Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Curs opţional de
literatură engleză
Ioana Ivan-Mohor
Facultatea de Litere
Specializarea:
Limba și literatura română – Limba și literatura engleză
Anul III, Semestrul 2
,,Dunarea de Jos’’ University of Galati
Faculty of Letters
Main Trends in
Modern British Drama
(An elective course in English literature
for 3rd year students)
Course tutor:
Associate Professor Ioana Ivan-Mohor, PhD
Galaţi
2009
Cuprins
CUPRINS
OBIECTIVE
b) drama as an art form, including the written text and the concrete
performance.
SETTING: the time and place in which the action occurs; the
backdrop and set onstage that suggest to the audience the
surrounding in which a play’s action takes place.
Society drama:
• A type of play whose subject-matter was socially restricted to
the lives of the upper middle-class.
• It demonstrated and endorsed a non-objectionable subject-
matter and morality.
• As such, it was conservative in matters of social conduct and
sexual morality.
Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He
arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes
Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with
Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena
can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison
returns to Jimmy and his angry life.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word
essay of the argumentative type:
1. Traditionalism vs modernism: A. W. Pinero’s The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray
2. G. B. Shaw: Thesis drama and Technique in Man and Superman
3. Naturalist Premises in J. Galsworthy’s The Silver Box
4. The “kitchen-sink” play: D.H.Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs.
Holroyd
5. The “kitchen-sink” play: Arnold Wesker’s Roots.
6. John Osborne’s Alienation: Look Back in Anger.
1
Form of hymn or choral lyric in which Dionysus was honoured.
2
A serious and subtle dance drama that evolved in Japan in the 14 th century out of earlier songs, dances and sketches. It
was originally performed by priest-performers attached to Budhist temples. Noh plays were lyric dramas and were
intended for aristocratic audiences, differing from the popular kabuki. In noh performance movement, music and words
create an ever-shifting web of tension and ambiguity. A noh text contains prose and poetry sections. Prose is delivered
in a sonorous voice which rises gradually and evenly in pitch, then drops at the end of a phrase. Poetry sections are sung
and they make up the bulk of the text. In the central narrative module of a play the major character dances a crucial
event from his or her past to a song sung by the Chorus. The vocal pattern is overlaid on rhythm played by musicians on
drums and flute. The noh stage consists of a raised dancing platform, covered by a temple-like roof supported by pillars
at the four corners, which helps to focus the audience’s attention on the performance. At one side is a balcony which
accommodates the chorus, while upstage there is a smaller platform occupied by the musicians. The actors, between
two and six in number, wear masks and elaborate costumes, entering and leaving on a long slanting walk from stage
left. There is little or no scenery except for the framework with the roof and three symbolic trees in front of the slanting
walk, representing heaven, earth and humanity.
Eliot adapted the popular forms of drama of his time (the detective play, or
the drawing-room comedy format) in order to render his serious, spiritual
themes.
Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play commission by The Religious
Drama Society fir the 1935 Canterbury Festival and Eliot’s first dramatic
success, treated a Christian martyrdom as if it was a murder, so that,
despite its static form and medieval subject, it was subsequently
transferred on the commercial stage. The structure of the play builds up
the story of Thomas Becket, the 12th century martyr, through Chorus,
priests, Tempters and Thomas himself. Divided in two parts, it starts with
Becket’s arrival at his Cathedral from France, determined to resist the
submission of Church to State (which Henry demands.) Four Tempters
appear to test Henry’s decision, and the last of them is the most difficult to
resist, insinuating that pride is motivating the Archbishop. But the Chorus
of the women of Canterbury (who express the related anguish of the whole
community) enable Thomas, through their pleads, to overcome the
paralysis of will induced by the last Tempter. In the second part, the four
knights, intent to punish Thomas, arrive at the Cathedral, and their
physical threat implicates the audience in the brutality and political
expedience of the murder. The play ends on the Chorus’s concluding
thanksgiving to Thomas’s testimony through martyrdom. Thus, Becket’s
death is presented as an imitation of Christ’s own martyrdom, for Becket
becomes the Christian subject who renounces his own free will in order to
subject to the pattern designed for him by God’s will. The imagery and
rhythms of the Choral verse are designed to carry the audience through
the same spiritual progression as Thomas himself, while the use of
colloquial prose in the Knights’ direct address to the public reinforces the
identification between the two by breaking through the temporal distance
and implying thus that the 20th-century loss of faith is no less guilty of
Becket’s death than the historical characters themselves.
