British Drama

Özet: Çağımızın önde gelen sosyalist İngiliz oyun yazarlarından biri olan Howard Brenton, yazmış olduğu otuzdan fazla oyunda şiddet olgusuna oldukça büyük bir önem vermiştir. Her ne kadar bireysel şiddet olayları hem bireyler hem de toplum için tehlikeli sonuçlar ortaya çıkarsa da bu eylemler genellikle önceden öngörülebilen ve önlenebilecek eylemler iken, özellikle değişik toplumsal gruplar arasında meydana gelen kolektif, toplumsal şiddet olayları, bireysel şiddet eylemlerinden çok daha tehlikelidir. Özellikle devlet tarafından uygulanan şiddet bu tür şiddet eylemlerinin en önemlisi ve tehlikelisidir. Brenton da eserlerinde ve de özellikle bu çalışmanın konusunu oluşturan The Churchill Play adlı oyununda bu konuyu ele almaktadır. Bu eserde devlet tarafından toplumun değişik tabakalarına ve gruplarına karşı uygulanan baskı ve şiddet olayları ve toplumsal sorunların önemli bir sebebi olan ekonomik eşitsizlik ele alınmaktadır. Brenton bu eserle birlikte şiddetin devlet tarafından kitleleri kontrol altında tutmak için nasıl bir araç olarak kullanıldığını ortaya koymaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler. Howard Brenton, şiddet, kolektif şiddet, The Churchill Play, toplama kampı State-based Social Violence in Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play Abstract: Howard Brenton who is one of the leading socialist playwrights of contemporary British Literature has written more than thirty plays most of which are concerned with the question of violence. Though individual acts of violence have a great impact on both the members of the society and the structure of the society as a whole, they are transitory and can be predicted and + Bu çalışma Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü'nde 2010 yılında hazırlanılan " Howard Brenton'ın Tiyatro Eserlerinde Şiddet ve Boyutları " adlı doktora tezinden esinlenilerek geliştirilmiştir. * Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü, Sivas. sbay@cumhuriyet.tr

This study aims at exploring the significance of Post-Neoliberalism in Anders Lustgarten’s If You Don't Let Us Dream We Won't Let You Sleep (2013). Acknowledging that any literary production cannot be examined without considering a bigger and more complex social structure, the study attempts to find out about the dialectical relationship between Lustgarten’s play and the society in which the characters live. Post-Neoliberalism is a relational perspective on governance that emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis. Post-Neoliberalism is also a concept given to a period on which a global climate crisis affected the whole world and vital resources were crudely consumed. Most importantly, the Post-Neoliberal era has been built on serious political disappointments fuelled by neoliberal policies. In the play set in a dystopian UK, the business representatives decide that the financially burdensome culture of addiction must be eliminated. For this purpose, the state invents “Unity Bonds”, a tool that will generate returns if the number of people committing crimes to the investor or taking drug treatment drops to a certain level. Thus, the state wants to shift the cost of social repair to the private sector.  The play takes place in a dystopian universe in which ‘the market determines everything approach’, the basic principle of neoliberalism, dominates every area of society, and the basic rights of citizens such as health, education and housing are commodified. Using close reading method, this study deals with the analysis of the interactive arrangements between the play and its socio-political context. The impetus behind this study is to investigate the ways in which Anders Lustgarten critiques the Post-Neoliberal era which destroys the foundational values of the western society and the social consensus lying in its base by deepening the economic and social injustices.
Key Words: Anders Lustgarten, Post-Neoliberalism, Free Market Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Post-Globalisation, Contemporary British Theatre

The article focuses on the representation of violence in Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal.
Building on Slavoj Žižek’s theory, the paper suggests that the play is a complex exploration of the problem as it not only depicts instances of what Žižek calls subjective
violence, but also probes into systemic violence that may have led to the eruption of
the former. *e article argues that the characters are socially excluded and that it is
precisely this fact that drives them to commit felonies. *e paper also addresses the
question of whether Prichard’s play is an in-yer-face drama, suggesting that it eludes
such categorization as it is also a piece of social realism.

