Volume 1, Issue 2

India has been a great pole of attraction for both colonial and postcolonial literature. Postcolonial drama has also shown an equal fascination with this huge and versatile Asiatic land, as reflected in Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1974) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997). Despite the cultural difference between their authors and the 20-years’ gap in their writing, the two plays are comparable on various thematic and aesthetic issues. They are both narratives of chaos, violence, frustration and despair, dealing with slippery and disembodied subjectivities, which point to mortality and ultimately death. The atmosphere of distancing from reality and the process from gradual disappearance to total absence are achieved through voices off, fictionalization or virtuality, while scopophilia is also enhanced both as a dramatic device and as a trope of audience reception. However, the stance and the mood of the writing are radically different in the two plays: nonchalance, nostalgia and postcolonial melancholia in the French play; biting satire and political urgency in the Indian play. Despite the hybrid identity and the cosmopolitanism of the two women dramatists, it becomes obvious that in the contemporary situation of global politics and transnational capitalism the position of the western writer is still more advantageous for the scope of the writing itself and its reception, whereas the 3 rd world writer is still writing under a state of emergency and his/her work is perceived under the same restrictive circumstances.

Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City (1974) retraces an episode in Northern Ireland that is part of the province’s legacy known as The Troubles: the Bloody Sunday events of January 30, 1972. By connecting the problems of power with the problems of political and social ethics in a dramatic spectrum, Friel interprets the social conditions of Bloody Sunday in the context of the evolving views of the nation’s identity and community values. The Freedom of the City addresses issues of otherness within the shifting cultural paradigms of contemporary Northern Ireland.

As Fintan Walsh and Sara Brady have advocated: “in the case of Irish culture, […] orality has played a far greater historical and sociocultural role than ‘text’”; consequently song has been integral to the construction and performance of Irish identities. This in turn, has resulted in a prevalence of song-forms within the Irish play. For this reason, rather than treating the songs as mere embellishments to the dramatic work, I hypothesize that songs constitute accretions, or repositories of ‘social memory,’ with the potential to profoundly affect an audience’s reception. In this essay, I examine Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), a play which many observers contend, dramatized Ireland’s transition in the early 1960s, from de Valeran traditionalism to the modernisation espoused by Seán Lemass. Through offering a close reading of the play, and drawing upon a range of sources to contextualise the discourse, the essay analyses Friel’s application of song to argue that the play, in fact, reflected Ireland’s entry into a globalized modern age characterized by systems of cultural exchange, which lay outside the purview of political sanctions. Central to the argument is Friel’s multilayered juxtaposition of traditional Irish song, with American influenced popular music. This connotes a cultural agon embodied within the protagonist, Gar O’Donnell, which in turn commented upon a young generation’s abnegation of Irish traditional song (and its associations with an old order), and their embracement of a fluid and dynamic American culture, epitomised by the success of the Irish Showbands in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Employing Georges Bataille’s theories on non-productive expenditure as a framing device, this article considers Sam Shepard’s States of Shock (1991) under the hermeneutic framework of ‘performance of waste.’ This play contains a Surrealist anarchy in its subtextual impulse to overthrow the dominant hegemonic discourse at large in line with Bataille’s economic theories. In its symbolic dramaturgy, catastrophic spectacularized imagery and stratified layers of representation, States of Shock is unmistakably surreal. This play indicates the productivity of non-productive expenditure, a concept evident in the obsessive, hyperbolic rendering of experience created by the prismatic scenography, and in the compulsion to investigate one’s origins. In States of Shock , the Colonel directs to Stubbs that “[a] catastrophe has to be examined from every possible angle” (152). Shepard has realised this in the surreal creation of climatic warfare that relies on multiple layers of spectacularized representation. This seemingly wasteful effort also incorporates Shepard’s continued interrogation of masculinized transgenerational trauma. Whether his men are at war with each other or themselves, the catastrophe of the present is traced back through the patrilineal line of ancestry and in States of Shock , is compared to the fruitlessness of military warfare, perhaps the most wasteful endeavour of all.

Sarah Kane’s debut Blasted depicts the main character Ian in a state of existential crisis at the end of the play. He dies and is later reborn, which can be analysed as a complex staging of the process of subject formation when approached from a psychoanalytical point of view. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the subject’s development and especially her notion of the abject are well suited to describe some of the gruesome actions that occur in Kane’s plays. Applying Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theory may serve to show that underlying these actions of horror is more than a rebellious will to shock the audience. In this article, I want to explore the incidents of abjection in Blasted in regard to Ian’s development, focusing on the final scene where a breakdown and (re)formation of the subject takes place. The staging of a genesis of the subject in this scene is furthermore underscored by strong references to the biblical account of creation through God in seven days. By facing abjection, the subject comes into contact with the semiotic stage of being: a pre–linguistic state, a state of crisis. Religious structures serve as the symbolic order that tries to deal with this situation. Ian vividly portrays the subject’s struggle between the semiotic and the symbolic, the abject and the religious order – a struggle that is inherent in the general human condition.

In Dedication, or The Stuff of Dreams Terrence McNally explores the conundrum of the actor who uses theater to hide from, rather than explore, his real or true self. Theater’s ability to stimulate the imagination collides with fantasy’s seductive ability to narcotize pain as Lou Nuncle attempts to secure the use of a dilapidated, long shuttered, nineteenth century theater building from its owner, a crabbed, aged millionairess suffering from inoperable cancer. By paraphrasing in the play’s title the penultimate lines of Prospero’s farewell to the revels in Shakespeare’s The Tempest , McNally posits Lou and Mrs. Willard as differing types of the Renaissance magus who, like Prospero, must eschew bitterness regarding the disappointments that each has suffered and mount a theatrical production that transforms actors and audience alike.

In this article the thrust of the argument is that the moment of con/tactile aesth/ethics and its correlates form the fulcrum of the play on which its dynamics turn. The argument is proposing a belated aesth/ethic relationship between Ann and Krak (representing the phallogocentric discourse) concomitant with an aesthetics of the self and ethics of alterity and event, in which aesth/ethic is defined in terms of exposure and responsivity to the Other, transitivism of corporeal traces between ipseity and alterity, resulting in the dehiscence and connaissance of both parties in a chiasmatic contact.