In his next plays, Eliot rejected the overtly religious drama (as
preaching to the already converted) and turned, instead, to secular topics
in order to “allow a Christian mentality to permeate the theatre, to affect it,
and to influence audiences who might be obdurate to plays of direct
religious appeal” (Lemming). As such, Eliot’s social (or drawing-room)
comedies, while continuing to experiment with the choral form, turn to
Greek myth in order to establish a parallel to the surface action, in order to
achieve “a doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at
once” (Innes), a metaphoric quality which is the characteristic of
poetic/symbolist drama.
The Family Reunion (1938) is paralleled by the events and
characters of Aeschylus’s The Orestia. Clytemnestra finds an equivalent in
Amy the dominant mother, while Harry parallels Orestes, the returning son
responsible for his mother’s death. The plays borrows a misleading
detective frame, with a confession of murder (the hero, who returns home
to attend his mother’s birthday celebration, is convinced to have murdered
his wife, and he confesses this to his half-incredulous and half-panicked
relatives), questioning of the suspect, and a possible witness to the crime,
as well as the appearance of a police agent. But Harry’s guilt is imaginary.
He is simply repeating inherited patterns, for his dream of pushing his wife
overboard, at sea, is a projection of his father’s plan to drown Harry’s
pregnant mother in a well on the estate. Where Agamemnon sacrifices his
daughter, Harry’s father was persuaded not to dispose of Amy because
this would have meant killing his unborn child. Moreover, the net that traps
him is the web of family responsibilities, and instead of being butchered
with an axe, his life is sapped by his wife’s implacable will to preserve the
status quo. The sins are those of omission, and the curse lies in repeating
the past rather than a developing pattern of vengeance. Similarly, it is
Harry’s refusal to perpetuate the hell of unreality (as symbolized by the
country estate of Wishwood) that kills Amy, destroyed by his departure.
But instead of fleeing in guilt, like Orestes, Harry’s exit is to be seen as a
triumph, while the tragedy is that of his mother, of a person living on will
alone. Such hidden parallels are signaled by breaking naturalistic
expectations, and, in turn, the unnatural actions of the characters are
justified by their correspondence to the myth. The dialogue, reflecting the
various levels of the action, switches between colloquial and heightened
verse, visionary trances, unconscious utterance and chanted incantation,
while the classical figures of the pursuing Fate are listed explicitly in the
cast as “The Eumenides” – tangible embodiments of the myth, who, at
first, haunt Harry as avengers of his wife, but later come to personify his
spiritual change.
Yet, even with the shifts of consciousness in the play, the
coexistence of two such different dimensions of reality proved incongruous
on the stage, so that, with his next play, The Cocktail Party ( 1949), Eliot
resolved this “failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the
modern situation” (Innes) by concealing the plot’s mythical origins.
The preliminary basis for the play was Euripides’s Alcestis. But here
the Eumenides are disguised as a psychiatrist, colonial envoy , and
interfering unofficial aunt, interacting with the social group they manipulate.
This concealed mythical level is replaced by an external shaping of
experience through the imposition of a geometrical symmetry on the
surface plot. Not only the missing wife has a lover, but the latter one is in
love with the mistress of the husband, whom he selects as a confidant,
forming thus a quadrilateral equation. In addition, the action is circular,
beginning with the end of one party, and ending with the preparations for
another.
The Confidential Clerk (1953) takes this to an extreme. The model is
Euripides’s Ions, but the plot follows it in that Eliot has three dubiously
parented young people in the play (a husband and a wife each have a
misplaced illegitimate child, and both recognize him in the tile figure; he, in
turn, is revealed to have lost his real father, and chooses his clerical
predecessor, whose own child was lost in the war, as his true spiritual
parent.) Where the original myth had a single child – the son of Apollo,
believed dead by his mother who tries to kill him when adopted by her
husband – Eliot adds an illegitimate daughter and a second
unacknowledged son, accentuating thus the parallelism to a farcical level,
the automatic association being not with a classical archetype, but rather
with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Increasingly, in Eliot’s later plays, the mythical subtext becomes
more tenuous and, as the social mode comes to dominate, the verse takes
on the attributes of ordinary conversation. His last play, The Elder
Statesman (1958) resembles Oedipus at Colonus only in the fact that the
aged protagonists of both plays go away led by loving daughters and, after
resisting messengers from the past, die reconciled with the gods. But the
plot of The Elder Statesman, where two blackmailers appear out of Lord
Claverton’s past demanding not money but acknowledgement of their
existence, while the Lord’s own guilty secret (running over the body of a
man already killed by another driver) is equally imaginary reduces the
motivation for the spiritual conversion of its protagonists, who lack any
convincing personal reality.