Individual memory assumes a fundamental part in the improvement of individual identity. Individuals' available
points of view about themselves, feelings, and goals affect their recollections and evaluations of past selves. Thus, people's existing points of views about themselves are influenced by what they recall about their own past, and how they evaluate earlier selves and scenes. People's reproduced evaluations of memories, their obvious detachment from past experiences, and the point of view of their recollections have proposals for how the past impacts the present. In this study we will focus on the verification of the reciprocal relation between memory and identity in Shelagh Stephenson’s play The Memory of Water (1996) through three sisters who come together for their mother’s funeral service in the north of England. The sisters’ path toward mourning brings their past into question as memories strive for authenticity and the internal facts of their different lives affecting their current identities will be uncovered.

Keywords: The Memory of Water, identity, memory, Shelagh Stephenson, burial ceremony

Bryony Lavery is an important figure in British feminist drama. She has been noted by critics for her unconventional theatrical methods and themes. Her Frozen (1998) is an anti-paedophiliac play that deals with a psychiatrist who tries to investigate the motives of a paedophile. Investigations into the past of the sexual predator blur the lines between the victim and the victimiser, and the acts of forgiving by the wronged family challenge conventional motifs of revenge. Lavery’s use of black and dark comedy further challenges conventional ways of dealing with such serious matters. Therefore, by presenting the psychosexual history of the sexual predator in Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, this article will analyse the social and psychological reasons behind sexual abuse in the play, and discuss Lavery’s unconventional poetics of anti-paedophilia.
Keywords: Bryony Lavery, Frozen, psychosexual history, anti-paedophilia.

Silence as a theme in the plays of Pinter mostly refers to the hidden agenda of organisations at work at the socio­political level. To break the silence, to explore the secrets of the operations of organisations on the part of an individual results in his doom. The forces of organisation silence all opposition and dissidence. The elements of menace and mystery in the early plays of Pinter has a metaphysical perspective but today, considered with the later plays when we perceive the rites of silencing as vital to the plays’ structure. (This paper was presented at an International Conference on Harold Pinter at the University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France in March, 2007.)

1. Would you call the character of Dr. Faustus ‘heroic’? Give reasons for
your answer. (20)
2. Discuss the play within the play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (20)

3. What is the importance of Hamlet’s soliloquies in the play? (20)
4. Can The Alchemist be considered an allegory? Give a reasoned answer. (20)
5. Can Eliza in Pygmalion be termed as feminist? Elaborate. (20)
6. What are the comic strategies used in The Playboy of the Western World? (20)
7. Discuss Murder in the Cathedral as a poetic drama. (20)
8. Comment on the title of Look Back in Anger. (20)
9. Discuss Waiting for Godot from the perspective of the theatre of the Absurd. (20)
1. Discuss the character of Dr Faustus as a tragic figure. 20
2. Identify the characteristics of Shakespearean comedy in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. 20
3. What do you think is the dominant quality of Hamlet’s character? Illustrate. 20
4. Discuss The Alchemist as a satire. 20
5. Comment on the relevance of The Playboy of the Western World to the present time.
20
6. Do you think Pygmalion is a romance? Give reasons for your answer. 20
7. What are the qualities that set Murder in the Cathedral apart from other plays? 20
8. Examine the existentialist elements in Waiting for Godot. 20
9. Discuss the main characters of Look Back in Anger and their relationship with each
other. 20
10. Write an essay on British drama in the twentieth century. 20

A scrupulous study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its most comprehensive rewriting Indigo, or Mapping the Waters by Marina Warner. Taking as its focus representations of femininity and the other, the study scrutinises the various implications of three concepts: ambivalence, liminality and plurality in terms of their relevance to the conjunctures of postfeminism and post-colonialism, proposing that postfeminist discourse is in search of a new ethics and perspective that mainly champion these three terms through the employment of intertextuality as a strategy. The study is careful to carry out a comparative analysis of the works in terms of both poetics and politics. Informed by interdisciplinarity, the study explores how The Tempest destabilises itself, inviting a deconstructionist reading in terms of its relation to patriarchal and colonial dynamics ingrained in the play and how Indigo takes its substantial space among other rewritings of The Tempest by presenting new and imaginative ways of seeing the female and feminised figures in the play.

The aim of this study is to examine to what extent the struggle and interaction between the colonizer and the colonized contribute to response to British colonial domination, othering and oppression in Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink (1994). This will be carried out by means of a Bakhtinian polyphonic and dialogic analysis that aims to ascertain the relationship between the colonial and postcolonial time and setting. It will be concluded that the colonial and postcolonial India and Indians are under the west hegemony although the postcolonial Indians are more educated. But since the education system is established by the colonizer, subjection is felt at every step of life for an Indian. Through a dialogic reading, it will be deduced that the struggle and interaction of the characters through dialogues bring to light the cultural representation and diversity and establish a response to colonial discourse both in the past and present. As Stoppard reveals, the colonized replies to the prejudices and stereotyping of the colonizer. The voices of the colonized Indians are heard since the play has a postcolonial and polyphonic structure; that is, the voiceless inferior Indian is voiced by the playwright.

Antifeminism in Bernard Shaw’s Candida
Susheel Kumar Sharma, Professor of English, University of Allahabad, Allahabad-211002, India                                             
Rabindra Kumar Verma, Research Scholar, Dept of English & MEL, University of Allahabad, Allahabad-211002, India                   

ABSTRACT
The critics of Shaw have studied Bernard Shaw’s Candida (1895) variously. G E Brown (1970) opines that in Candida Shaw depicts a triangular relationship among Candida, Morell and Marchbanks. Martin Meisel (1984) reads Candida as a domestic comedy in which Shaw dramatizes family life. Maurice Colbourne (1949) opines that the play is a comedy of simple conflict of ordinary life. J L Styan (1962) holds that Candida is a play of mothering in which Candida chose to mother rather than do anything else. William J Doan (2000) views Candida as a play with an eye on duty. Bernard F Dukore (1973) opines that Candida is a parody of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Charles A Berst (1974) states that in Candida emotions and characterisations are far more important than the ideas. Walter N King (1959) holds that Candida is a rhetorical tour de force of Bernard Shaw. Louis Crompton (1969) views Candida as a naturalistic play in which Shaw discuses domestic life of the Victorian society of England. Similarly, Margery M Morgan (1972) states that Candida is a critique of Victorian society that focuses chiefly on home. Arthur H Nethercot (1949) opines that in Candida the problem of the meaning of characters and their relationships forms the backbone of the whole play. However, the feminist of 1890s were campaigning for equal rights of women and New Woman was the key issue of the period that attracted attention of the intellectuals. The this paper therefore, seeks to make a close reading of the play to study Shaw’s reaction against women characters and find out antifeminist traits projected against them.

Ensuing John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, a new angry young generation has appeared with more provocative and shocking works which have later been called 'in-yer-face' theatre by critic Aleks Sierz. It would not be wrong to say that Sarah Kane with her first play Blasted is the key figure of 'in-yer-face' theatre. Presenting dirty language, sex, nudity, violence on stage are shocking techniques that leave an indelible impression. In Blasted, Kane connects the interpersonal violence with the forgone conclusions of the war which is dirty, and she depicts this idea in a harsh way in which audiences may feel that as if Kane throws up on them while telling her story.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the characteristics of in-yer-face theatre in Sarah Kane's Blasted.

Shaw, the larger-than-life playwright who called himself “a bit of an
actor,” was often preoccupied with role-playing. In “Acting, by One Who Does Not Believe in It,” a paper delivered at a Fabian meeting in 1889, Shaw asserted that acting — often denounced as shamming — can actually be an avenue to “metaphysical self-realization.” Employing a metadramatic approach to Pygmalion, the following article finds connections between Shaw’s career as a dramatist and the mixed outcomes of Henry and Eliza’s journeys into “metaphysical self-realization.”

Methuen Drama (A&C Black Publishers Ltd) allowed me to cite from the text of Top Girls used in Caryl Churchill Plays: 2.1 would like to acknowledge Michael Daniels for permission to print his photo of Bianca Amato as Marlene from the Guthrie 1996 production of Top Girls on the cover of this book. Of course I would also like to acknowledge Caryl Churchill for writing such a thought-provoking play.

I would very much like to thank Janelle Reinelt for inspiring my interest in Caryl Churchill and for her numerous helpful suggestions during the writing process of this book. I am grateful to Elaine Aston and Graham Saunders for their welcoming generosity and knowledge while researching in the UK. I would also like to thank faculty members at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego for their encouragement, especially Bryan Reynolds, John Rouse, Nadine George, Laura O'Connor and Jim Carmody.

Personally, I would like to express my gratitude to Kandace Korth and Gordon Wiser for providing me with wonderful getaways where I could write in peace. Thank you to Patricia Wilshire and Caroline Brooks for always welcoming me to London. Many thanks to Genny Blewett, Golnag Tahsini and Mark Alkons for their assistance during the writing process. Thanks to Janna Segal for many late-night conversations. Finally, but definitely not least, many thanks to my family for their ongoing support, especially my brother Vince for sharing my interest in all things dramatic, my father Bert for always talking to me about politics, and most of all, my mother for exposing me to the joys of the theatre.

Prejudice and hatred towards Muslims in Europe and America are not reactions to the 9/11 attacks in New York alone. Nevertheless, these anti-Muslim sentiments date back to the post-WW II era, when waves of Muslims came to Europe as refugees seeking a better life away from civil wars and unrest in their homelands. This paper is to detect and discuss the driving forces of Muslimophobia in Richard Bean's England People Very Nice and Yousef El Guindi's Back of the Throat. The paper must first tackle the term Islamophobia, its history and misconceptions, to build a more solid distinction between the broad term of Islamophobia and the more precise term of Muslimophobia. The discussion moves subsequently to the perceptions of threat and ethnocentrism as the forces that intensify anti-Muslim sentiments. Henceforward, the paper pursues a comparative analysis of the dramas at hand by tracing the employment of threat and ethnocentrism in shaping Muslimophobic characters in both dramas. The outcome of this comparative study reveals that the ideology of each author plays a vital role in the underlying perceptions of threat and ethnocentrism.

This paper aims to analyse As You Like It both as a comedy, consisting of marriages, love affairs and songs, and as a pastoral work, praising the country life in the Forest of Arden. While doing so, the ideas on drama and poetry brought forward by Shakespeare’s contemporaries Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), and Ben Jonson (1572-1632) together with Julius Caesar Scaliger’s (1484-1558) ideas on comedy will be taken into consideration. It will be concluded that the power of love and tolerance is emphasized with the happy ending and reconciliations at the end of the play; therefore, as Sir Philip Sidney points out, the play achieves both to delight and teach. The dances, songs and marriages all delight the audience.

Women playwrights have always struggled to redefine femininity in their works by primarily reflecting the unequal treatment of women in society. To this end, some of the contemporary women dramatists make use of canonical texts and rewrite them in order to challenge the accepted notion of patriarchal dominance presented earlier by prominent male writers. Shakespeare’s plays have also been appropriated for contemporary theatre by women playwrights opposing the mainstream ideas initiated by his seminal works. One of the contemporary revisionist women playwrights is Elaine Feinstein (1930-) who attempts to subvert both gender and political aspects of Shakespeare’s King Lear in her version of the play, Lear’s Daughters (1987) written cooperatively with Women’s Theatre Group.

Lear’s Daughters marginalises the former protagonist King Lear by presenting him offstage and prioritises his imaginary wife instead who is absent in the original play. As the title also suggests, in this rewriting, the emphasis is not on Lear who is just a lecherous imperfect father, but on his three daughters who suffer from parental neglect. The male protagonist of the original work is reduced to a lesser degree, and his daughters are not responsible for his tragedy any more. Feinstein reinforces her feminist stance by eliminating the male characters, making the Fool an androgynous character, and making the daughters and Lear’s wife the new protagonists. Lear’s Daughters deals with the problem of gender inequality as well as protesting the social and economic deterioration during the Thatcher period. Accordingly, this paper argues that Elaine Feinstein, as a feminist playwright, brings together both social and political critique concerning women by implicitly criticising Thatcher’s policies; hence contemporising the issue of women’s subordination in Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Keywords: Elaine Feinstein, Women's Theatre Group, Lear’s Daughters, Shakespeare, King Lear, Feminism, Patriarchy, Rewriting, Thatcher.

Shakespeare, the most canonical of canonical authors, has a voice that is a permanent part of our lingua franca.  For the first time in literary and stage history, I have created an academic-creative hybrid which tackles English poetics versus Scottish poetics combined with an argument to include Hecate, who is important to Scottish mythology, along with Hecate’s two oft-excluded songs, wrapped up inside a new Scottish translation and adaptation. Many purists consider any non-Elizabethan English performance of Shakespeare’s works as blasphemous while some traditionalists argue that any new interpretation will fracture the canon. Against the backdrop of my translation, I will prove this is not true. Using First Folio of 1623, I have directly connected Shakespeare’s original work to the heartbeat of Scottish history, Celtic culture, and social thinking. As Walter Benjamin stated, new literary interpretations of older material “is the measure of a work’s afterlife. Every literary work is incomplete until it is translated . . . it is only through translation that it can truly come to life.” My fresh Scottish tongue translation, coupled with a strong Celtic-themed adaptation, of Macbeth will allow today’s audience an opportunity to discover new connotations that only de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation will permit.

Despite their different time periods and social, economic and political changes in the society, these three plays have anger, violence and alienation in common and so, the desire to convey these feelings to their audience yet in different forms.

• comparing and contrasting the works
• focusing particularly on contextual/historical background and theatrical/aesthetic features

Caryl Churchill's plays thematically embody elements of many-isms such as feminism, sexism, capitalism, and socialism, labeling her dramaturgy as an eclectic combination of social philosophies and political ideologies. Although genuinely creative and original in her writing and theatrical practices, Caryl Churchill does not refrain from making use of preceding European theatrical theory, practice, and culture. In this sense, she is a playwright who benefits considerably from the thematic and technical aspects of the Brechtian epic theatre, which can be observed in her Mad Forest. Sarah Kane, on the other hand, with her experimental dramaturgy that stretches and twists features of realism and naturalism into new post-dramatic forms, is no less different from her predecessor Caryl Churchill in terms of embracing challenging, confrontational ideas and reflecting them in her plays. Notwithstanding with her openness to novel dramatic styles, Sarah Kane, too, acknowledges earlier dramatic aesthetics as seen in her Phaedra's Love, which is an adaptation of the classical Roman playwright Seneca's Phaedra. Likewise, it can be observed that Sarah Kane utilizes certain features of the Brechtian epic theater in her Cleansed. Considering these, this article studies how and to what extent Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane maintain the Brechtian dramatic elements in their Mad Forest and Cleansed, respectively. By examining this tripartite interaction among Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, the study also tries to reinterpret the dramatic relations among these seemingly distant playwrights of different generations.

It is quite common to consider Robin Goodfellow the jester of fairy king Oberon, a trickster. His tricks, however, are in no way common. He plays tricks on time and space. There is an abundance of words that belong to the semantic field of time and place in the play. The majority of these words are uttered by Theseus, the Duke of Athens. Un-playful as he might appear to be, the Athenian Duke guarantees the success of Puck’s tricks. The fairy and the Duke seem to be playing similar roles. In this article, we attempt to challenge the tradition that casts the actor playing Theseus in no other role than that of Oberon. We will endeavour to show that Theseus and Robin are the parallels that never meet.
Keywords: Doubling, trickery, time, parallels, performance

This article explores Martin Crimp’s use of Carl G. Jung’s word association test in his 1997 play "Attempts on Her Life". As Crimp reproduces the list of one hundred stimulus words devised in 1909 by the psychoanalyst to test his patients' mental health, this paper shows that this “collage” of disarticulated words inserted into the dialogue of three anonymous art critics in "Scenario 11" ironically emphasises the absence of the main character, the suicidal artist, and highlights her refusal to undergo “treatment.” Anne’s posthumous silence both ignores the psychoanalyst’s trigger words and mocks the critics’ conflicting opinions. By foiling these “attempts on her life”, her aphasia reflects the vanity of language and, more specifically, questions the value of contemporary art criticism especially when leading to moral judgements, and points both at the failure of the scientific claims of psychoanalysis and at the “pointlessness” of pseudo-intellectual debates suffused with subjective biases and personal emotions. Crimp’s collage itself is a criticism of the temptation to make uncompromising statements about one’s life and motives. While the critics’ debate ends in disagreement, the scientific voice faces its own loneliness and becomes a dramatic event per se. A similar resort to psychoanalysis and psychiatry can be found in Sarah Kane’s "4.48 Psychosis" (2002): in these instances of "in-yer-head" theatre, both authors turn either the clinical voice of the doctor or the neurotic voice of the patient into a self-referential source where a form of stage poetry emerges, displaying both the bare materiality of words and the disappearance of the main character.

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Cet article sur la pièce majeure de Martin Crimp, "Atteintes à sa vie" (1997), propose une étude du scénario 11 en regard du test d’association de mots créé par Carl G. Jung en 1909. Récupérée et insérée au cours du dialogue qui prend place entre trois critiques d’art anonymes, la liste de cent mots inducteurs mise au point par le psychanalyste pour évaluer la santé mentale de ses patients fait ici l’objet d’un collage textuel qui souligne ironiquement l’absence du personnage principal, l’artiste suicidaire, et son refus de se soumettre à tout traitement psychanalytique. Le silence posthume d’Anne à la fois contrarie les appels lexicaux du médecin et moque l’affrontement verbeux des critiques. En contrecarrant ces "atteintes à sa vie" par la parole, l’aphasie de l’artiste morte reflète en creux les vaines prétentions du langage et pointe du doigt l’échec des ambitions scientifiques de la psychanalyse autant que la vanité du débat intellectuel. Ce collage permet à Crimp de critiquer la tentation d’émettre des jugements catégoriques sur la vie et les motifs de « l’Autre ». Tandis que le débat des critiques s’achève sur le même désaccord initial, la voix clinique est renvoyée à sa propre solitude et devient un pur événement dramatique. On trouve le même ressort à la psychanalyse et à la psychiatrie dans "4.48 Psychose" de Sarah Kane : dans ces "théâtres de l’espace mental", les deux auteurs transforment la voix – que ce soit celle du médecin ou celle du patient – en un langage auto-référentiel, source d’une poésie de la scène qui met à nue la matière sonore des mots et fait écho à la dissolution existentielle du sujet.

Caryl Churchill is one of Britain’s most prominent and talented contemporary playwrights. Since the 1960s, the author has published thirty plays dealing with a wide variety of subjects from political matters to gender issues and ecological problems. Amongst the many issues and social problems of Churchill’s dramatic oeuvre, natural concerns and environmental catastrophes stand out as the dramatist displays significant awareness towards issues concerning the destruction of nature. To that end, particular themes related to the Anthropocene and Capitalocene come forward in Churchill’s ecological plays. Briefly defined as the era of observable human impact on Earth, the Anthropocene was coined in 2000 and reformulated by scholars various times. The most notable reinterpretation of the Anthropocene resulted in the coining of the Capitalocene which argues that this epoch was largely shaped by the detrimental effects of capitalism on the human society and naturally, on Earth as a whole. This article’s main purpose is to expose specific depictions of the Capitalocene in Churchill’s Not not not not not enough oxygen and Far Away to reveal why and how these depictions are presented in the author’s plays. Therefore, the study demonstrates Churchill’s theatre as a theatre of the Anthropocene and reveals the dramatist’s critique of capitalism in order to raise awareness towards environmental issues in the British society and public opinion.

Much as not accepted legally as a part of the political system, the media, Fourth Estate, is an industry that exerts an indirect still huge effect on society. The most usually perceived piece of the fourth domain is the news media or the press. Pravda, the winner of the 1985 Evening Standard Best Play Award, is a satirical play by David Hare and Howard Brenton which explores this issue and shows what the genuine role of journalism must be in society. Our study deals with the mid-1980s daily newspaper industry in Britain, specifically the ones owned by the Australian media and press baron Rupert Murdoch, and why so many English newspapers choose to behave as if they were propaganda sheets in disguise of newspapers.

This study investigates the critique of neoliberalism in David Hare’s plays. The British playwright, Sir David Hare, is known for his long and distinguished writing career which consists of a remarkable number plays, television, and film radio scripts. David Hare gives a unique place to cultural and political criticism of the British Institutions in his plays. From his early career days which coincide with the emerge of “the angry young man movement” of post-war Britain, he depicts “the contradictory trends of the nation and shares with his predecessors the idea of social and usefulness drama” (Boireau 2003: p.27). As regards his personal and historical status as a dramatist, David Hare dramatizes the social disorders within the society and portrays them in a way that shows their dialectical bounds with culture, society, and ideology. In this context, it is not surprising that neoliberalism, dominating world politics for nearly forty years, has a literary presence in Hare’s drama.
This thesis focuses on specific plays written in the core period of the neoliberal era. The plays are selected from the ones that are written in 2000s and include strong criticism of neoliberal policies which are considered to lead to a decline of neoliberalism. The plays under consideration are as follows: The Permanent Way (2003), Stuff Happens (2004), The Vertical Hour (2008b), Gethsemane (2008a), The Power of Yes (2009) and Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2014a). Acknowledging that any literary production cannot be examined without considering a bigger and more complex social structure, the study attempts
to find out about the dialectical relationships among Hare’s
selected plays, the societies which they reflect and the neoliberal
policies which have been perceptibly dominant in the
world politics since 1970s. I therefore attempt to put David
Hare’s selected plays into their historical context and argue
that the plays have a dialectical relationship with the society
in which they were created. Using the dialectical method, I
offer an analysis of the interactive arrangements between the
plays and their socio-political context. In this sense, the impetus
behind this study is to offer a dialectical analysis of David
Hare’s selected plays in order to underline his unique language
and thematic choices to construct his literary argument.

