre were
published in the first decade of the 21st century, an encouraging
improvement22 in the context of Bosnian and Herzegovinian and Western
publications on the issue of postmodernism generally, and Anglo-
American texts on the issue of postmodern(ist) theatre and drama.
Šemsović and Kodrić’s texts interpret individual dramas by the Croatian
authors Brešan and Marinković, applying a postmodernist theory and
perspective. The former examines meta-textual techniques and elements in
Marinković’s Klempajevi (2001), and the latter the intermediality in
Brešan’s Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja (1965, 1971)23. Both
authors borrow terminology from (postmodernist) cultural and literary
theory, attempting first to define and then adapt it to the scope of their
articles. Šemsović provides the reader with a brief description of the terms
intertextuality and meta-textuality, and evokes theorists such as Julia
Kristeva, Anton Popovič, Miroslav Beker, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić, and
Nirman Bamburać-Moranjak. He goes on to interpret the title and structure
of Marinković’s play, as well as the didaskalia, dialogic exchanges and use
of citations within it (Šemsović 2005). Kodrić is slightly more extensive in
both the explication of required terminology and its contextualisation
within the scope of his article; he situates Brešan’s theatre alongside
postmodernist literature, then introduces and defines the term
“intermediality”, backing his explication with a quotation from Pavao
Pavličić. Kodrić then expands his clarification to argue that
intermediality—both in general theory and as a technique in Brešan’s
150 Chapter Eight
play—has not been expansively or explicitly considered (Kodrić 2005,

105), thus problematising the issue.
Gordana Muzaferija’s texts and the aforementioned book “Kreontova
Antigona Mire Gavrana”/”Creont’s Antigone by Miro Gavran” (Muzaferija
2001); “Gavranove igre teatrom/tekstom”/”Gavran’s Play with Theatre
and Text” (Muzaferija 2004); “Glumac u središtu igre (Dio iz studije
Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana)”/”The Actor at the Centre of the Play (part
of a study entitled Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana) (Muzaferija XIII 2004);
and Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana (Muzaferija 2005) centre their analyses
on the plays of Miro Gavran, who has been the most frequently performed
contemporary Croatian playwright since his debut in 1983, and whose
plays have been translated into 38 languages (Gavran n.d., “Miro Gavran
Writer Biography”). As Muzaferija suggests, Gavran’s dramas abound in
meta-textual and metatheatrical games (Muzaferija XIII 2004, 130), so
discussions about his dramatic scope necessarily involve terminology
arising from both postmodernist discourse and dramatic theory. Muzaferija
claims that,
... u Mire Gavrana [je] jedan od najčešćih oblika propitivanja semiotike

pozornice i tekstova pisanih za pozornicu problematiziranje teatra u teatru
– bilo kao teme, bilo kao postupka – što se uglavnom ostvaruje primjenom
pokusa i predstave u predstavi i postaje dominantnim modelom Gavranove
dramatike uopće/
... one of the most common forms of questioning theatre semiotics and
signs of the texts written for stage in Miro Gavran [is] to foreground the
theatre within the theatre – whether as a theme or as a technique – which is
primarily manifested through the exploitation of rehearsal and
performance-within-the-performance, and which becomes the dominant
model of Gavran’s dramatic scope (Muzaferija XIII 2004, 130; transl. by
IČF).
It is noticeable from this excerpt that the dramatist’s strategies demand

appropriate vocabulary and a shift in perspective; hence, Muzaferija takes
a look at Gavran’s plays applying much-needed (postmodernist)
terminology. In the same article, at the point of examining Gavran’s text
Bit će sve u redu/Everything Will Be Alight [sic] (1996), Muzaferija makes
a particularly apt observation of Gavran’s scope and the lucid quality of
postmodernist dramas in general. She claims that the text and theatre
become places of confrontation for the generic, stylistic and linguistic
binaries of tragic vs. comic, elite vs. trivial, local vs. foreign, and archaic
vs. contemporary (Muzaferija XIII 2004, 138). The volume Kazališne igre
Mire Gavrana (Muzaferija 2005) continues in the same vein, acting as the
binding strategy of this extensive book-length scrutiny of Miro Gavran’s
dramas. Muzaferija observes and portrays Gavran’s (playful) postmodernist

dialogue with cultural and literary texts of the past, such as Sophocles’
Antigone, his re-reading of historiography and re-positioning of historic
figures, such as Queen Elizabeth I or Shakespeare, and his frisky portrayal
of his own times. Muzaferija unrelentingly reminds the reader of the
postmodernist distancing employed by the dramatist for the purpose of
appropriation and parodic subversion of a mythic, cultural and
historiographic past. Even though the enumerated texts by Muzaferija24
focus solely on Croatian writer Miro Gavran, they are of enormous weight
to researchers of postmodern/ist drama and theatre. Heading towards a
similar conclusion in her review “Play as Stylistic Dominant”, Marina
Katnić-Bakaršić ascertains that,
knjiga Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana autorice Gordane Muzaferije [je]

primjer odlično i netipično osmišljene monografije o jednom dramskom
piscu, da je uz to rađena sa gotovo opipljivim poletom i energijom, te da
će nesumnjivo biti izuzetno čitana i citirana/ the book Kazališne igre Mire
Gavrana by Gordana Muzaferija [is] an example of an excellent and
atypical monograph on a dramatic author, composed with almost tangible
enthusiasm and energy, and it will, beyond any doubt, be often read and
cited (Katnić-Bakaršić 2005, 219-220; translation IČF).
Katnić-Bakaršić’s four-page review itself deserves the consideration of

researchers into postmodernism in dramatic texts, as it is one of the
infrequent articles and reviews in Bosnia and Herzegovina that scrutinize
and promote postmodern/ist dramatic texts with precision and
thoroughness. Within it, Katnić-Bakaršić discusses Muzaferija’s handling
of Gavran’s texts, not only focussing on the excellence of the monograph,
but elaborating on it and revealing her own inspection of Gavran’s and
other postmodern plays. For example, when commenting on the title of the
book, and the use of the word “igra”25 in chapter titles, Katnić-Bakaršić
suggests that one aspect of Muzaferija’s usage is that theatre necessarily
implies a play, and that plays are enacted. She then claims that another
aspect is related to Gavran’s foregrounding of the play in his dramas, since
his dramatic pieces play with theatre, myth, history, and text (Katnić-
Bakaršić 2005, 219). Additionally, Katnić-Bakaršić provides space to
examine the consequences of subverting a character’s might through
dialogic power plays, adding that such dramatic foregrounding makes
Gavran a highly relatable dramatist at a time of persistent
(de)construction(s) of academic and any privileged discourses (Katnić-
Bakaršić 2005, 219). She states
152 Chapter Eight
Zapravo, Gavranovi tekstovi posebno su oneobičeni, začudni, upravo

prividnim odsustvom oneobičenosti, prividnom jednostavnošću, koja se
odjednom i sama pokazuje tek jednom igrom, odnosno strategijom, jer se
svakim novim čitanjem, svakom daljom analizom i interpretacijom
otkrivaju uvijek novi i novi semantički i stilistički relevantni slojevi./
Actually, Gavran’s texts are defamiliarized, made strange, by their
seeming absence of defamiliarization, a seeming simplicity that suddenly
proves itself a game, that is, a strategy, because each new reading, each
analysis and interpretation unveils novel layers of semantic and stylistic
importance (Katnić-Bakaršić 2005, 219; translation IČF).
“Play as Stylistic Dominant”, however, is not the first, nor the only
critical commentary in which the author raises the term “postmodern/ist
drama”, or correlates dramatic and theatre arts with postmodern theory. In
her book Lingvistička stilistika, first published as an e-book in 1999, then
as the enhanced and edited print volume Stilistika in 2001, Katnić-
Bakaršić pays due attention to the elements of dramatic style in “podstil
drame” (Katnić-Bakaršić 1991, 54-58). The author does not include a
discussion on postmodern(ist) drama in that subchapter, but later, in the
subchapter on the topic of “intertextuality, metatext, self-referentiality”/
“intertekstualnost, metatekst, autoreferencijalnost”26 (Katnić-Bakaršić
1991, 104-109), she refers to specimens of and excerpts from the dramatic
genre to explain and exemplify the dominantly postmodernist elements of
style. Likewise, in her article “Postmoderna i preokret u stilistici”/”
Postmodernism and Turn in Stylistics” (Katnić-Bakaršić 1998, 30-33),
Katnić-Bakaršić expounds on techniques employed to switch register,
illustrated by excerpts from novels by Borges and David Lodge, and from
David Newby’s dramatic text Love and Other Media. This suggests the
direction the author will take in her next publication, which is of particular
significance to this research.
The book Stilistika dramskog diskursa is of utmost relevance for those
interested in research on drama in general, and postmodern(ist) drama in
particular. Among other related issues, Stilistika dramskog diskursa turns
the reader’s attention first to the ‘ludic dialogue’, whose primary function
is a game (“čija je primarna funkcija igra”) (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 155),
then to the interculturalism in theatre (“interkulturalnu teatarsku praksu”)
(Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 191-195), and the intertextuality and self-
referentiality of the dramatic discourse (“intertekstualnost i
autoreferencijalnost dramskog diskursa”) (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 204-
213). The author straightforwardly states the following:
U postmodernoj drami mogu se pronaći postupci karakteristični za

postmodernu u cjelini: intertekstualnost, intermedijalnost, citatnost,
autoreferencijalnost. Metafikcionalnost postaje ključni postupak nekih

drama, a za stilističku je interpretaciju bitna jer nerijetko postaje i njihova
stilska dominanta. Biti tako kaže da, uz prozu, i teatar 20. stoljeća
„podjednako uspješno demonstrira metafikcijsku strategiju” (Biti 1997:
220). Dramski pisac ne može ostati imun na činjenicu da živi i stvara u
svijetu u kojem bi se, po Derridaovim riječima, oko svakog iskaza mogli
staviti navodnici kao znak da je i to citat (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 204).
Postmodern drama employs techniques and strategies characterizing
postmodernism in general: intertextuality, intermediality, citation and self-
referentiality. Metafiction becomes a key stratagem of some of the plays,
which to a stylistic interpretation is of utmost significance as it becomes
such a dramatic text’s stylistic dominant. Hence, Biti states that, along with
prose texts, 20th century theatre “demonstrates metafictional strategies
equally successfully” (Biti 1997: 220). Dramatic authors cannot remain
immune to the fact that they live and create in a world in which, in
Derrida’s words, any statement should have quotation marks as a sign that
it also is a quotation (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 204, transl. IČF).
The author employs terms such as “postmodern drama” and “theatre

practice” and as her examples, she takes texts by established dramatic
authors from former-Yugoslavia27 and globally28, whose plays have long
been included in anthologies of canonical and classic texts. Katnić-
Bakaršić does not question the existence of postmodern drama and
postmodernist theatre, nor does she list postmodern(ist) theatre and drama
exclusively as staged texts, performances, installations, or “happenings”.
She discusses the term and genre as defining a fully-fledged and
autonomous body of texts that display appropriate stylistic elements and
techniques. She also manages to situate dramatic texts from the much
narrower cultural region of the Balkans into the global “postmodern
theatre” scene. The excerpt cited above indicates precisely and clearly
some of the distinct traits and techniques of postmodern drama.
If we compare Katnić-Bakaršić’s discussion on postmodernist drama
with those composed by non-Bosnian authors, we find that they share
more similarities than differences. It is easy to agree with Katnić-Bakaršić,
who claims that a whole array of generally postmodernist techniques and
strategies (the most common being “intertextuality, intermediality,
citations, [and] self-referentiality“) (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 204) can also
be employed to qualify postmodernist plays, which display a tendency
towards “metafiction” as the “stylistic dominant” (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003,
204). She also refers to interculturalism in drama, which frequently uses
foreign language in dialogic exchanges of characters representing the
Other, not only for the purpose of “characterisation of the dramatic figures
through speech acts”, but to express the author’s “orientation to
154 Chapter Eight
interculturalism” because such a direction is “ideologically marked”

(Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 193). Additionally, the examples of “cross-
bordering” that Katnić-Bakaršić defines as a removal of “borders between
theory, that is science, and practice, that is literature” are often found, as
are metadrama, and ludic dialogue, which is simultaneously a playful
game and an “erasure of the old and setting up of the new borders”
(Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 211).
With the idiosyncratic explanations of hybridity, intertextuality,
metatheatricality, self-reference, formal experimentations and innovations
that Annette Saddik identifies as characteristics of postmodern drama (in
the US), the author insists that postmodern/ist drama/theatre manifests
itself in the presentation of shattered and fragmented characters and the
further destabilisation of an illusion of unified identity, because
postmodernist drama “focus[es] on the instability of meaning and
inadequacies of language to completely and accurately represent Truth,
along with an irony and playfulness in the treatment of linguistic
constructs” (Saddik 2007, 6); hence, postmodernist plays are characterised
by dialogic fragmentation. Although Woods focuses on performance, he,
like Saddik, also talks about fragmented characters, metatextuality, anti-
totalizing and open structures, the use of collage and improvisation, and
the deconstruction of a text in its dramatisation as postmodernist elements
(Woods 1999, 81-83). Conversely, Jacqueline Martin suggests that the
goal of postmodernist performance appears to be fragmentation,
metatheatricality, and play with theatre signs, and that postmodernist
theatre is a polyphone theatre in which “there is no linear narrative,[and]
time and place are indefinite as in a dream” (Martin 1991, 119-120).
Predictably, Herta Schmid (who uses the term postmodernist in the
context of Russian drama and is conditioned by the intertextuality in the
plays of Vampilov, Amalrik and Aksënov) suggests that postmodern
dramatic elements include open structure, dialogue that appears to uphold
the principles of daily communication while masking literary motifs and
references; generic hybridisation through the utilisation of narrative
strategies and features in a dramatic genre; and the use of (the
metadramatic and self-referential strategy of) the play-within-the-play,
with the purpose of exposing its nature as a fictional construct. These are
points also raised by Brian Richardson (fragmentation, questioning of
identity and reality, formal experimentation, intertextuality and subversion
of dramatic conventions); Brian Singleton (interculturalism, simulation of
reality, metatextuality, self-referentiality, generic hybridisation and erasure
of the borders between high/low literature); Elizabeth Sakellaridou
(intercultural drama and intermediality), and Patrice Pavis. To this “list” of
postmodernist drama features, Pavis adds relativism, which is manifested

through “rejection of any centralizing and committed reading, the levelling
[sic] of codes, the undoing of discursive hierarchies, the rejection of a
separation between high culture and mass culture” (Pavis 1992, 14). Such
manifestations are used to move theatre and drama away from the
logocentrism caused by essential Lyotardian mistrust in the “grand
narratives”.
The most comprehensive debate is initiated by Kerstin Schmidt, who
claims that postmodernist drama is characterised by diverse forms of
hybridity29, metafiction, self-referentiality, the deconstruction of dramatic
and theatrical signs, intertextuality, irresoluteness and the use of ludic
dialogue, de-hierarchisation of theatre signs and forms, openness of
structure, intermediality, interculturalism, and the use of pastiche, irony,
parody and citation in order to question the established cultural and
literary artefacts that retain traces of the past, present and future. Unlike
Pavis, Schmidt takes the attitude that postmodern drama is not de-
politicised, but quite the contrary, highly political as, with its questioning
of borders and the marginal, it “compels the critics to be more attentive to
the ways in which gender and race are broached by the artist” (Schmidt
2005, 24). This manifests throughout its expected thematic framework.
According to Schmidt, postmodern(ist) drama frequently thematises and
problematizes the fragmentation and transformation of identity in a
contemporary world that no longer rests on the idea of an autonomous,
unified and complete Subject, since postmodernist pluralism assumes that
even identity is a construct, specifically a culturally defined one.
Conjoined with this is the theme of the instability of verbal
communication and communicative media, because everything, including
the meaning of linguistic signs, is fluid. These topics, added to the usual
formal experimentation, have led to an increased use of contemporary
media in postmodern(ist) theatre, in order to better represent spatial and
temporal re-orientation: “spatial paradigms, in this context, endorse
simultaneity and synchronicity”, and “[t]ime is predominantly rendered as
discontinuous and relative” (Schmidt 2005, 74; 76).
Despite the fact that the theorists mentioned here, both Western and
Bosnian and Herzegovinian, have different intentions and discuss
postmodern (and contemporary) drama using diverse approaches and
perspectives, they acknowledge a similar if not identical range of traits that
are displayed by postmodern(ist) drama and theatre.
156 Chapter Eight
4. Anglo-American Drama in Bosnian & Herzegovinian

Academic Discourse
When considering Bosnian and Herzegovinian discourse on Anglo-
American drama, the obvious must be stated once more: texts discussing,
expounding on or reviewing Anglo-American dramatists other than
Shakespeare are rare, and, as was the case with postmodernist (Anglo-
American) drama, periodicals are the place to look in order to find these.
The only more substantial piece of writing that takes Anglo-American
plays as examples for its chief focus is the above-mentioned Stilistika
dramskog diskursa. In this work, Katnić-Bakaršić refers to texts by British
authors profusely when presenting the reader with the stylistic elements of
dramatic texts generally and introducing the concept and elements of
postmodernist drama. Thus, among texts used to exemplify the topic in
question, Katnić-Bakaršić cites inescapable British classics, such as
William Shakespeare and his plays Hamlet (1599-1603), Julius Caesar
(1599) and King Lear (1606); Bernard Shaw and his Pygmalion (1913);
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954); and Harold Pinter’s Old
Times (1971) and Betrayal (1978). However, the author not only touches
on canonical works but expands her corpus to incorporate a range of texts
by English and Scottish authors from the 1980s, including David Hare’s
Paris by Night30 (1988), Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never
Should (1985), Jo Clifford’s Ines de Castro31 (1989), Liz Lockhead’s
Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), and Rona
Munro’s Maiden Stone (1995). Unfortunately, apart from an indirect
reference to David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992)32, there is a conspicuous
absence of dramatic texts by American authors. Still, this should not be
seen as an imperfection in a book that focusses on dramatic theory
generally, and incorporates plays from many times and places.
The list of periodicals and articles that examine Anglo-American
dramatic authors from different eras and perspectives is somewhat longer,
yet comprises only a few names—both among the authors of critical
commentaries and among the dramatic works themselves. Among the
playwrights discussed are Ben Jonson, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and
Tom Stoppard, and the commentators are Srebren Dizdar, and this
chapter’s author. Among Srebren Dizdar’s texts are, “Velemajstorske
partije šaha: dramske strategije Bena Jonsona u djelima ‘Volpone’, ‘The
Alchemist’ i ‘Bartholomew Fair’”/“Grandmaster’s Games of Chess: Ben
Jonson’s Strategies in Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair”
(2004), and “U traganju za izgubljenim dramatičarem: ponovno
sagledavanje drama Harolda Pintera”/“Searching for a Lost Dramatist:
Harold Pinter Re-Considered” (2005). Both works are lengthy and

comprehensive analyses of dramas by the title dramatists. In the former,
Dizdar begins by presenting Jonson, his life and his dramatic scope,
including the critical and public reception of his works. He then embarks
on an intriguing and intricate analysis of the selected plays, basing his
reading on Jonson’s application of classical comedy rules, primarily those
of Donatus, and Dryden’s comparison of Jonson to a “skilful chess-player”
(Dizdar 2004, 172). The latter article focuses solely on Pinter, as it was
written on the occasion of his becoming a Nobel laureate in Literature.
Initially, Dizdar situates the dramatist, thus providing the reader with a
brief, accurate diagnosis of British theatre and drama in the first half of the
twentieth century. Having already presented key details from the
playwright’s biography, Dizdar then expounds on Pinter’s typical themes,
motifs, settings and dramatic style.
Srebren Dizdar’s third article to deal with dramatic authors33—the
2006 text “Pisac u politici”/“Writer in Politics”—is somewhat different in
tone and length from the previous two, as it was composed specifically for
the workshop “Pisac, intelektualac: angažman u vremenu i
društvu”/“Writer, Intellectual: Political Involvement in Time and
Society”34, and subsequently published in the thematic issue of Novi Izraz:
Pisac i angažman (31: 2006). In it, Dizdar discusses political and social
involvement of creative authors and the toll such activism takes, focussing
on Harold Pinter, and the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Within the
scope of the article, Dizdar scrutinises in particular Pinter’s One for the
Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991),
and Party Time (1991), as works that recreate the post-1980s reality
aligned with Pinter’s political persuasions (Dizdar 2006, 40).
To keep this chapter as impartial as possible, and to avoid the trap of
self-promotion, particulars of any of the articles published by its author
will not be presented or discussed at length, even if the texts in question
focus on modern(ist) and postmodern(ist) British drama and theatre, and
authors such as Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard35. It must be noted, however,
that although it appears that American drama is fully disregarded in
Bosnian and Herzegovinian academic discourse, this is not the case. In a
2009 survey on American drama, the author of this chapter attempted to
present the American dramatic scene as extensively and vividly as
possible, promoting, among others, the following authors and their plays:
Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Langston Hughes,
Lillian Hellman, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, D.
H. Hwang, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner.
Unfortunately, due to its span and intention, the text in question does not
158 Chapter Eight
spend much time on the specifics of each author mentioned. For this
reason, a whole series of analyses and critical commentaries ought to be
issued.
5. Conclusion
As outlined in this chapter, Bosnian and Herzegovinian researchers on
Anglo-American drama will find their work toilsome and challenging,
partly because few studies on the subject of English, British and/or US
drama and theatre are published in the languages of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Bigsby’s previously cited verdict haunts the field; it appears
as if dramatic literature is indeed banished from the world of academic
discourse, especially regarding plays created in the last three or four
decades of the previous century. Even though this situation corresponds to
the global condition of (postmodern/ist) Anglo-American drama, the
question remains why this is so, and whether the current state of affairs
will improve. Accessing original works is still difficult, especially for
potential non-English-speaking researchers, since not a single anthology of
dramatic works from Britain or the USA has been translated in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Furthermore, there is a need for more systematic studies on
the subject of (postmodern/ist) Anglo-American drama in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, whether they be monographs, historical surveys or
textbooks. Even though more recent works by American and British
dramatic authors are rarely promoted, there is a rising interest in them,
judging by the quantity of articles in those periodicals that focus on
postmodern/ist drama and/or Anglo-American plays. Novels still hold
primacy in the number of works published, analyses and critical
commentaries, yet this intricate and captivating literary-scenic genre has
its place and should be acknowledged accordingly. The author hopes that
this and other chapters in Highlights in Anglo-American Drama:
Viewpoints from Southeast Europe provide such recognition, and that the
volume is one of many to come.
References
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York: Hill and Wang.
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Notes
1
Both of whom centre exclusively on L. S. D. performed by the Wooster Group
ensemble.
2
Jernigan also wrote the introduction, and a chapter titled “Tom Stoppard’s
Regressive Postmodernity: Tracking the Major Plays from Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead to Indian Ink” (Jernigan 2008, 157-182).
3
In the introduction to his Postmodern/ drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage
(1998), Watt states, while discussing the “problematics of a phrase”—the title of
the chapter—that “[E]ven though the phrase postmodern drama appears routinely
in textbooks to distinguish, say the work of Robert Wilson or Richard Foreman –
or, as we shall see, the plays of Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard – from that of
Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, drama is not always welcome (or safe) in
contemporary theoretical discourse” (Watt 1998, 3).
4
Dating from the post-war period, especially the decades in which postmodernist
philosophy starts to be formulated (1970s onwards).
5
Made by the aforementioned Bigsby, Watt, Woods, Schmidt, Jernigan, and
Saddik (as well as many others who are not tackled in this analysis).
6
Out of a total 12 articles, over 270 pages of proceedings.
7
It can be added that this is a particular issue in those examples of contemporary
theatre and postmodern(ist) drama that propose and promote open structures and
various staging formats for (even ‘classical’) dramatic pieces.
8
In this phrase, the element “readers” refers not only to lay readers and the
uninformed theatrical audience but also (and more so) to informed, “expert”
readers.
9
Taking place in the 1970s and 1980s (Auslander 2004, 98).
10
This is, in itself, a problematic attitude, considering the ceaseless debates on
whether postmodernism is a reaction to or a continuation (and part) of modernism.
164 Chapter Eight
11
A concept derived by Alan Wilde (see Biti 1997, 286).
12
Data on doctoral dissertations defended include the period from the Faculty's
establishment in 1954 until the composition of this article, whereas data on
master’s theses date from 1971 (accessed from the Faculty Library’s online
catalogue, and the website of the Nirsa Centre for academic research, on or before,
June 20, 2015). It should be noted that these catalogues provide information on
doctoral and master’s research carried out in all disciplines offered at the Faculty
of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, as follows: philosophy, linguistics,
literature, cultural studies, history, psychology, and education.
13
These are: Dijalog/Dialogue (covering the period from 1977 to 2012); Dialogue-
International Edition (editions from 1995, 1997, and 1998); Hijatus (publications
from 1995, 1996, and 1997); Hum (2006–2014); Novi Izraz/New Expression
(1998–2013); Odjek (2005–2013); Pregled (2003–2014); Pismo/Letter (2003–
2013); Survey-Special Edition (2008 and 2009); and Zeničke sveske/Zenica
Notebook (2005–2012) (www.ceeol.com, last accessed June 20 2015).
14
Except in the case of special editions of Dijalog-International Edition, and
Survey-Special Edition, both published in English.
15
Of a total of 42, discussing drama or exploring dramatic pieces as their
analytical corpus.
16
Titled “Poigravanja ništavila virtualne stvarnosti”/“Playing Blank with Virtual
Reality” (Kodrić 2005).
17
“Metatekstualni postupak u drami Klempajevi Pava Marinkovića”/“Meta-textual
Proceedings in the Play The Klempajs by Pavo Marinković” (Šemsović 2005).
18
“Fenomen laži u teatru—dva prikaza porodičnog rasula”/“The Phenomenon of
the Lie in Theatre – Two Views of a Family Decline” (Pupić 2010), “Provokativni
teatarski tekst”/“A Provocative Theatre Text” (Pupić 42, 2008), “Otklon od
tradicionalnog zapadnog pozorišta”/“Decline from Traditional Western Theatre”
(Pupić 39, 2008) and “Pozorište kao užitak za sva čula”/“Theatre as a Joy for All
Senses” (Pupić 37-38, 2007).
19
See “Gavranove igre teatrom/tekstom”/“Gavran’s Play with Theatre and Text”
(Muzaferija 2004), and “Kreontova Antigona Mire Gavrana”/“Creont’s Antigone
by Miro Gavran” (Muzaferija 2001).
20
I refer here to “Postmodernistička tekstualnost Toma Stopparda”/“The
Postmodernist Textuality of Tom Stoppard” (Čirić 2007), and “Social
Constructivism and The Other in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Indian Ink” (Čirić-
Fazlija, 2011).
21
The book in question is Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana, published in 2005 in
Zagreb (Muzaferija, 2005). A chapter from this book had previously been
published in 2004, as the article “Glumac u središtu igre (Dio iz studije Kazališne
igre Mire Gavrana)”/“The Actor at the Centre of the Play (part of a study entitled
Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana)” in the Faculty of Philosophy Works, tome XIII
(Muzaferija XIII, 2004).
22
It can be established that the first series of texts discussing postmodernist theory
in Europe and the USA were published in the late 1970s and early 80s, whereas in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small number of such texts appear in the late 1980s and
early 90s, with a greater number in circulation post-2000. The implication of this is
that it took about two decades for the Bosnian and Herzegovinian academic and
theoretical community to gain momentum on this issue. A comparable difference is
detected with regard to discourse on postmodernism in theatre and the dramatic
arts, which in Europe and the USA appears regularly from 1991 onwards, with
more comprehensive texts on the topic being released in the 21st century (see Watt,
1998; Woods, 1999; Connor, 2004; Schmidt, 2005, Saddik, 2007; Jernigan, 2008).
23
This play was composed in 1965, yet it premiered in 1971, the same year it was
first published (Zuppa “Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja/redatelj: Vinko
Brešan – O predstavi”).
24
The late professor Gordana Muzaferija (1948–2008) was a prolific author with
an extensive body of academic texts of all formats and purposes that focused on
the dramatic genre and theatre arts, including an anthology of Bosniak drama, and
an anthology of Bosnian and Herzegovinian drama in the 20th century.
25
This may refer to any type of game, or a play, alluding to and evoking a theatre
performance.
26
This is the chapter’s subtitle.
27
Such as Almir Imširević’s Kad bi ovo bila predstava... Balkanski đavo Sram
(2001), Dževad Karahasan’s play Kralju ipak ne sviđa se gluma (1986) and dramas
by Miroslav Krleža, Miro Gavran, and Ivo Brešan.
28
Including Shakespeare, Ionesco, Beckett, Chekhov, Hare, and other similar
writers.
29
This involves not only generic hybridisation, but the crossing of borders between
high and popular literature, and the erasure of distinctions between imaginative and
real, simulation and reality, and literary theory and practice.
30
Although she does not specify that the text in question is not a stage play.
31
To become an opera by James MacMillan, in 1996.
32
In the subchapter “Cognitive Context in Drama and Schemes” (Katnić-Bakaršić
2003, 119-121), the author mentions J. J. Weber's discussion of power models in
Oleanna by Mamet.
33
In his bibliography Professor Srebren Dizdar has as many as 40 works in
different formats and on diverse topics, ranging from British and American
literature (predominantly the lyrical and narrative genres), to postcolonial
literature, ELT and higher education, to an anthology of English romantic poetry
and translations of general public literature.
34
This workshop was organised by the PEN Centre Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Novi Izraz. It was held on February 25 2006 (Novi
Izraz 31 2006, 3).
35
See References.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SLOVENE BIRTHDAY PARTY ON FILM
TOMAŽ ONIČ
UNIVERSITY OF MARIBOR
1. The Birthday Party on British and Slovene Stages

The Birthday Party was written in 1957 as Harold Pinter’s first full-
length play, preceded only by The Room in the same year. It was not an
instant success – quite the opposite, its London production that opened on
19 May 1958 closed down five days later after it had received extremely
negative reviews, from lightly ironical, to bitterly cynical and openly
hostile. In Michael Billington’s (2008) words, these reviews nearly
strangled Pinter’s career at birth. Billington (ibid.) provides, however, a
selection of events that helped Pinter recover and mentions a few people
who were—unlike the majority—very supportive: the actor Patrick
Magee, who arranged—or at least triggered—the BBC commission for A
Slight Ache; Harold Hobson, who was one of the rare reviewers expressing
admiration for the play and its author; and last but not least his supportive
wife, who encouraged the playwright to continue. Today it is hard to
imagine contemporary British theatre without Pinter’s contribution,
particularly The Birthday Party, which is among his most frequently
staged pieces.
The first staging of The Birthday Party in Slovenia was in 1979, which
is 22 years after its original production. By that time, the Slovene audience
had seen Homecoming in 1967 and The Caretaker in 1970. Since the first
production in 1979, The Birthday Party has been produced four more
times. The next two performances were staged in 1991 and 1997 as
graduation productions at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and
Television (AGRFT), and directed by Mateja Koležnik and Galin Stoev,
respectively. In 2002, a production highly relevant to this research, since it
was produced in film version a year later, was staged in Kranj and directed
The Slovene Birthday Party on Film 167
by Vito Taufer. Finally, the most recent production was again produced at
the AGRFT in 2004 and was directed by Vida Cerkvenik Bren.
Even though Pinter’s plays in general came to the Slovene audience
rather late – the first one about a decade after its original production and
the following two within the following decade – Pinter has been present
on Slovene stages ever since and remains one of the British playwrights
most frequently translated into Slovene.
2. The Slovene Film Version

It is not a common occurrence for a non-Slovene theatrical piece to be
made into a Slovene film. This makes the adaptation of the 2002 stage
performance of The Birthday Party (Slov. Zabava za rojstni dan) into a
film both a special and a rare phenomenon in the Slovene theatre and film
space. It must be noted that, unlike the existing British film versions of the
play (e.g., two major ones from 1968 and 1986), this one is not a fully
independent movie made from scratch but leans heavily on the theatre
performance of the play that was produced in the 2002/2003 season in the
Prešeren Theatre in Kranj. Most of it was filmed on this same location,
i.e., where the stage production was rehearsed and performed (with the
exception of the guest performance(s), of course). Therefore, the film
version in many respects recalls the theatre production, yet it exploits a
considerable variety of the advantages of the film medium, mainly in
terms of camera angles, camera movement, zooming, sound and light
features, and so on. Thus, considering it as a mere recording of a
performance would be highly unjust.
The 2002 play was directed by Vito Taufer, and it featured these
actors: Ivanka Mežan as Meg, who was renamed Meta in the Slovene
translation; Tine Oman as her husband Petey/Pepi; Rok Vihar as
Stanley/Stane, the tenant at the house; Borut Veselko as the mysterious
Goldberg; Gaber Trseglav as his partner McCann/Mičo and Vesna Slapar
as the neighbour Lulu/Lili. After a successful production that was widely
praised and won the best overall production award at the main annual
Slovene theatrical event, The Borštnik Festival, the Slovene national
television channel decided to co-produce a film version based on the stage
performance. The film was recorded on the stage of the Kranj theatre,
while the outdoor scenes, which were added to Pinter’s completely indoor
play, were filmed in the vicinity of the nearby village of Lukovica. The
2003 Slovene production of The Birthday Party is therefore not a random
choice for this piece of research but one motivated by its unusual impetus
and multi-modal representation choices.
168 Chapter Nine
3. From Stage to Screen

In the 1990s, many stage performances were filmed by the Slovene
National Television, a practice that has recently declined to a considerable
extent. According to Taufer (Onič 2015), the recording was often done “at
one go”, but the Kranj production of Zabava za rojstni dan received
slightly more funding in terms of multiple shooting days, probably
because it was an award-winning performance. It is obvious from the film
that this is not a mere recording, but one that displays many aspects of a
carefully planned and implemented work. The features that distinguish this
film production from a mere recording of a theatre performance are to a
great extent connected to precise and dexterous use of the camera. Janez
Lapajne, the director of the film production, employed a variety of shots
and angles to support a number of Pinteresque effects. This was done in
combination with stage light and sound as well as with a number of other
clever directorial decisions.
In the Slovene film of Zabava za rojstni dan, camera angles have been
skilfully employed to support the development of interpersonal relations
among the characters. Depicting these in Pinter’s plays is a substantial
challenge for any film director, since the relations among his characters
are practically never neutral or devoid of friction. On the contrary, Pinter’s
stage creates a constant presence of emotional strain, psychological
violence, undefined menace, and attempts by the characters to overpower
their conversational partners (see Quigley 1975, Schechner 1966). In this
film, inferiority in a relationship is usually shown with the use of shots
from a high angle, which makes the character look smaller and thus more
helpless against the powerful oppressor, and vice versa. In one of his
reviews in The Guardian, Billington (1994) identifies a chain of
oppressors and the oppressed in The Birthday Party: Meg is maltreated by
Stanley, who then turns into a victim of the two men. McCann is himself
at a certain moment suppressed and physically abused by Goldberg, who
is the only character that seems to be outside everyone’s zone of menace.
Pinter’s text, however, allows the director to reveal even Goldberg’s weak
side; this was the case in the production of the National Theatre in London
referred to by Billington (ibid.), where Goldberg shows signs of fearing
his bosses, whoever they may be.
To create an even more puzzling atmosphere, most of these relations in
the Slovene film production are supported by an array of camera angles. In
some cases these come in sequences of relatively brief shots. In the most
intense scenes, this effect is strengthened by zooming in on a selected
object or body part, like a pair of spectacles, a hand, or the back of a head.
Such use of camera exposes a notable difference from the stage presentation:
on stage, there is a limit to the viewer’s angle of vision; the capacity to
expand that would normally be considered an advantage of film. However,
when there is the need to control the viewer’s reactions so precisely, the
camera’s ubiquity is not necessarily a benefit. These camera effects in
such cases are used not to create the usual naturalistic illusion, but to
defamiliarize the ordinary and thus to destabilize visual certainties.
Viewer’s focus in the situations described is thus closely guided to
particular details of interest, while extreme close-ups of characters’ faces
additionally introduce an air of menace, which is a well-known characteristic
of Pinter.
Another technique for guiding the viewer’s attention that is frequently
employed in this film is the inclusion of two faces in the same close up
camera shot. This allows the viewer to observe both facial expressions (or
the lack thereof) at the same time. The sharpening and blurring of the
picture sometimes provides additional cues to the part of the screen where
the director wants the viewers’ attention.
The camera in Lapajne’s film also seems to suggest the intensity of
action by moving closer to or farther from the locus of action. He usually
reserves long and medium shots for neutral and slow-moving action, while
energetic or violent scenes are pulled closer to the viewer with the use of
mid shots, close ups or over-the-shoulder shots. To these features, Lapajne
successfully adds a Pinteresque flavour by choosing a mid shot or a close
up and focusing it away from the viewer’s point of interest. For example,
when Stanley comes downstairs in the first act, the camera focuses on his
hand sliding down the banister rail, showing only the middle part of his
torso in the background of the shot. Since this is the first time Stanley
appears on stage in person, while much has been said about him, it is
natural that the audience is eager to see him. The suspense and mystery are
additionally underlined by a single background tone—a menacing strike
on a low piano key—so this draws the viewer’s attention and increases
curiosity, but Stanley’s face is still not revealed. This film technique
recalls the visual manifestation of this aspect of the Pinteresque, since this
is a visual equivalent to what Pinter does with language: he seems to lure
the audience to build certain expectations regarding the play and then
declines to fulfil them.
4. The Slovene Translation and the Use of Dialect

The Slovene translation of The Birthday Party, i.e., Zabava za rojstni
dan for the Kranj Theatre production, was provided by Zdravko Duša in
170 Chapter Nine
2002. The same translation served as the basis for the film version;
however, there are considerable differences between the 2002 unpublished
translation text of the play and its 2003 film production script. In 2006, a
revised translation of the play was published in book form, together with a
selection of Pinter’s short prose.
One of the first things the viewer notices about the Slovene translation
in the film version is its strong dialectal colouring. Most noticeable are the
non-standard language elements from the Upper Carniola dialect, as well
as those from the speech of the Slovene Central region. It must be
acknowledged that the original play text is not in Standard English either;
however, the English colloquialisms, which are not bound to any
particular locality in the geographical sense, are considerably fewer and
carefully infused into the language of particular characters. Apart from the
mere fact that the inclusion of these elements in the Slovene translation
often has little or no ground in the original, introducing dialect in Pinter
also seems problematic from the macrostructural interpretive aspect:
geographically bound language tends to suggest a geographically bound
character. If the language and consequently location are (easily)
recognizable by the audience, the character is intuitively, even subconsciously,
placed into that region. This, however, is in diametrical opposition with
Pinter’s concepts of the unknown and the mysterious, with which he
invests his characters, as well as background information referring to
them. Save from what is directly visible on stage and scattered misleading
hints, no socially locating context that guides our normative interpretations
of speech and behaviour of the characters is revealed to the audience.
Moreover, Meg and Petey’s boarding house, where the play is set, is
located “in a seaside town” (Pinter 1993, 39); this is another confusing
element in the film, since Upper Carniola is an Alpine region and is in no
geographical connection with the sea, nor is Ljubljana and its
surroundings. The same type of problem has been identified and
problematized in the Slovene translation of Pinter’s The Caretaker (see
Onič 2008, 140-142), where the tramp can be traced back to the same
Slovenian region as the characters from The Birthday Party.
Unjustified introduction of dialectal elements into dramatic texts,
particularly those from the speech of the Capital region, is not an
unprecedented case in Slovene translation for the theatre. The domination
of the Ljubljana speech on Slovene stages was criticized in the early 1980s
by the Slovene linguist Breda Pogorelec, who concluded that this was
unacceptable for Slovene speakers from other regions (see Tomše 1983,
114). She continues, however, to acknowledge the existence of regional
language variants and suggests that these should be allowed and accepted
locally. While there might be arguments speaking in favour of this claim

in the case of a theatre production (even though the problem of potential
presence of non-local audience members and the stated contradiction with
Pinter’s internal dramatic logic do remain), this certainly does not apply in
the case of a television production, which necessarily reaches a wider
audience.
In his thoughts about the use of dialect in the Slovene film Petelinji
zajtrk (Engl. Rooster’s Breakfast), its director Marko Naberšnik (2013, 77)
stresses that film as genre is often perceived by the audience as more
realistic than the theatre. Therefore, it is crucial that the film convey an air
of authenticity, which also applies to the language. Additionally, Zupan
Sosič speaks in favour of dialect (2008, 94), and interestingly remarks that
standard language sells less well, which was empirically proved by Pulko
and Zemljak Jontes (2007). In the case of Naberšnik’s film, the setting is
the Northeast of Slovenia, and the prevailing dialect is that of the region;
however, we should consider the fact that the dialect used in the translated
play is by definition not the dialect of the original setting. The latter does
not overlap with the language or dialect of the translation. It is, therefore, a
different matter when we are dealing with a translated play. In our case,
the theatre version of The Birthday Party was produced in the Kranj
theatre, which offers a likely explanation for the use of this dialect. The
written translation contains dialectal expressions and structures but to a
much more limited extent than the film version. This suggests that the
theatre professionals lowered the level of language even more than was
done by the translator by setting the play almost fully in the Upper
Carniola dialect and the Ljubljana regional lingo.
The 2002 translation commissioned for the theatre performance
contains several dialectal expressions and occasional other non-standard
features. Apart from these, the translation in many passages still gives the
impression of following the rules of the general spoken language (Slov.
splošni pogovorni jezik), which is a less strict and in theory not regionally
bound version of standard Slovene. The translator included expressions
like fejst, popucal, glihkar, kera (their standard equivalents being močno
(Engl. hard), počistil (cleaned up), ravnokar (just), katera (which one)),
while many more appear in the film version and are not there in the
written translation. These expressions include, for example, namalat se,
with the neutral term naslikat se or narisati se (literally to paint oneself or
draw oneself somewhere, but in this case the idiomatic meaning to appear
suddenly applies). Another example is ziher, a strong colloquialism
coming from German sicher (meaning surely) that on film replaces a
relatively lighter counterpart sigurno from the written translation. The
172 Chapter Nine
latter is still marked as colloquial in the Dictionary of the Slovene

Language but in practice shows a more general use than ziher.
The other, even more frequent feature of the film version is the partial
or complete reduction of certain vowel sounds that is typical of both the
Upper Carniola and the Ljubljana manner of speech (see Logar 1993,
Toporišič 2000). Among the reduced vowels, we find i: for example,
pršla, se vidva instead of the standard prišla, se vidiva (meaning came, see
you), which we find in the translation. There are also cases of reduced e:
zlo, toplga instead of zelo, toplega (very, warm) and a: tko instead of tako
(so). Among the frequently lost end vowels is o: jutr, skisan, mlek instead
of jutro, skisano, mleko (morning, sour, milk) and i in infinitive verb
forms: namalat, slišat instead of namalati, slišati. Sometimes the
reduction is partial: aj changes into ej: daj no into dej no (come on), av v
ov: prav into prov (all right) and several other shifts away from the norm.
Of all these, only the reduction of the final infinitival i appears in the
translation, all these other non-standard elements remain mostly in the
spoken version on film.
Another dimension of the non-standard use of language is its
inconsistency. Frequently, this turns out to be an even more distracting
factor for the audience than the use of dialect itself. Even though it is
contradictory to Pinter’s logic, the audience can get used to a certain
variety of language and accept it as the director’s decision. On the other
hand, continuous shifts in the use of linguistic means, particularly if they
are arbitrary, cannot go unnoticed, since the integrity of the character,
which is normally built through his or her language, is constantly shaken
by unnatural language inconsistencies and unplanned shifts that are
perceived by the audience intuitively. In our case, the translation does
have some examples of such inconsistency. Among them are various
reductions, which are mostly restricted to the film version; however, these
do occasionally occur in the written form, for example, mostly the
standard rojstnega dne, vidite, dovolite (birthday, see, allow), but
sporadically the reduced zanimivga, usedte, poslušte (interesting, sit down,
listen). These differences in the adopted level of language do not arise – as
one might seek to explain them – from the utterances of different speakers;
the usage varies even in the use of the same character.
Many of these inconsistencies appearing in the written translation are,
interestingly as well as explicably, mended in the film version. The spoken
utterances are pushed considerably towards dialect, thus wiping out the
inconsistent standard/non-standard written use. The latter is also quite
consistent in the spoken form, a feature which was probably taken care of
by the acting team, the language editor in particular.
Similar “correction” into dialectal use took place in the case of lexical
register shifts, which also appear in the written translation. For example, in
the utterance Si se fejst nagaral davi? (Engl. Have you been working hard
this morning?), fejst is a strong dialectal expression, while davi (this
morning) is a standard and a very formal expression. The same applies, for
example, to Sem mu povedala, naj se podviza, ali pa bo ostal brez zajtrka.
(Engl. I told him if he didn’t hurry up he’d get no breakfast.), where the
phrase podvizati se is very formal, almost literary, while there is no
grounds for that in the translation, where the level of language is lower but
consistent. Both these examples, too, are mended in the film version; the
davi was changed into zjutraj, which is less formal non-standard, and the
podvizati se was turned into zmigati se, a considerably lower register verb.
In a similar case, a very formal verb in the phrase Sem ga primorala. (I
made him [drink tea].) is left out in the film version, most likely because
of the register clash. These changes, obviously, improved the internal
consistency of the film; however, according to Podbevšek 1998, 83–4),
any major changes in the written text should always be done with the
translator’s permission. She further explains the authority of the language
editor.
Another point, connected to the use of non-standard language in The
Birthday Party, has to do with characterization of Goldberg, the senior of
the two men who come to the house and eventually drag the
psychologically and emotionally ruined Stanley away, apparently for
treatment. Goldberg’s language is mostly calm and elevated, almost
solemn at certain moments. It contains many formal stylistic elements,
with which he achieves an impression of rationality, even though, the
content of his statements is sometimes so vague that it becomes trivial:
Goldberg /…/ At all events, McCann, I can assure you that the assignment
will be carried out and the mission accomplished with no excessive
aggravation to you or myself. Satisfied? (Pinter 1993, 60)
Vrbovšek (2013, 39) claims that in the Slovene film version the
linguistic aspect of Goldberg’s character is distorted to a large extent
because of the use of dialect, since this places him, as she concludes, on
the same common level as the other characters, such as Petey.
Dialect on stage as well as on the screen is a phenomenon that will
always hold its place in the world of drama and film. Therefore, dealing
with this issue is as permanent as translating itself. Speaking from film
making practice, Naberšnik (2013, 81) claims that there is no generalized
rule for dealing with dialectal issues. Each case is separate and requires an
174 Chapter Nine
individual approach, the only condition being authenticity. If the dialogue

sounds natural, it is fine.
5. Translation Shifts and Production Changes

The dialogue in the film version of the play frequently moves away
from Duša’s translation; however, the changes introduced into the text are
rarely major ones. Only in a few places, do we encounter a considerable
omission of several lines or a major textual change, while minor variations
of the utterances are quite frequent. Even though they might seem
insignificant at first glance, their synergic effect creates a substantially
different interpretive potential. The importance of retaining this potential
is also understood from Pinter’s statement about the precision with which
he shapes his lines (Pinter 1976, 14). Many of these changes eventually
influence characterization and relationship development, which in Pinter’s
world are never a side issue.
A good example of how the translation is modified in the film version
to its own loss (probably without the translator’s consent) is Meg’s
statement about their boarding house, which is supposedly on the list. This
phrase first appears when Petey tells her about the two men’s inquiry
regarding the lodging at their boarding house, and Meg concludes that
they must have heard about it:
Meg They must have heard this was a very good boarding house. It is. This
house is on the list. (Pinter 1993, 42)
This example demonstrates how Pinter’s concept of the unknown or

the mysterious is subtly infiltrated in the text; a natural question that arises
for the viewer is probably “What list?” At first glance, the context
suggests some kind of catalogue of the best boarding houses in town (Meg
speaks about it with enthusiasm and appreciation), but then neither a
clarification nor a confirmation of this guess is ever offered in the
development of the play. And, of course, boarding houses are not classy
establishments. There is a clash between the potential distinction of “the
list” and the undoubted squalor of the reality. Into this clash creeps the
suspicion that lists are not always places where one wants one’s name to
be.
The Slovene translation is practically literal: Hiša je na seznamu.
(Engl., word-for-word: house is on list), while in the film version it is
changed into Ta hiša ima renome. (This house has a [good] reputation, a
good name.). The problem that arises and eventually blunts the sharpness
of Pinter’s text, which intentionally fails to communicate reassuring

information through the “dialogue in standard English form with
conversation getting nowhere” (Schechner 1966, 176), is that the changed
utterance leaves no open questions. To have a [good] reputation is a non-
ambiguous phrase with its semantic aspect clearly expressed. Meg uses the
phrase twice more, both times unchanged, and this recurrence is kept both
in the translation and in the film version. Therefore, in both cases the
effect of the iteration is intensified, of course, differently in each case. In
the translation (following the original), it intensifies the audience’s
curiosity and impression of the seeming importance of “the list”, which by
additional mentioning and continued lack of any hint about its nature
increases the sensation of mystery and consequently Pinter’s “menace“. In
the film version, on the other hand, the interpretive potential develops in
the opposite direction, i.e., it reassures the audience with an absolute and
unquestionable statement that raises no questions and thus causes no
unease. The isolated effect of this stylistic feature is probably minimal, but
one cannot neglect the cumulative effect that rests on numerous similar
instances leaving the impression of missing crucial information and
consequently conveying Pinter’s concept of menace.
Textual modifications that are not in line with Pinter’s interpretive
potential can also have an unwanted impact on characterization. If this
happens on a larger scale, it can change or distort the characters, their
interpersonal relations and eventually the dramatic structure. As previous
research has shown (e.g., Hribar 2004, Onič 2006, etc.), these
modifications are usually minor, almost insignificant; however, similarly
to the point previously made, the cumulative effect of multiple instances
of the kind can be considerable. Such an example is changing a when-
clause into an if-clause in the first scene of the play. Petey is reading the
newspaper and Meg asks him to tell her “when [he] come[s] to something
good”. In the 2002 Slovene translation this is rendered accurately, but the
film version changes this into “A mi boš povedal, če bo kaj zanimivega?”
(“Will you tell me if you come to something good?”). This alteration may
seem negligible – which it would be in casual colloquial speech –, but in
Pinter’s meticulously constructed sentences, this cannot be a coincidence.
Using when, Meg is determined to win Petey’s cooperation, and this goes
well with her character as outlined in the scarce number of lines preceding
this utterance. On the other hand, if would suggest that she is a more
passive and less enthusiastic character, who would be equally satisfied if
Petey never reads her anything from the paper. This, of course, changes
the interpretive potential of the original Meg and in our case also the one
in Duša’s translation. Darja Hribar (1999, 135), who analysed the 1979
176 Chapter Nine
translation of The Birthday Party by Janez Žmavc and its three variants,
adapted by various theatre practitioners, finds that, except for the one
stored by the Slovene Theatre Museum, all other variants contain the same
shift, i.e., they change when into if. It is unclear why this particular variant
changed ko (when) “back” into če (if), thus bringing it closer to Pinter’s
original; Hribar (ibid.) believes that this was done unwittingly and,
therefore, without a particular purpose.
Similar characterization issues can also result from more substantial
translation or adaptation shifts, like deleting, adding or reshaping
utterances. This can be illustrated with a deletion of Meg’s utterance in the
follow-up of Act I when Petey talks to Meg about a show coming to town:
Petey This is a straight show.

Meg What do you mean?
Petey No dancing or singing.
Meg What do they do then?
Petey They just talk. (Pinter 1993, 43)
The written translation retains the number of utterances and text

distribution, while the film version drops Meg’s second question and
merges the Petey’s two previous utterances into one:
Petey To je navadna predstava. Brez plesa pa petja.

/This is a straight show. No singing or dancing./
Meg Kako to misliš?
/What do you mean?/
Petey Samo govorijo.
/They just talk./
The merging of utterances acts against Petey’s characterization. His

enthusiasm for keeping the conversation with his wife going is
diametrically opposite from hers. From his behaviour as well as from the
style of his utterances, it is only too obvious that he wants to participate as
little as possible. The instances in which he starts a conversation in the
original text are scarce, and his answers are as a rule boiled down to a
sheer minimum regarding the effort invested in his reply. In the original
dialogue, Meg must extort from him every bit of information, while the
Slovene Petey is quite generous in his speech: by willingly explaining
what he meant by navadna predstava (straight show), he demonstrates
more interest in the conversation than his counterpart in the original.
Moreover, some of the humour is lost by removing Meg’s question about
what they do in a show without dancing or singing – just talk.
Characterization that is incongruent with traditional interpretation of

Pinter’s text in the film version can lead to an even greater deviation
caused by directorial decisions. For example, when Petey eats the
cornflakes served out by his wife, she asks him, whether they were “nice”:
Petey I’ve finished my cornflakes.

Meg Were they nice?
Petey Very nice. (Pinter 1993, 39)
Again, Petey’s answer is brief and displays minimum effort on his part.
His choice of word shows his low interest because of the repetition – he
repeats Meg’s word nice, but also because of the word itself, which is
vague and weak in terms of semantic strength. On top of this, the audience
cannot fail to acknowledge the pointlessness of Meg’s asking about the
taste of cornflakes that come from the same box every morning, and
whose taste cannot vary all that much. In the Slovene translation, Meg’s
question So ti pasal? (Engl. Were they agreeable to you? / Did you like
them?) is not asking about the taste of cornflakes as in the original, but
refers to Petey’s feelings while eating the cereal. Therefore, the Slovene
dialogue between the spouses makes more sense than that in the original
language, since asking for her husband’s appreciation of the food is, in
fact, asking for a piece of information Meg does not possess – as opposed
to the dialogue in the original. So, it is not only that increasing the level of
information flow in a dialogue must be considered a serious translation
shift, but this shift is intensified by the directorial decision, according to
which Petey smiles at Meg while delivering his reply Zlo pasal. (I liked
them very much.). Such emotional participation in the interaction with his
wife at the breakfast table is beyond what Petey’s character can
accommodate.
The final observation in this section addresses the issue of the outdoor
scene(s) in the Slovene film version of the play. One typically Pinteresque
characteristic that can be applied to practically all of Pinter’s plays is their
rigorous restriction to closed space. The plays are almost always set in
windowless rooms. If there are any windows, these either crowd up
against the ceiling or look onto some neglected enclosed garden. Pinter’s
characters never leave the rooms they inhabit; the same is true for The
Birthday Party. Stanley’s inability to leave the house is the main reason
that he cannot escape the two men, even though Petey has announced their
arrival a day before. With this in mind, the directorial decision to include
an outdoor scene is a surprising one. After the first scene with Lulu,
Stanley leaves the house and walks along a moderately descending park
path to a lakeshore. Apart from this outdoor scene, there are also instances
178 Chapter Nine
when the camera shows the house from outside, as is usually done in TV
series in order to inform the viewer about the location of the scene that
follows. Here, however, providing the location of the events seems
unnecessary, since Pinter’s whole play happens in one indoor location, and
the playwright seemed uninterested in providing information about its
locality to the audience.
It is true that the possibilities of a theatre performance are in this sense
more limited, so a director is less easily tempted to move the scenes
outside in a stage production (i.e., change of scene) than in a televised
play, but the question of its interpretive dimension remains open. The
question of moving the set to an outdoor location is, obviously, not an
issue of possibility but of interpretive potential. The Slovene film
production is, however, not the only film version of The Birthday Party
that includes outside scenes. The 1968 British film, directed by William
Friedkin, opens with a long shot of a beach in a British-looking seaside
town, then the camera is set at the windscreen of an obviously expensive
car and travels through the town streets, seemingly towards the boarding
house. Unlike Stanley’s stroll into the outdoors, however, no characters
are shown in Friedkin’s film before Petey enters the room. This directorial
decision can thus be reconciled with the original script, since it can be
claimed that Friedkin made good use of the possibilities offered by the
television medium to convey to the viewer the information that the play is
set in a seaside town, which Pinter provides in the didascalia.
6. Conclusion
As this paper has attempted to demonstrate, the Slovene 2003 film
version of The Birthday Party contains many stylistic and linguistic
elements as well as directorial decisions that both intensify its Pinteresque
features and weaken its compact dramatic structure. These do not
necessarily come as a direct consequence of the changed medium, i.e.,
from the theatre stage to television screen, although some do.
The use of dialect probably falls in the former category, since this
feature is not inseparably connected to the film medium; it could also
happen in a non-televised performance; such was the case in the 2002
stage production of The Birthday Party on which the film version is based.
Moreover, this is far from being the only case of a stage production where
dialect is introduced, most of the time without grounds for it in the original
text. Several directorial decisions regarding camera angles and various
kinds of shots, however, are good representatives of the latter category,
since these are the features that a theatre director does not have at his/her
disposal. In the case of the Slovene production of The Birthday Party,

most of these are meaningful and valuable additions to the stage
production, thus extending the play’s interpretive potential.
References
Billington, Michael. “Fighting Talk” The Guardian. 3 May (2008).
—. “The Birthday Party”, review. The Guardian, 19 March (1994).
Hribar, Darja Darinka. Sestavine sloga Harolda Pinterja v slovenskih
prevodih: vpliv slogovnih posebnosti na sprejemanje na Slovenskem,
unpublished doctoral dissertation. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta,
1999.
—. “Harold Pinter in Slovene translations” ELOPE 1(1/2) (2004): 195–
208.
Logar, Tine. Slovenska narečja. Besedila. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga,
1993.
Naberšnik, Marko. “Narečje kot filmski govor.” In Govor med znanostjo
in umetnostjo, ed. by Katarina Podbevšek and Nina Žavbi Milojević
(Maribor and Ljubljana: Aristej and AGRFT, 2013): 77–82.
Onič, Tomaž. A telephone conversation to Vito Taufer, 26 August 2015.
—. “Pogovorni in narečni izrazi – soočanje s prevajalskimi zagatami”
Jezikoslovni zapiski 14(1) (2008): 139–150.
—. “Alliteration as a means of characterization of dramatic personae: a
translation issue” ELOPE 3(1/2) (2006): 247–255.
Pinter, Harold. Zabava za rojstni dan, translated by Zdravko Duša.
Radovljica: Didakta, 2006.
—. Zabava za rojstni dan, film. Ljubljana: National Radio and Television,
2003.
—. Zabava za rojstni dan, translated by Zdravko Duša, unpublished
translation. Kranj: Prešeren Theatre, 2002.
—. The Birthday Party. London, Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993.
—. Complete Works: One. New York: Grove Press, 1976.
Podbevšek, Katja. “Lektoriranje govorjenega (gledališkega) besedila”
Jezik in slovstvo XLIII(3) (1998): 79–88.
Pulko, Simona, and Melita Zemljak Jontes. “Raba zemljepisnih različkov
slovenskega jezika glede na stopnjo izobraževanja in različne govorne
položaje.” In Slovenska narečja med sistemom in rabo: povzetki
predavanj, ed. by Vera Smole (Ljubljana: Center za slovenščino kot
drugi/tuji jezik pri Oddelku za slovenistiko Filozofske fakultete, 2007):
n. pag.
180 Chapter Nine
Quigley, Austen. The Pinter Problem. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton

Schechner, Richard. “Puzzling Pinter.” The Tulane Drama Review 11(2)
(1966): 176–184.
Tomše, Dušan, ed. Jezik na odru, jezik v filmu. Ljubljana: Mestno
gledališče ljubljansko, 1983.
Toporišič, Jože. Slovenska slovnica. Maribor: Založba Obzorja, 2000.
Vrbovšek, Tonja. Film Adaptations of Pinter’s The Birthday Party,
unpublished Master’s Thesis. Maribor: University of Maribor, 2013.
Zupan Sosič, Alojzija. “Petelinji Zajtrk, knjižna in filmska uspešnica.” In
Slovenski jezik, literatura, kultura in mediji, ed. by Mateja Pezdirc
Bartol (Ljubljana: Center za slovenščino kot drugi/tuji jezik pri
Oddelku za slovenistiko Filozofske fakultete, 2008): 87–96.
CHAPTER TEN
HAROLD PINTER IN CROATIA:

A CRITICAL RECEPTION OSCILLATING
BETWEEN THE LABELS OF ‘ABSURDIST’
AND ‘PINTERESQUE‘
MIRNA SINDIČIĆ SABLJO

UNIVERSITY OF ZADAR
1. Introduction
In his preface to the monograph Harold Pinter on International Stages,
Tomaž Onič points out that the extent of Harold Pinter’s literary, cultural
and political impact has stretched far beyond the borders of the United
Kingdom. The various responses received have depended on a multitude
of factors, such as where, when and under what political regime the
productions or translations took place (Onič 2014, 9). Pinter’s Croatian
reception could possibly serve as a good example of Onič’s remarks. The
Croatian reception of Harold Pinter’s dramas occurred relatively early,
only five years after the first UK production of one of his plays.1 This
reception underwent an accelerated development, which declined in
intensity after the end of the 1970s. A detailed overview of Pinter’s
reception and criticism in Croatia was recently undertaken by Acija
Alfirević (2014, 89-102). Hence, the aim of this paper is to determine
whether, and in what way, labels such as Martin Esslin’s label of the
Theatre of the Absurd, facilitated, directed and regulated the reception of
Pinter in Croatia. The second aim of this paper is to provide a historical
and cultural background for the reception and to highlight the turning
points in the critical and theatrical reception of Pinter’s drama in Croatia
in the context of the various labels associated with his name.
182 Chapter Ten
2. A brief overview of Pinter’s reception in Croatia

Croatian theatregoers were given their first opportunity to see one of
Pinter’s plays in 1962 when The Caretaker, produced by the Atelje 212
theatre from Belgrade, was performed on stage in Zagreb (on the Chamber
Stage at the Students’ Centre). In that same year, Pinter’s play The Room
was performed during the International Festival of Student Theatre, which
was otherwise held in Zagreb each year from 1961 to 1974.2 In 1964 The
Collection and The Lover were premiered at the Zagreb Drama Theatre.3
Early reactions of Croatian theatre critics toward Pinter’s drama were
similar to reactions toward his plays in other European countries. Reviews
published after the first Croatian production of Pinter’s plays reveal
bewilderment by the critics and their attempt to embrace, appreciate and
present Pinter’s plays to readers. Even though Harold Pinter was presented
as one of the most interesting contemporary European playwrights4,
reviewers still valued Pinter’s work according to the standards of
traditional dramaturgy (Puljizević 1964, 6), and they clearly manifested
their disappointment with what they saw on stage (Grgičević 1964,
Lipovčan 1964, Puljizević 1964). They went as far as questioning whether
there was even a need to stage Pinter’s plays (Lipovčan 1964, 9) and
expressed doubt as to whether Pinter’s plays would ever be put on stage in
Zagreb again (Batušić 1965). The critics who were more open to
contemporary theatrical trends, such as Marija Grgičević, used Beckett
and Ionesco as a reference point and compared Pinter’s plays to their texts
(1964, 10). Grgičević was aware that Pinter’s work belonged neither to the
‘Angry Young Men’ nor to a politically engaged theatre, but she also
underlined that Pinter’s plays were not anti-plays, even though they had
characteristics similar to Beckett’s and Ionesco’s plays. Grgičević
explained that Pinter’s characters were not as metaphoric as Beckett’s or
Ionesco’s characters, and the manner in which they communicated among
themselves was considerably different. Nikola Batušić, in his review of the
theatrical season in Zagreb, also compared Pinter and Ionesco, and stated
that Ionesco was more successful in representing an inability to
communicate and in playing around with illogical words (1965, 11-16).
The first affiliations of Pinter’s and Beckett’s names in Croatia
appeared in reviews and papers in the early 1960s. In 1963, Ivo Vidan, a
prominent professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences in Zagreb, began a study on Pinter by comparing The
Dumb Waiter and Waiting for Godot (1963, 462-464). Vidan claimed that
Pinter’s theatre represented the antithesis of mainstream contemporary
European drama and perceived Pinter’s work in the context of an English
Harold Pinter in Croatia 183
theatrical tradition. However, his arguments and conclusions rely mostly

on a comparison of Pinter, Beckett and Ionesco, while clearly pointing out
that Pinter’s work was mainly perceived as associated in some way with
the Theatre of the Absurd. In 1964, the affiliation was further extended
upon publishing the translation of The Dumb Waiter in an anthology of
avant-garde drama in Belgrade (edited by Slobodan Selenić). That
anthology gathered together plays written by Alfred Jarry, Guillaume
Apollinaire, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet,
Tadeusz Różewicz, Norman Frederick Simpson, Edward Albee and
Harold Pinter, and contributed to affiliating Pinter with the authors
discussed in Martin Esslin’s book that detailed a new theatrical trend.5
Pinter’s work was frequently compared to that of Samuel Beckett and
Eugène Ionesco in the context of his worldwide criticism6, and to the work
of other writers such as Kafka, Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, Eliot,
Joyce and many others (Knowles 2009).
The turning point in Pinter’s reception in Croatia was the production of
The Homecoming (Povratak) on the small stage of the Croatian National
Theatre in Zagreb in February 1967. The Homecoming, directed by
Georgij Paro, is considered the best production of one of Pinter’s plays in
Croatia (Batušić 1973, Gotovac 1967). The value of Pinter’s work was no
longer questionable, but reviewers continued to describe and value
Pinter’s work in relation to the Theatre of the Absurd. Mani Gotovac, in
her review of The Homecoming, mentioned that the play’s action lacked
motivation and the characters behaved as marionettes, relying on Esslin’s
description of the main characteristic of an absurd drama (1967, 6).
Gotovac compared Pinter and Franz Kafka, describing the atmosphere in
Pinter’s play using key words such as discomfort, anguish and concern.
Jozo Puljizević based his review of the production on whether The
Homecoming was an anti-play. He characterized The Homecoming as a
grotesque comedy that relied on tragic absurdity.
After the success of The Homecoming, Pinter’s plays were frequently
staged until the mid-1970s: The Dumb Waiter was performed at the
Zagreb Drama Theatre (Zagrebačko dramsko kazalište) in 1969, The
Landscape in 1971, Old Times in 1973 and No Man’s Land in 1976 at the
newly opened Theatre &TD in Zagreb.7 From the mid-1960s onwards,
Theatre &TD actively promoted experimental and avant-garde drama in
Croatia. The repertoire of Theatre &TD mainly covered contemporary
European drama that was not being staged in other Croatian theatres at
that time.8
Theatre critics failed to exhibit the same enthusiasm manifested after
the performance of The Homecoming in 1967. Marija Grgičević considered
184 Chapter Ten
The Landscape too artificial and more suitable for performance on radio
(1971, 17). She described Old Times as a play in which nothing happened
(1973, 5). Vukov Colić valued Pinter’s play in terms of the Theatre of the
Absurd, and he even considered Pinter to be an epigone of Samuel
Beckett. Nikola Batušić was especially critical toward Pinter’s work. He
had no high regard for Pinter’s plays and believed they were performed on
Croatian stages not because of their literary value but because of Pinter’s
fame in England (1976, 926-928). Batušić’s opinion was that Pinter’s
plays appealed to the public because they exhibited scenes from everyday
life on stage and because Pinter refused to provide a definitive explanation
of his plays, thus giving the public the opportunity to interpret them freely
(1973, 952-954). Batušić compared Pinter to Chekov and described
Pinter’s theatre as a ‘theatre of silence’. The localization of No Man’s
Land was welcomed by reviewers with the location considered as largely
contributing to the play’s appeal and success (Batušić, 1976).9
After their success on avant-garde theatre scenes in Zagreb and on the
main national stages, Pinter’s plays found their way to the stages of
provincial towns. In 1975, The Birthday Party was performed in the
Croatian National Theatre in Split (directed by Vlatko Perković). Anatolij
Kudrjavcev’s review of the performance in the local newspaper Slobodna
Dalmacija demonstrated that Croatian theatre critics still experienced
difficulty in trying to describe and define Pinter’s work (1975, 6).
Furthermore, Kudrjavcev’s article revealed that the Theatre of the Absurd
remained the main focal point in reading and interpreting Pinter.
Kudrjavcev read Pinter as a confrontation with Beckett and Ionesco and
endeavored to find ways in which his work was different from the other
two.
Somewhere after the mid-1970s, Croatian theatres seemed to lose
interest in Pinter. His plays were staged less frequently. The independent
theatre company “Teatar u gostima” staged The Betrayal in 1980, which
was a big success.10 The director of the performance was again Georgij
Paro, the most active promoter of Pinter’s work in Croatia.11 Prominent
theatre critics Dalibor Foretić (1979, 5) and Nikola Batušić (1980, 153-
155) both deemed that the play failed to surpass Pinter’s earlier plays, as it
was missing elements that Croatian critics considered typical of Pinter’s
work: silence and a demonstration of despair and coldness in everyday
life. The most evident change in Foretić and Batušić’s review was that
they no longer associated Pinter with Beckett or Ionesco but presented
Pinter as an author belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. They analysed
The Betrayal with reference to Pinter’s work and struggled to recognize
the main characteristics of Pinter’s style.
During the 1980s, Harold Pinter’s plays were staged mainly in

provincial theatres: The Dumb Waiter was staged in Dubrovnik in 1988,
and The Caretaker was staged twice, in 1982 in the Marin Držić Theatre
in Dubrovnik (directed by Vojin Kajgenić) and in 1984 in Karlovac
(directed by Mladen Škiljan). Pinter’s plays were often, especially during
the 1980s, performed principally by independent, non-professional and
student theatre companies.12 These included Teatar Bursa, which staged
Mountain Language in Dubrovnik in 1991. Between 1991 and 2004, there
were no new productions of Pinter’s plays in Croatia.
In 2004, Harold Pinter won the Premio Europa and announced that he
would no longer be writing theatre plays, causing a revival of interest in
Pinter in Croatia. Contributing to this interest was the Nobel Prize
awarded to Pinter in 2005.13 The renewed interest in Pinter coincided with
a revival of Genet’s and Ionesco’s plays.14 In 2004, production director
Marin Lukanović staged The Betrayal, with the production carried out by
the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka. The Dumb Waiter
was performed in Vinkovci in 2006 (directed by Vjekoslav Janković) and
in Dubrovnik in 2012 (directed by Lawrence Kiiru). Even though Pinter is
considered by contemporary Croatian theatre critics as a classic, a
tendency to associate Pinter with the Theatre of the Absurd is still present.
The association is evident even in the most recent articles on Pinter
published in Croatia, for example, Željko Ivanjek, in his articles published
in the newspaper Jutarnji list after Pinter’s death in 2008, claimed on a
number of occasions that Pinter was a representative of the Theatre of the
Absurd.
3. Harold Pinter and the Theatre of the Absurd

Toward the end of the 1950s Pinter began creating a form of drama
uncommon for British theatre, and subsequently critics and audience alike
were not receptive of his plays. With regard to Pinter’s dramatic style,
critics had difficulty in describing or relating it to any established dramatic
model. The plays were often described by reviewers as obscure, delirious,
oblique, enigmatic and puzzling, and finally dismissed as theatrical
failures (Zarhy-Levo 1993, 2001). Pinter was often compared to Ibsen,
Osborne, Kafka, Beckett or Ionesco. The frequent comparison with
Beckett was motivated by the fact that Pinter openly expressed his
admiration of the Irish writer, who resided in Paris (Batty 2005, 15-16),
and also because the action of some of Pinter’s plays was set in
claustrophobic rooms representing a world anticipating intrusion, as in
Beckett’s plays (for example, in Endgame). Beckett’s name was regularly
186 Chapter Ten
associated with The Caretaker, whether for praise or blame (Knowles

2009, 77). Critics compared Pinter to Beckett and Ionesco, suggesting that
Pinter could suitably be regarded as a British representative of the
European avant-garde. As with Beckett and Ionesco, Pinter was also
rejected by the theatre and literary critics as a writer of pointless,
enigmatic and metaphoric drama (Batty 2005, 28).15 Harold Hobson was
among the first critics to realize that these works represented a new
movement, defined later by Martin Esslin as the Theatre of the Absurd.16
The process of Pinter’s work becoming accepted and established in British
theatre and placed in reference to the group of European playwrights was
founded on Esslin’s label of the Theatre of the Absurd (Zarhy-Levo
2001).17
Martin Esslin, the author of several articles and a book on the Theatre
of the Absurd (the first edition of his book appeared in 1961), considers
Pinter one of the exponents of this theatrical trend, as he defined it, in the
English speaking world. Esslin explains that Pinter belongs to a younger
generation of playwrights who followed in the footsteps of the pioneers of
the Theatre of the Absurd (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Jean
Genet). Esslin’s book has provoked a major change in the critic’s attitude
toward post-war avant-garde drama. During the 1960s, the playwrights
discussed in Esslin’s book were accepted as a new theatrical trend. Esslin
clearly distinguishes the trend he defines from two other trends existing in
the then contemporary French theatre – the existentialist theatre and the
‘poetic avant-garde’ (Esslin 1961, xx–xxi).18 Esslin explains that he had
been struck by the fact that the plays of dramatists working in different
countries quite independently of one another shared some common
features: the plays do not have a clear plot, the time and place of the action
are not clearly stated, the characters have hardly any individuality and
often even lack names, dialogue tends to get out of hand, and everything
that happens seems to be beyond rational motivation (Esslin 1961, xvii–
xviii). Esslin’s aim, as clearly stated in the introduction of his book, was to
define the conventions of this theatre so that it could be judged on its own
merits and not by the standards of conventional theatre. In undertaking this
active mediating role, Esslin undoubtedly contributed to the playwright’s
acceptance and subsequently has intensified the reception of dramatists
grouped under the label of the Absurd. His work is an example of how
critics can play a major role in categorizing, defining and characterizing
new movements, as Yael Zarhy-Levo’s research has demonstrated (1993;
2001; 2009; 2011).
Firstly, Esslin identified the dramatist whom he considered directly
associated with the new type of respective drama. Secondly, he coined the
label by borrowing the term from Albert Camus, thus providing a familiar
context for viewing the new type of drama. Finally, he presented the new
theatrical trend as continuing an already recognized literary tradition
(Georg Büchner, Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud etc.). During that time,
Esslin had a substantial impact on the careers of playwrights he considered
as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. He provided the initial
‘legitimacy’ for playwrights whose acceptance into the theatrical canon
had not yet been decided. Playwrights such as Eugène Ionesco, Harold
Pinter, John Arden, Samuel Beckett, Fernando Arrabal, Friedrich
Durrenmatt, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Sławomir Mrożek, Joe Orton, Sam
Shepard and Boris Vian were recognized not only by theatre critics and
reviewers but also by publishing houses, for example by Grove Press
based in New York (Glass 2011). Consequently, numerous critics
identified Pinter as one of the dominant figures of the Theatre of the
Absurd. Critique on Pinter abounds in discussion of whether Pinter’s work
differs from that of other playwrights considered as belonging to the
Theatre of the Absurd.
The fact that Harold Pinter is so often compared to Samuel Beckett and
read and perceived as a playwright belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd
in Croatia is not surprising, considering the extent to which his Croatian
reception was associated with and facilitated and directed by the theatrical
trend as canonized by Esslin. Pinter’s plays began to be performed in
Croatian theatres at the time when the works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet,
Mrożek and other avant-garde dramatists were at the peak of their
popularity. Pinter’s work attracted the attention of Croatian directors and
translators immediately after Ionesco and Beckett conquered the Croatian
theatrical scene, and after the literary value of their works was no longer in
doubt. The Croatian reception of Beckett and Ionesco, the leading
exponents of European post-war avant-garde theatre, began at the same
time as in other European countries and much earlier than in some Eastern
European countries.19 The first articles on Beckett and Ionesco were
published in Croatian newspapers in 1954, immediately after the first
performance of Waiting for Godot in Paris.20 At the beginning of the
1950s, after the break with Stalin, the arts scene was quietly encouraged to
open up to western influences and to make (politically controlled)
exchanges with the western cultural scene. The Socialist Federative
Republic of Yugoslavia was accused of seditionist politics and excluded
from the alliance of communist countries in 1948. Western forces helped
Yugoslavia economically at that time, hoping that the country would serve
as an example to other communist countries who sought independence
from Moscow and, in that way, they would weaken the monolithic
188 Chapter Ten
communist bloc. Tito wanted to prove to the West that Yugoslavia was
more democratic and more open to the West than other communist
countries and was eager to present the country in a better light, permitting
the country’s cultural opening to the West.21 The texts of William
Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, T. S. Eliot, André Breton, André Malraux, Virginia Woolf, John
Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide and many
others were translated into Croatian and published in Croatia. The growth
of interest in Anglo-American literature was especially evident. During the
second half of the 20th century, far more works were translated from
Anglo-American literature than any other national literature (Dragojević
1991). A deliberate policy of creating abroad the impression of artistic
freedom in Croatia included the activities of theatres. Theatres in Zagreb,
and later in other Croatian cities, produced plays by Federico García
Lorca, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Dario Fo, Ugo Betti, Friedrich
Dürrenmatt and numerous Anglo-American playwrights (such as Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, John Osborne etc.), instead of the Croatian
classics and Russian plays that had dominated the repertoire from 1945
until the first half of the 1950s (Matković 1988). By the end of the 1950s,
Anglo-American plays were no longer praised or critiqued solely from
ideological positions. However, during the initial years of its Croatian
reception, the polemical debate focused on Beckett’s work and extended
from those who still held a position close to Marxism and socialist realism,
to those who accepted modernism, i.e. those desiring a wider field of
artistic production and the introduction of aesthetic pluralism. A
prescriptive, ideological criticism did persist in Croatia for some time.
Theatres abandoned the political orbit, but the criticism did not, especially
in newspapers, which continued to be responsible for educating the masses
and promoting official ideology. During the 1950s, Beckett was perceived
as either an existentialist or a nihilist, appreciated and celebrated as a
central figure of modern literature, while, on the other hand, his works
were considered devoid of any artistic value. Beckett’s works were viewed
in existentialist terms and at the same time read and understood in Marxist
terms and regarded as a symptom of the decline of western contemporary
society. These two currents are evident in Beckett’s early Croatian
reception and reflect the position of the country—a communist country
that was quite open to Western cultural influences (Sindičić Sabljo 2013).
Pinter’s plays were staged in Croatia more often in the 1960s and the
first half of the 1970s, in a period that coincided with the peak in
popularity of the Theatre of the Absurd, judging by the number of
performances, translations and critical texts published on the authors in
question during this period. Pinter’s Croatian reception dates from the
1960s, in a period when ideological criteria in criticism were no longer
present; hence, his works were never declared as nihilistic, gloomy and
superfluous by Croatian audiences, as were, for example, Beckett’s
(Sindičić Sabljo, 2013). The only exception was Jozo Puljizević’s review
of the production of The Collection and The Lover, published in Vjesnik in
1964. He describes Pinter’s characters as grotesque caricatures of
contemporary human beings living in a world they failed to understand.
Puljizević’s identification of Pinter’s characters as symbols of the
bourgeois man, who becomes alienated and decadent in Western capitalist
society, relies on the premises of Marxist literary criticism.
The beginning of Pinter’s reception corresponds to the period when
Beckett and Ionesco acquired the status of contemporary drama classics in
Croatia, and the period when Croatian literary and theatre critics became
acquainted with Esslin’s work and his label the Theatre of the Absurd.22
Their success directed the attention of Croatian theatre directors,
translators and critics toward works of other playwrights that were
considered part of the same theatrical trend, such as Michel de
Ghelderode, Georges Schéhadé, Roland Dubillard, René de Obaldia,
Fernando Arrabal and Robert Pinget. Croatian theatres were interested in
the works of all playwrights considered as belonging to the Theatre of the
Absurd, not only the French or those residing in Paris: for example,
Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and Sławomir Mrożek.23 The reception of all
other authors considered as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd was
somehow related to the reception of Beckett and Ionesco. Beckett and
Ionesco undoubtedly drew attention to the work of other dramatists of the
Absurd and facilitated their reception. Nevertheless, the works of Beckett
and Ionesco remained a focal point through which the works of all other
playwrights were read, interpreted and valued. Between 1965 and 1975,
authors who were recognized as avant-garde and contemporary captured
the attention of Croatian theatres and were subsequently presented to the
public; however, by the mid-1970s, the number of their works being
performed began to decline.
In Croatia, Pinter’s plays were performed in the same theatres that
earlier or coincidently produced plays written by Beckett, Ionesco,
Obaldia, Arrabal, Dubillard, Kopit, Albee and many others. These theatres
included the Zagrebačko dramsko kazalište24, Mala Scena (Small Scene)
of the Croatian National Theatre25 and the Theatre &TD in Zagreb. During
the 1950s and 1960s, their plays were performed in small, independent and
experimental theatres. After success and affirmation on these smaller
stages, the plays were staged in the main national theatres and subsequently
190 Chapter Ten
in provincial and amateur theatre companies. Pinter’s plays were put on

stage by directors who favoured post-war avant-garde drama, such as
Georgij Paro26, Vlatko Perković, Tomislav Radić and Mladen Škiljan.27
In recent years, a number of scholars have striven to deconstruct and
redefine Esslin’s concept of the Theatre of the Absurd, in an attempt to
illustrate that playwrights like Beckett, Pinter, Genet, and Ionesco can
stand on their own merits, without needing the appellation of Absurdist to
assign them meaning. Among them is Michael Y. Bennett, who opposes
Esslin in his book titled Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus,
Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter.28 Bennett’s argument is that Esslin
based his understanding of the plays on two significant misreadings: 1)
Esslin mistranslated and miscontextualized a passage from Ionesco that
Esslin uses to define the absurd, and 2) Esslin misread Albert Camus as an
existentialist (2011, 2). Throughout his book, he offers an anti-
existentialist reading of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus as a touchstone for
reevaluating the plays written by Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet,
which he sees not as Absurdist, but as “parabolic drama”. The plays are
read through a reexamination and reapplication of Camus’s philosophy
that emerged after the publication of The First Man in 1995. Bennett
argues that, if we read Camus not as an existentialist but as someone
revolting against existentialism, the understanding of the Theatre of the
Absurd can be reconceived, and that reading such clearly distinct plays
within the genre of parable might provide new revelations. He explains
that the limiting thematic label of the Theatre of the Absurd can be
replaced by an alternative, non-structural term, the “parabolic drama”
(2011, 2). Bennett also states that Waiting for Godot and the plays of the
Theatre of the Absurd have been pigeonholed as absurdist texts by the
public and academia alike (2011, 2). His conclusion illustrates the initial
phase of the Croatian reception of Pinter: Pinter is a playwright belonging
to the Theatre of the Absurd whose work is mostly read and interpreted in
relation to and in contrast with Beckett and Ionesco. Categorizing and
labelling Pinter’s works was helpful to some critics and readers in
understanding them, but the label should not limit the approach to Pinter’s
work and its interpretation.
4. Conclusion
A comprehensive insight into the Croatian reception of Pinter clearly
shows that his work became well known to the Croatian public as early as
1962, soon after his work had crossed the UK borders. Occasionally,
Pinter’s plays were produced in Croatia immediately after their première
in the UK. For example, Old Times was performed in Zagreb only two
years after the world première and No Man’s Land only a year later. There
were approximately thirty repeat performances for each production.29
Nonetheless, Pinter wrote twenty-nine plays, only twelve of which were
staged in Croatia, meaning that a significant proportion of his plays are
still awaiting their first performance in Croatia. Judging by critical
acclaim, Pinter is now considered a classic playwright in Croatia and is
generally perceived as a contemporary British dramatist who pays
considerable attention to the various modes of linguistic expression.
Pinter’s critical reception in Croatia shares similarities with his critical
reception in the UK and elsewhere. Initially, his work faced some
unfavourable responses, in the UK after the production of The Birthday
Party in 1958 and in Croatia after the production of The Collection and
The Lover in 1964, which bewildered critics (Puljizević 1964, Grgičević
1964, Batušić 1965). The principal reaction of critics to the play was a
sense of perplexity, given that they found it difficult to interpret what the
play was about. The critics compared Pinter to other playwrights,
contextualized his work into a theatrical tradition, struggled to find terms
to describe his plays, and characterized his dramaturgy as being unusual
and difficult to fit into any conceivable model (Gotovac 1967). In general,
the critics most often praised the acting and the performance but
occasionally questioned the quality of the written work. A range of critical
perceptions emerged in the UK between 1959 and 1964, especially after
the success of the production of The Caretaker in 1960, and in Croatia
after the performance of The Homecoming in 1967. The last phase of his
reception in the UK occurred in 1964 and 1965, culminating in Pinter’s
admission into the theatrical canon. That phase corresponds to his critical
reception in Croatia during the 1970s.
Pinter’s work in Croatia is usually placed within a theatrical trend
known as the Theatre of the Absurd. Croatian critics insist that the main
characteristic of his plays is a presentation of the human condition, while
they remain devoid of logically constructed plot or traditional
characterization. Though there did exist some acknowledgement that
Pinter exhibited his own unique style and that he made use of traditional as
well as absurdist dramatic techniques, Pinter’s name in Croatia until the
mid-1970s was predominantly associated with the label of the Theatre of
the Absurd. The articles on Pinter written by Batušić (1973, 1976, 1980),
Foretić (1979), Cuculić (2004) and Alfirević (2001) represent a step
forward in critical appreciation of Pinter’s work, given that they tend to
appreciate Pinter’s work without placing it in the context of the Theatre of
the Absurd.
192 Chapter Ten
Throughout the world, Pinter’s critics have recognized his plays as an

original contribution to British drama, which is further confirmed by their
choice of ‘attributes’, something which has served as a marketing strategy.
Recently, as Zarhy-Levo has pointed out, Pinter’s drama has been
presented to the public under the label of ‘Pinteresque’ (2009, 254).
According to her, this label can be perceived as the final version of the
epithet ‘puzzling’, previously attributed to Pinter’s dramatic work and
reflecting the assumption of reviewers that, from the present onwards,
Pinter’s plays can be marketed under a ‘Pinter’ label, detached from an
association with Beckett. Zarhy-Levo has concluded that this unique label
is a functional substitute for clarifying the ‘incoherent’ elements, thereby
leading to a familiarization of Pinter’s unique style. The reception of
Pinter in Croatia clearly proves that labels can be useful in trying to
introduce the work of a new author in a certain national literary field, but
this also shows that labels can be limiting and hinder critics and audiences
from making considerations outside of familiar surroundings.
Affiliation with the Theatre of the Absurd and a comparison to various
writers were useful at the time when Pinter’s works were unknown to the
Croatian theatre public, and these certainly contributed to a wider
appreciation of his work. This becomes even more plausible, considering
that Pinter’s plays were staged at the same time, in the same theatres, and
by the same directors as those of other playwrights associated with
Esslin’s label. Labels are convenient when it becomes necessary to halt the
initial resistance of critics and the public toward someone’s work.
However, once the writer has been admitted into the canon, the labels
become unnecessary. The problem arises when they stay with a person’s
name, preventing critics and readers from looking beyond to seek an
author’s individual style.
The Croatian audience continues to wait for new productions,
translations30, papers and book-length studies discussing Pinter’s work
outside of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pinter’s work deserves to be
presented, described, analyzed and judged on its own merits and less in
comparison to Beckett and Ionesco. Even though Pinter’s work is
continually present in theatres in Croatia, and has been affiliated less
frequently with the Theatre of the Absurd since the end of the 1970s, there
is still undoubtedly much work to be done in systematically presenting
Pinter’s work in Croatia.31
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February 24th 1967: 6.
Grgičević, Marija. “U zatvorenom krugu. Uz premijeru jednočinki
“Kolekcija” i “Ljubavnik” u Zagrebačkom dramskom kazalištu.”
Večernji list, November 7th 1964: 10.
—. “Mimoilazni dijalozi. ‘Krajolik’ Harolda Pintera u režiji Mira
Marottija.” Večernji list, February 19th 1971: 17.
—. “Premijera pod ‘zabranom’. Javna generalka ‘Starih vremena’ Harolda
Pintera u Teatru &TD.” Večernji list, May 18th 1973: 5.
Ivanjek, Željko. “Pinter je bio u Zagrebu i pisao za ‘Gorgonu’.” Jutarnji
list, December 27th 2008: 76.
—. “Pinterova pisma Georgiju Paru.” Jutarnji list, December 29th 2008:
37.
194 Chapter Ten
Knowles, Ronald. “Pinter and twentieth-century drama.” In The

Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009): 74-87.
Kudrjavcev, Anatolij. “Zrelo ostvarenje. ‘Rođendan’ Harolda Pintera u
izvođenju drame splitskog HNK.” Slobodna Dalmacija, May 20th
1975: 6.
Lipovčan, Srećko. “Nesporazumi sporazumijevanja.” Studentski list,
November 11th 1964: 9.
Matković, Ivan. “The Reception of Anglo-American Drama on the Post-
War Croatian Stage: Theatre, Politics, Ideology (Part II).” Studia
Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, XXXIII (1988): 133-159.
Onič, Tomaž. “Preface.” In Harold Pinter on International Stages, ed.
Tomaž Onič (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014): 9-13.
Paro, Georgij. Theatralia disjecta. Karlovac: Matica hrvatska, 1995.
Puljizević, Jozo. “Kolekcija ljubavnika.” Vjesnik, November 7th 1964: 6.
—. “Tragična komika.” Vjesnik, February 21st 1967: 6.
Selenić, Slobodan. Avangardna drama. Beograd: Srpska književna
zadruga, 1964.
Sindičić Sabljo, Mirna. “The Reception of Samuel Beckett in Croatia
during the 1950s.” Scando-Slavica 2 (2013): 207-218.
Vidan, Ivo. “Komedija nespokojstva. ‘Avangardni’ teatar Harolda
Pintera.” Forum 9 (1963): 462-473.
Vukov Colić, Dalibor. “Slijepo crijevo avangarde.” Vjesnik, February 19th
1971.
Zarhy-Levo, Yael. “The theatre critic as a cultural agent: Esslin, Marowitz
and Tynan.” Poetics 21 (1993): 525-543.
Zarhy-Levo, Yael. The Theatrical Critic as Cultural Agent. Constructing
Pinter, Orton and Stoppard as Absurdist Playwrights. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2001.
—. “Pinter and the critics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Harold
Pinter, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009): 249-265.
—. “Dramatists under a label: Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd
and Aleks Sierz’ In-Yer-Face Theatre.” Studies in Theatre
&Performance, 3 (2011): 315–326.
Notes
1
Pinter’s first play (The Room) was written and produced in 1957 at the University
of Bristol.
2
The Room was performed in 1962 in Zagreb by the Leeds University Union
Theatre Group, during the International Festival of the Student Theatre. During the
1960s, that festival was exceptionally important for Croatian theatre, as it gave
theatre audiences and practitioners the opportunity to see for the first time not only
Pinter’s plays on stage, but also those of numerous avant-garde writers such as
Michel de Ghelderode, Fernando Arrabal, Alfred Jarry, Sławomir Mrożek, Jean
Cocteau, Eugène Ionesco, Edward Bond, Peter Weiss and many others. On the
International Festival of the Student Theatre, see also Cvitan, Grozdana. “IFSK i
Dani mladog kazališta: Repertoar i sudionici.” In Krležini dani u Osijeku 1997.
Hrvatska dramska književnost i kazalište u europskom kontekstu, Book One, ed. B.
Hećimović (Zagreb/Osijek: Zavod za povijest hrvatske književnosti, kazališta i
glazbe HAZU, Pedagoški fakultet u Osijeku, HNK Osijek, 1999), 234-238.
3
The Collection and The Lover were directed by Georgij Paro.
4
A. R. “Pjesnik šutnje na zagrebačkoj pozornici. Premijera u ZDK.” Večernji list,
November 3rd 1964; Z. Z. “Kolekcija i Ljubavnik Harolda Pintera. Prva premijera
Zagrebačkog dramskog kazališta. Borba, November 5th 1964: 7; D. F.
“Dvosmislenost govora. Premijera u ZDK.” Vjesnik, February 4th 1964: 5.
5
Between 1945 and 1992, Croatia was one of the former Yugoslav Republics.
Books translated and published in Belgrade (Serbia), such as Slobodan Selenić’s
anthology of the avant-garde drama, were also read in Croatia.
6
For example: Bernard Dukore. “The Theatre of Harold Pinter.” The Tulane
Drama Review 3 (1962): 43-54; Ruby Cohn. “The World of Harold Pinter.” The
Tulane Drama Review 3 (1962): 55-68.
7
The Dumb Waiter was directed by Vanča Kljaković, The Landscape by Miro
Marotti, Old Times by Relja Bašić and No Man’s Land by Tomislav Radić.
8
Between 1965 and 1977, performances were conducted of plays written by Jean
Genet, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Albert Camus, Michel de Ghelderode, Raymond
Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre, René de Obaldia, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Dubillard,
Jean Vauthier, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Vaclav Havel, Peter Handke,
Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond and many others. On the repertoire and artistic
politics of the Theatre &TD, see also: Selem, Petar. “Prvo razdoblje Teatra ITD.”
Scena 2-3 (1974): 64-81.
9
The translator of No Man's Land (Antun Šoljan) converted English personal
names and names of places into Croatian. Pinter’s characters in his translation
speak in one of the Croatian dialects. For a further discussion on this subject, see:
Giga Gračan. “O Šoljanovu Pinteru.” Prolog 28 (1976): 87-89, or, in Giga Gračan.
“Lokalizacija kao prevodilačka metoda. Ničija zemlja Harolda Pintera u prijevodu
Antuna Šoljana.” Kolo 3 (1998): 343-348.
10
The Betrayal was performed on the small stage of Vatroslav Lisinski concert
hall in Zagreb.
196 Chapter Ten
11
Željko Ivanjek's articles published in Jutarnji list in 2008 revealed that Georgij
Paro maintained a correspondence with Pinter at the time he was staging his plays.
12
The Dumb Waiter was put on stage by the student’s theatre company Ivan Goran
Kovačić (1963) and later by the theatre company Coccolemocco (1982). The
Caretaker (1969 and 1989), The Lover (1969, 1975, 1979 and 1985), The Dumb
Waiter (1980 and 1985), Old Times (1989) and The Betrayal (1989) were
performed on stage by students of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb.
13
Two of Pinter's interviews were translated and published in Croatian magazines
in 2006: “Još uvijek imam neku vjeru u kazalište (interview with Michael
Billington)”, translated by Sanja Lovrenčić, Kazalište 25-26 (2006): 23-29; “Neće
me ušutkati (interview with Matthew Tempestu)”, translated by Katarina Moržan,
Književna revija, 1-2 (2006): 6-11.
14
Genet's The Screens was performed onstage in 2003 and The Maids in 2001,
2009 and 2010. Ionesco's The Chairs was staged in 2003, The Lesson in 2003 and
2004, The Bald Soprano in 2004 and 2007 and Exit the King in 2004.
15
After the London premiere of The Birthday Party, a bewildered critic wrote,
“Harold Pinter’s first play comes in the school of random dottiness deriving from
Beckett and Ionesco and before the flourishing continuance of which one quails in
slack-jawed dismay. The interest of such pieces as an accepted genre is hardly
more than that of some ill-repressed young dauber who feels he can outdo the
école de Paris by throwing his paint on with a trowel and a bathmat; and indeed—
to come back to the terms of playmaking — as good, if not a better result might
have been achieved by summoning a get-together of the critics circle of the
vegetarians unions, offering each member a notebook and pencil and launching
thereafter on an orgiastic bout of ‘Consequences’, with the winning line to be
performed by a star-cast midnight matinee at Drury Lane […]. (Granger, D.
Financial Times, May 20th 1958, reprinted in Lloyd Evans, G. and B, eds. Plays in
Review, 1956–1980. London: Batsford, 1985)
16
Sunday Times, June 15th 1958, p. 11 (Cf. Batty 2005, 224).
17
The first two editions of Martin Esslin’s book titled The Theatre of the Absurd,
discussed Pinter’s work in the chapter ‘Parallels and proselytes’, while the 3rd
edition of the same book discussed his work in a separate chapter. Esslin also
published a book on Pinter in 1970, titled The People Wound: The Plays of Harold
Pinter. In its third, expanded edition, the title was changed to Pinter. A Study of
His Plays (Methuen, London, 1977).
18
In his Introduction to Absurd Drama (Penguin books, 1965, 7-23), Esslin
expressed his regret because the Theatre of the Absurd had become a catchphrase,
frequently used and abused. Esslin argued that critical concepts of this kind are
useful when new modes of expression and new conventions of art arise. According
to him, a label of this kind is an aid to understanding and valid only insofar as it
helps in providing an insight into a work of art. It is neither a binding
classification, nor all-embracing and exclusive.
19
Waiting for Godot had its first performance in Romania in 1980, in GDR in
1985 and in Bulgaria in 1988. For a further discussion on this subject, see: Saiu,
Octavian. “Samuel Beckett behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception in Eastern
Europe.” In The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, ed. M. Nixon, M.

Feldman (London & New York: Continuum, 2009): 251-271; Baker, Barrie.
“There is no way in which we can relate to this play: Waiting for Godot.” In
Theatre Censorship in Honecker’s Germany. From Volker Braun to Samuel
Beckett. Bern: Peter Lang., 2007: 145-168.
20
Fotez, Marko. “Pariška gledališta pred kraj sezone.” Vjesnik, July 6th 1954: 4;
Grün, H. “Iz moderne dramaturgije: Godeau i Godot.” Republika 2-3 (1954): 259-
260.
21
For a further discussion on this subject, see: Jakovina,Tvrtko. Socijalizam na
američkoj pšenici. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 2002; Jakovina, Tvrtko. Američki
komunistički saveznik: Hrvati, Titova Jugoslavija i Sjedinjene Američke Države:
1945.-1955. Zagreb: Profil international, 2003; Goldstein, Ivo. Hrvatska 1918.-
2008. Zagreb: EPH/Liber, 2008.
22
Translations of Esslin's texts were published in the literary magazines Republika
and Mogućnosti during the 1960s.
23
On the reception of the Polish avant-garde theatre in Croatia, see also: J.
Sobczak, “Poljska avangardna drama u hrvatskom kazalištu.” In Krležini dani u
Osijeku 2001, ed. B. Hećimović (Zagreb/Osijek: Zavod za povijest hrvatske
književnosti, kazališta i glazbe HAZU, Pedagoški fakultet u Osijeku, HNK Osijek,
2002): 261-274.
24
Between 1964 and 1969, numerous plays written by O'Neill, Ibsen, Shakespeare,
Strindberg, Mrożek, Ghelderode, Obaldia, Różewicz and Arden were staged at the
Zagrebačko dramsko kazalište.
25
The Chamber stage of the Croatian National Theatre actively promoted
contemporary drama by staging plays written by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Roland Dubillard, Fernando Arrabal,
Eugène Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett etc.
26
Georgij Paro also staged Genet's The Maids (1967 and 2010), Genet's The
Screens (1984), Beckett's Play, Ionesco's Bold Soprano, Arrabal's Picnic (1984)
and Ghelderode’s Christophe Colombe (2001).
27
Beckett's Endgame (1958) and Happy Days (1965) were directed by Mladen
Škiljan. Arrabal’s Prayer (1967), Obaldia’s The Unknown General (1967),
Beckett’s Comedy (1970) and Ionesco’s Delirium for Two (1972) were directed by
Tomislav Radić. Beckett’s Endgame (1975) and Genet’s The Maids (1989) were
put on stage by Vlatko Perković.
28
Michael Y. Bennett structured his text into four main chapters, each offering a
reassessment of a single play: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Pinter’s The Birthday
Party, Genet’s The Blacks and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
29
The Collection and The Lover (1964) had 30 performances, The Homecoming
(1967) had 29, The Dumb Waiter (1969) had 29, The Landscape (1971) had 12,
The Caretaker (1970) had 12, Old Times (1973) had 17, The Birthday Party (1975)
had only 3, No Man’s Land (1976) had 32 and The Betrayal (1979) had 74
performances.
30
Pinter’s plays have been translated into the Croatian language so that they can be
performed in professional and amateur theatres. Most of the translations have,
198 Chapter Ten
however, not been published and exist only in the form of theatrical scripts. Only
the translations of his shorter plays and a single short story have been published in
prestigious Croatian literary magazines. The translation of The Dumb Waiter has
been published in the Croatian literary magazine Mogućnosti, which played a
significant role in the Croatian reception of post-war avant-garde drama.
31
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Acija Alfirević, the Research
Library in Zadar and to the Institute for the History of Croatian Literature, Theatre
and Music for the help they have provided during my research.
INDEX
Aaron, Joyce 69 Camus, Albert 188, 189, 191, 194,

Absence of War, 40 196
Acting Up, 32, 43 Castaneda, Carlos 63, 73, 74
affirmative action, 58, 59 Chaikin, Joseph 63, 74, 141, 142
Afghanistan, 31, 35, 36 circumplex model, 130, 131, 133,
Albee, Edward 117, 120, 122, 128, 134, 136
129, 132, 135, 136, 137, 142, Craig, Edward G. 8, 11, 13, 24, 26,
144, 158, 184, 190 27
America, i, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, critical strategies, 30, 41
63, 64, 66, 73, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, critical strategy, 40, 41, See critical
96, 119, 121, 124, 162 strategies
American Dream, 53, 70, 71, 73, 80, cross-bordering, 154
98 Desdemona. A Play about a
Angry Young Men, 183 Handkerchief,, 117
avant-garde drama, 145, 184, 187, dialect, 112, 171, 172, 173, 174, 179
191, 199 Durang, 117, 121, 122, 129, 133,
Baudrillard, Jean 53, 60, 80, 81, 83, 135, 137
88, 96, 143 Duša, Zdravko 170, 175, 176, 180
Beckett, Samuel 113, 142, 144, 156, Eagleton, Terry 84, 88, 90, 93, 97
157, 159, 160, 163, 165, 183, Edmond, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57,
185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 58, 61
194, 195, 196, 197, 198 Esslin, Martin 182, 184, 187, 188,
Beijing opera, 7, 17, See jingxi 190, 191, 194, 195
Betrayal, 117, 122, 134, 135, 156, Eyes for Consuela, 62, 64, 65, 68,
185, 186 73, 75
Bigsby, Christopher 45, 49, 60, Foucault, Francis 81, 91, 92, 97,
130, 136, 138, 140, 144, 145, 108, 114
146, 158, 159, 163 Fukuyama, Francis 81
Billington, Michael 38, 42, 167, Graham, Laura J. 63, 64, 65, 74
169, 180, 197 Greek drama, 5, 9, 19, 21, 64
Blue Bouquet, 67, 75 Greek theatre, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18,
Boston Marriage, 47, 54, 117, 123, 20, 27, See Greek drama
124, 133, 137 Guardian, the 35, 42, 98, 115, 135,
Brecht, Bertold 4, 77 169, 180
Burmese Theater, 25 Hare, David 2, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33,
camera angles, 168, 169, 179 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43,
camera movement, 168 156, 165
camera shot, 170 Homecoming, the 167, 184, 192,
198
200 Index
hyperreal, 80, 81, 85, 87 Murmuring Judges, 40

hyperreality, 80, 84, 86, 88, 96, See nāṭya, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22,
hyperreal 28, 29
Indian theatre, 24, 25, See kathakali, New World Order, 37, 43, 157
kūṭiyāṭṭam, nāṭya Nichols, Peter 117, 122, 134, 135,
Indonesian theatre, 14, 15, 20 137
initiation rites, 63, 69 nō, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
Interculturalism, 142, 160 19, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28
intermediality, 149, 153, 155 November, 47, 57, 58, 59, 60
In-Yer-Face, 98, 101, 103, 115, 195 Oleanna, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54,
Ionesco, Eugene 142, 149, 165, 183, 60, 156, 165
185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, One for the Road, 36, 39, 157
194, 196, 197 otherness, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54,
Iraq, 31, 35, 36, 37, 44 55, 58, 59
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 31 Oumano, Ellen 69, 75
Japanese Theatre, 24, See kabuki, Passion Play, 117, 122, 134, 137
nō, 25 Paz, 67, 75
jingxi, 7, 13 Penelope, 117, 127, 135, 137
kabuki, 8, 13, 17, 20, 21, 26 performance, 8, 14, 15, 19, 21, 27,
Kane, Sarah 2, 45, 60, 76, 77, 78, 136, 139, 141, 145, 146, 147,
81, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 150, 154, 165, 168, 169, 172,
95, 96, 97, 98, 103 179, 184, 185, 188, 192
kathakali, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 20 phallocracy, 45
Knuckle, 40 phallocratic, 53, See phallocracy,
kūṭiyāṭṭam, 8, 11, 13, 17, 28 See phallocracy
Late Henry Moss, 62, 72, 75 Pinter, Harold 2, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37,
Lonesome West, 104, 110, 113, 115 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 64, 77,
male breadwinner and female 117, 122, 134, 135, 137, 139,
homemaker, 117, 120, 123 156, 157, 159, 160, 167, 168,
Mamet, David, 2, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174,
50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180,
59, 60, 61, 117, 123, 124, 130, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186,
133, 135, 136, 137, 156, 165, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
188 194, 195, 196, 197,199, See
Marriage of Bette and Boo, 117, Pinteresque
121, 133, 137 Pinteresque, 37, 169, 170, 178, 179,
McDonagh, Martin 2, 100, 101, 182, 193
102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, Pirandello, Luigi184
109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, Plato, 42, 43, See Platonic
116 Platonic, 42, See Plato
menace, 77, 169, 170, 176 Plenty, 35, 40
metatextuality, 154, 155 political activism, 31, 38
Mexico, 28, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, postemotional, 82, See
69, 70, 72, 73 postemotionalism
Mountain Language, 34, 36, 38, postemotionalism, 90, See
157, 186 postemotional
Highlights in Anglo-American Drama 201
postmodern, 2, 53, 81, 100, 113, simulacra, 26, 80, 83, 88, See
138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, simulation, hyperreality,
148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, Baudrillard, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86,
157, 158, 163, See 88, 96, 155, 165, See simulacra
postmodernism Skylight, 40
postmodernism, 78, 83, 84, 140, Socrates, 41
142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, Stoppard, Tom 122, 138, 142, 143,
149, 151, 153, 164, 165, See 144, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163,
postmodern, postmodernist 164, 195, 196
postmodernist, 2, 76, 81, 84, 89, 90, Strindberg, August 184
96, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, Stuff Happens, 35, 43
147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, suspense, 170
155, 156, 163, 165, See Teeth’n’Smiles, 40
postmodern, postmodernism Theatre of the Absurd, 182, 184,
Presumption, 117, 126, 134, 135, 185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192,
136 194, 195
production, 3, 32, 108, 167, 168, Thai Theatre, 6, 7, 15, 20, 20, 27
169, 170, 172, 179, 182, 183, trauma, 76, 88, 96, See trauma
184, 186, 189, 190, 192 theory, trauma criticism
Race, 47, 51, 52, 57, 58 Vertical Hour, 35
Racing Demon, 40 Via Dolorosa, 31, 32, 33, 38, 43
Ravenhill, Mark 2, 76, 77, 78, 80, Vogel, Paula 117, 123, 124, 125,
81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 95, 130, 133, 135, 137, 144
96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 144 Walsh, Enda 117, 127, 135, 136,
Reader, the 40 137
Reinhardt, Max 4 Watt, Stephen 141, 144, 145, 146,
Romance, 47, 52, 54 163, 165
Room, the 167, 183 Wenders, Wim 2, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82,
Roudane, Matthew 71, 73, 129, 137 83, 85, 96, 98
Saddik, Annette J, 118, 121, 137, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
138, 143, 154, 162, 163, 165 120, 132, 135, 136, 137
Seduced, 62, 70, 71, 73, 75 Yeats, W. B, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
self-referentiality, 145, 152, 153, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
155 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
shaman dramaturgy, 63 104
Shepard, Sam 2, 45, 62, 63, 64, 65,
68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
142, 144, 163, 188

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Highlights in Anglo-

Viewpoints from Southeast

Radmila Nastić and Vesna Bratić

Edited by Radmila Nastić and Vesna Bratić

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2016 by Radmila Nastić, Vesna Bratić and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8682-3

Highlights in Anglo-American Drama: Viewpoints from South-East

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 4

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 62

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 76

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 100

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 138

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 166

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 181

Index ........................................................................................................ 199

RADMILA NASTIĆ AND VESNA BRATIĆ

The present volume represents viewpoints on some aspects of modern

Anglo-American drama. The eighth chapter opens up the entirely new

YEATS’S PLAYS AND TRADITIONAL THEATRE

decorated in architectural perspective. In At the Hawk’s Well, the well is

necessary: Greek drama, for example, was performed by daylight) seems

The most obvious moment to be reconsidered regarding the actor is his

shocking geometrical designs found in Japanese kabuki or Chinese jingxi

As summed up by P. Ure (1963, 47), Yeats wanted a drama whose

A provision at the beginning of Yeats’s “Note on ‘The Dreaming of the

woman, thus giving birth to an otherworldly being, the transcendent

4. The chorus and the music

This was published in 1903, and again predates Yeats’s acquaintance

even interlocutor. Other traditional theatrical forms offer a fascinating

By the time of The Words upon the Window-Pane (1934) and,

It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre of

It has been my intent throughout this chapter to indicate―despite the

Arnott, Peter D. Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. London

Stucki, Yasuko. “Yeats’s Drama and the Nō: A Comparative Study in

STRATEGIES OF SOCIAL CRITICISM

indicate that, as internationally recognized political playwrights, Pinter

2. Plays Dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

in the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, namely, the Balfour

3. Plays Dealing with the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

his intention was to depict them as typical representatives of two different

Against the opinion of many of my closest friends, I believed in the

By 2001, Harold Pinter had already decided to give up playwriting and

LIONEL I feel so pure.

4. Identification of Pinter’s and Hare’s Strategies

principles of David Hare’s strategy of social criticism are combining facts

(1993). In these plays, Hare depicted the internal functioning of three

modern Anglo-American literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš,

—. Obedience, Struggle & Revolt: Lectures on Theatre. London: Faber

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PLAYS

2. The Phallic (Dis)order

Ironically, the knife which is a material correlative of the late, but

communicative tool. His exchange with Del is still marked by an attempt

DEL: But, you see, in reality, things unfold...independent of our fears of

Where the degree of otherness is concerned, compared to plays with an

3. “Hell is Other People”

Mamet’s Oleanna showed how the audience cracks along morally

Edmond: I DIDN’T FUCKING WANT TO UNDERSTAND...let him