Eliot’s plays can thus be seen as a progressive series of
experiments, each tackling the dramaturgical problems revealed by his
previous attempt to create a specifically modern form of poetic drama.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
Father (1887), Miss Julie (1898) and Creditors (1889), after a period of
mental crisis he wrote another twenty-nine plays in which he moved
towards expressionism, disregarding the strict demands of realism and
using materials that resembled dreams, or nightmares. For example, in A
Dream Play (1902), the main character is a dreamer, while his imagination
(in the form of dreams) designs the patterns, fancies, absurdities and
improvisations which make up the play. The Ghost Sonata (1907) is an
ironic psychological allegory which uses the same dream-like action to
explore the protagonist’s encounter with death, seen as a painful
awakening from a life of sleep-walking illusion.
and throws his money into the hall in an ecstasy of abnegation. But the
‘saved’ throw themselves on the money, and the cashier looses faith. He
can now trust only one person, a girl, but she calls the police and he
shoots himself.
an escapist lullaby as her son dies. In the 1930s, the real life analogues of
both plot and hero must have been clear to the audience: on the one
hand, the international competition recalled Scott’s race to the South Pole,
while, on the other, Ransome could be seen as a fictive counterpart of T.E.
Lawrence, as a national hero who had rejected society and had combined
a life of action and literary contemplation.
The confusing structure of On the Frontier, their last play, is set
against the background of an European war between two imaginary
countries, Westland and Ostria, which is fuelled by a mad demagogue
Leader and by a cynical businessman, Valerian. Alternating with the main
scenes which involve the politicians, the play shows the lives of two
ordinary families – shown simultaneously on stage with an invisible
‘frontier” line dividing the scene – as they are affected by war.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
1. Expressionist devices in Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie.
2. Expressionism and the radio play: Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood.
3
Agit-prop theatre originated in the aftermath of the Russian revolution as a substitute for newsprint. Its aim was to
spread information and the party line through a widely dispersed and illiterate population. The typical form of this type
of theatre were the short sketches which illustrated political commentary.
was also emplaced in the communal style of production, at times cast as troops in the
trenches by using a ‘plant’ to set up a dialogue with the soldiers on the stage, at other
times called to join in the choruses of the songs. Nevertheless, such overt theatricality was
always counterpointed by documentary fact – by having real photographs from the war
projected on a screen behind the actor, using slides of posters and advertisements from
the era to set the action in the context of the period, or have a newspanel giving a running
commentary on the scenes with dates and statistics. Such devices had the effect of
contrasting the stark reality with the songs, dance, mime and sketches of the performers.
direct address and other epic devices, while a dialectical structure stands at its back,
refusing to comfort the spectator or confirm him in his beliefs.
Arden’s subsequent plays are also attuned to the Brechtian model. The Happy Haven
(1960) centres again on anarchic individualism, which causes a group of joyous old folk
rise against the doctors and staff in the nursing home. Ironhand (1963), a play which
updates Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, presents the robber baron defending his way of
life against the extension of law, the rise of an amoral politician and the dominance of the
new middle-class the latter represents. Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1965) distances the
theme of imperialism into a 13th century Scottish context, while lsland of the Mighty (1965)
is an epic Arthurian romance. Such plays which attempt to represent complex issues in a
broad social and chronicle drama demonstrate that Arden’s concerns are similar to those
of Brecht (i.e. social and historical), with situations representative of forms of social
interaction, and characters tending towards the stereotypical. At the same time, Arden also
uses song and separates his scenes to make ‘gestic’ statements, yet, unlike his mentor,
he proves a more realistic writer who mainly uses the fourth wall convention to project a
rapidly moving plot, and his songs are not so much separate as incorporated into the
action.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
1. Edward Bond’s epic theatre: Lear.
2. The British Brecht: John Arden and Sg Musgrave’s Dance
MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY