Women Playwrights: Subverting Representational Strategies

Theatre Journal, 2010

ARIEL: A Review of International English …, 1992

Literature, Language, and the Classroom, 2021

Amongst the many abiding oddities of the English academia in India is a strange inability or aversion to practice. Though many of us teach—and love—drama, only very few are able to transition from the happy amateurism of collegiate theatre into the more demanding realms of commercial and street theatre. Anuradha Marwah is one of those increasingly rare English professors who have been able to do so. As much a novelist as a theatre practitioner, Marwah’s brand of socially committed, left-feminist theatre poses many challenging questions for the nature and direction of theatre pedagogy and practice in and outside the English literary academia in India. Anubhav Pradhan and Sonali Jain discuss theatre, feminism, and society with Marwah in a wide-ranging conversation.

2021

Most efforts made towards elevating the condition of women foreground the complicity of man in the former’s subjugation. Women are usually depicted in feminist drama as the passive recipients of the combination of man’s excesses and the repressive phallocentric universe. Hence some feminist plays privileging the monolithic view of women support this claim. By way of reframing this narrative and social construct, intra-gender studies elucidate some cultural and pathological antecedents that ex ray women-onwomen violence and discordant relationships. This study thus investigates intra-gender subjugation in the works of some Nigerian playwrights, using the  content and interpretative approach of the qualitative research methodology. Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods, and Tracie Utoh- Ezeajugh’s Who Owns This Coffin? are case studies whose critical analysis are anchored on Kimberly Crenshaw’s Intersectional feminism. The study reveals the affirmation of African playwrights that wom...

Theatre Survey, 1997

Manchester University, 2014

My thesis journey was initially motivated by an interest in the individual’s search for God, the self and the other (neighbour, men/women and enemy) as represented in the play texts. This call for a personal relationship with the ‘other’ highlights the individual’s feelings of unease and strangeness at a time when, one might argue, the majority belittles the role of religion, in support of scientific discoveries and human rights. Here, the French philosopher René Girard - whose anthropological and scientific interest in violence, religion and human culture has shaped my research - argues that the progress of humankind would not have become a reality without what he terms sacrifice. Here, I should confirm that the main influence on the early steps of finding my research topic were Peter Shaffer, Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin rather than Rene Girard. This thesis explores several interconnected relationships, the most important of which is between humour and violence or forms of ‘sacrifice’ in the plays of six British playwrights – Peter Barnes and Peter Shaffer, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane as well as Caryl Churchill and David Rudkin. It is this strange relationship which leads me later on to uncover and explore the representations of the stranger, the victim/iser and the foreigner in their works. The return of the stranger – the dead, the ashes of victims of extreme violence, the ghosts, the prisoners and the children - is inseparable from the search for individuality in a world ruled by the gods of war, money and dark humour. My research findings are viewed in the light of two narratives: the first is to do with the upper world and the second is to do with the lower as defined by Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival and the culture of folk humour in the Middle Ages. The upper is serious, official, exclusive and authoritative whereas the second is festive, comic, mythical and popular. It is hard to describe the relationship between these narratives as simply oppositional (some say iconoclastic) because they are coexistent and rely on one another. At this point, the different professional and ideological positions of the playwrights are important aspects in arriving at an understanding of the ways they collapse the borders between humour and terror, the banquet and the battle, carnivals and trials, the parade and economic exploitation, clownery and politics. Though these playwrights are not preachers or reformers, they challenge our easy laughter and our role as we witness the risen from the dead, those in the flames or in the future signalling to us to halt our participation and face responsibility for the victims.

Theatre Research in Canada Recherches Theâtrales Au Canada, 2007

A Companion to World Literature, 2019

The global rise of modern drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries needs to be understood in relation to ideologies of the nation-state, war, histories of colonial rule, and the oppression of women. The emergence of modern drama, known as "spoken drama" in many Asian contexts, has largely been driven by engagement with discourses of Western liberalism and realist aesthetics. Canons of modern drama in Europe and the USA were not just upheld as representative of the nation and as exemplars of cultural excellence, they were also upheld as dominant colonial models (Luckhurst 2006). The rhetoric supporting Western dramatic canons tended to erase or deny influences from other world literatures and theaters. Thus, for much of the twentieth century, European-and American-received histories of modern drama were mostly white, self-referential, and exoticized or marginalized innovative playwrights and experiments from elsewhere. In the 1960s these patterns began to shift and in the twenty-first century the pace of change has accelerated markedly. Histories and readers in world theater have proliferated and the influence of Asian theater, especially Japanese theater, is beginning to be acknowledged (Salz 2016). In particular, there are concerted efforts to raise the visibility of work by playwrights of color and by women (Jones and Elam 2013). African American playwrights Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks enjoy significant mainstream productions and are held in high esteem (Kolin 2007; Young 2012), their work looking to Africa, not to Europe, for its inspiration and impetus. Griselda Gambaro is revered as Argentina's most accomplished dramatist on the subject of her country's traumatic history. Caryl Churchill's work in A Companion to World Literature. Edited by Ken Seigneurie.

2014

RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2020

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.

Theatre Journal, 2016

Rivista Di Letterature Moderne E Comparate, 2011

resistance to synthesis, especially as espoused by Jameson. While theatrical Lears are Bradley's focus, her extensive use of adaptations of plays other than Lear (such as Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) and nontheatrical adaptations (e.g., Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres) extends her book's subject matter and also positions Lear as subject to twentieth-century ambivalence over canonicity. Adapting "King Lear" for the Stage marks a fine contribution to ongoing discussions of how adaptations wrestle with this cultural artifact's looming presence in the twentieth-century theatre. Via the "double gesture" Bradley tracks the unique cultural and theatrical pressures that provoke the conflicted compositions of adaptations of the play; in articulating the ambitions of these adaptations Bradley demonstrates their potential to disrupt fundamentally the cultural meaning of Lear.

Antae Journal, 2020

The dialogic nature of the dramatic art allows the female characters of Shakespeare to challenge the stereotypes advocated by the dominant culture. Chaperoned and silenced, the Renaissance female audience may find solace in the freedom of the female characters of Shakespeare. The plays of Shakespeare deconstruct the common image of women by showing that they are never allowed to speak for themselves. The play-within- the play technique offers the female characters of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream a rare opportunity of assuming the role of the audience and the critic. This allows them to challenge the male characters representational hegemony from a less vulnerable position than that of the character. This paper tries to show how Shakespeare uses his fictitious female audiences to address and critique the dominant patriarchal myths about the nature of women.

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2014

Two new books, Coyness a n d C rim e in Restoration Comedy: W omens Desire, Deception, a n d Agency by Peggy Thom pson and A Race o f Fem ale Patriots: Women a n d Public S p irit on the B ritish Stage, 1688-1745 by Brett D. Wilson, contribute to ongoing debates about the representation of women on the Res toration and eighteenth-century London stage. In spite of the similar focus in these books on gender in dramatic literature, however, the two authors find sharply different versions of femininity in the plays they examine. W hile Thompson proposes that a misogynistic paradox of coyness shapes the con struction of female characters in Restoration comedy, Wilson finds heroic ver sions of womanhood at the center of serious drama from an overlapping but slightly later period. Thom pson pursues this paradox o f coyness in the plays o f George