Surveys of Irish literature often ignore or maginalise the Derry-born playwright, George Farquhar, due to what Christopher Morash has justly called the “vicious anti-Catholicism” in his plays. When critics of Irish literature do engage with his work, it is often to praise the first two plays (Love and a Bottle and The Constant Couple) for their perceived Irishness, and to worry over the sectarian portrayals of Irish Catholics – and Catholics in general – in his last three and best-known plays (The Twin Rivals, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Strategem). Despite this privileging of the early work over the later classics, such critics have (curiously) not explained why there is a distinct increase in Farquhar’s sectarianism after his first two plays. This increase can be traced directly to the negative responses by jealous English playwrights and critics to the extraordinary popularity of 1699’s The Constant Couple.

Anti-Farquhar prologues, satirical poems, and reviews that appeared in the wake of The Constant Couple’s first run repeatedly mention the playwright’s Irishness. In one of the most vicious of these, Daniel Kendrick actually calls the Protestant Farquhar a “Teague”. Farquhar’s reaction to being regarded by English writers and critics as an Irish “Teague” was perhaps not unexpected for a Derry Protestant who – according to legend – was inside the walls during the Siege of Derry, fought for King William at the Battle of the Boyne, and whose childhood home was burned to the ground by Catholic rebels. In all of the plays that follow The Constant Couple, Farquhar either aggressively criticises Catholicism or features an offensively stupid Irish Catholic character. It was only after Farquhar eventually convinced English audiences of his loyalty to the English crown that the anti-Irish jibes abated.

One of the pioneering women dramatists of British literature, Timberlake Wertenbaker provides both a criticism of post-war Britain and propaganda of the ameliorating function of theatre in her play Our Country’s Good (1988). As a play based on the novel The Playmaker (1987) by Thomas Keneally, Our Country’s Good builds upon the issue of redemptive effects of theatre by portraying a group of convicts on a ship that takes them to Australia in the eighteenth century. Our Country’s Good portrays different authority figures consisting of those who believe in traditional means of punishment and who suggest the possibility of redemption through theatre as an alternative to severe punishment. It is possible to analyse the conflicting views of officers concerning the appropriate punishment methods of the convicts from a Foucauldian perspective. This reading draws on Foucault’s proposal of a penal reform that requires the use of carceral transformation through work and exercise resulting in the correction of delinquents’ behaviour. This paper focuses on the social function of punishment and analyses the representation of the conflation between theatre and punishment in Wertenbaker’s play in light of the dominant ideology concerning these issues in Britain in the Thatcher years.

This paper presents a commentary on Harold Pinter's Birthday Party by considering the surface appearance and the events on the surface in the play and the deeper reality which is being presented by the using the surface appearance as a theatrical effect. It provides examples from the play and evidence from relevant literary criticism. It focuses on the content of the play and how the effect of using surface reality to express what is under the surface functions.

The article concentrates on two small and little known dramatic texts (pageants) written by E. M. Forster in the late 1930s entitled The Abinger Pageant and England’s Pleasant Land. The introductory part introduces the history of pageant in the early 20th century. The article presents briefly Forster’s earlier, mostly unsuccessful, dramatic experiments, analyses the two texts, their staging and publishing history of the two playlets, as well as their place in Forster’s further development as an artist as well as their place in Forsterian criticism. Certain consideration is also given to their musical setting as well as their author’s cooperation with the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

As a much-discussed part of the human mind, memory today is an interdisciplinary subject studied by a variety of academic fields such as psychology, sociology, psychiatry, cultural studies, and literature. In British drama, it finds a reflection with the term "memory plays" whose representative playwright in the twentieth century is Harold Pinter. On the other hand, it can be observed that Anthony Neilson, emerging as a voice of the British In-Yer-Face drama of the 1990s, makes an emphatic use of memory in his plays like his predecessor. In this sense, this paper argues that Anthony Neilson's playwriting shows resemblances to Harold Pinter's, which is acknowledged as the Pinteresque, that, more specifically, Pinter's Old Times (1971) and Neilson's Penetrator (1993) share much in their use of memory, and analyses the particularities each playwright employs in their utilisation of this concept within their plays.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, writers and scientists in different fields have a great interest in the subject of Black Humor, which is used as a tool to survive. As we have seen in our study, Black Humor is seen as a means both to forget and to cause the others to forget the troubles following great disasters or wars. One of these writers, Howard Barker, in his play The Castle (1985), addresses the state of mankind through Black Humor and criticizes contemporary society with a story in Medieval Europe. The rigid hierarchies of the societies, the terrible massacres of wars, the loss of the united identity, or the shocking effects of modern society are seen ridiculed, acknowledging on the one hand the state of humanity as bleak and confirming the uniqueness of the individual on the other. We encounter one of the most beautiful examples of black humor when a landowner who returns to his home after taking part in a holy war to save to Jerusalem, the holy city of Christianity and Judaism, to see that his land was occupied by a new system of thinking and a new sense of life. The only thing that the reader and the audience can do in this situation is to laugh, because the only defense mechanism against the existing pains is the Black Humor.
Keywords: Black Humour, The Castle, Howard Barker, Crusades, Laughter

The interest in Ottoman court, history, and harem was on the rise in the aftermath of the Restoration of English monarchy. The Ottoman harem, especially, provided a fertile ground for the English playwrights. Thus, this study aims to analyze the representation of Hurrem Sultan who is regarded as one of the most prominent Sultanate women in Ottoman history in William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1663), Roger Boyle's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1668), and Elkanah Settle's Ibrahim, the Illustrious Bassa (1676). In those plays which deal with Sultan Suleyman's reign, English playwrights rewrite the siege of Rhodes, the death of Sehzade Mustapha, and the relationship between Sultan Suleyman and Ibrahim Pasha in a new dramatical context with a special emphasis on powerful Hurrem Sultan image. By taking a critical look at the representations of Eastern women in Orientalist discourse, this article covers arguments ranging from the Western representations of the harem to Ottoman women sovereignty in the sixteenth century. The common ground which the selected plays share is that there appears a powerful woman of Sultanate image as this study intends to explore. In this context, the present study indicates that the representation of Hurrem Sultan in selected Restoration period plays which depict her both as a powerful Eastern Empress and as an important political actor challenges the particular image of passive, sexually permissive and decadent Eastern woman embedded in other Western representations of the harem.

From the time of his first arrival in Italy at the beginning of October 1763 until the following June, when he departed from Venice, David Garrick’s portrait was painted on at least five different occasions by at least five different artists, in Rome, Naples and Parma. Thus his journey through Italy became a journey through art and theatre, revealing his sensitivity to the talent of both painters and sculptors.

In this paper I have tried to compare and contrast Bernard Shaw's Candida and Mahesh Dattani Where there's a Will. The plays (Candida and Where There's a Will) are based on the concept of marriage and position of women in the society. Shaw in Candida exposes the hollowness of ideal marriage and Dattani too puts forward the bold theme of marriage and extra marital affair in his Where There's a Will. How the time and ambiance changes the family bonding and interpersonal relationships has also been showcased. The difference between position of women and the concept of new women in 1890's and that of patriarchy in 1980's is compared. Both the dramatist exposes the evils of society but in their individual style. The paper throws some light on the tools and techniques used by the dramatists which made their plays unique and successful. One is an apostle of new drama, other the revolutionary dramatist who brought to forefront the invisible issues of post modern society. The dramatists draw their characters from different strata of society. Shaw's characters are drawn from different strata of society (lower, middle or elite) but Dattani's characters are epitome of urban society. Shaw and Dattani though belong to different country, cultures, time span but are the votaries of art for life's sake.

The intellectuals in the later part of the nineteenth century widely and deeply debated women’s movements for equality with men. These concerns were related to equal right to participation in the public, political and economic matters which found manifestation in the issues like voting, property and wages. Similarly, demands were being made to empower women to take decision in the issues related to family life like marriage and mothering. Bernard Shaw intervened in the debates through his plays.
            Antifeminism is an ideological defence of misogyny. An antifeminist is a person who is hostile to sexual equality and to the advocacy of women’s rights. Bernard Shaw’s viewpoint about women’s issues enlisted above is against those of the feminists. In his plays, women characters are assigned subordinate roles to their male counterparts and they are confined within the four wall of house. Any effort to break these boundaries is foiled and women are defeated and made to seek happiness within male paradigms. The male characters also treat them with contempt and use misogynistic words against them. The paper deals with such aspects of antifeminism in Bernard Shaw’s plays which are the projections against women’s freedom.
Keywords & Phrases: Antifeminism, misogyny, feminists, women’s rights, suffrage, mothering, domestic violence, Bernard Shaw