2002, Vol.15, No.3

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

Like her other plays, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic deals with dangerous themes at that time. Carrie’s incestuous desire for her brother, Lily’s obsessive love for her husband, and an aberrant love between a white rich woman and her black chauffeur arouse much reaction among the audience. Toys in the Attic is about love, unlike Hellman’s earlier plays which deal with social issues such as blackmail, betrayal and power relations. Here Hellman focuses on the destructiveness of excessive love― she suggests that we talk about love too carelessly and that we ignore the negative side of blind love. She does not portray love in a melodramatic way. In a traditional melodrama love is a cure-all, but in this play it is abnormal and obsessive―one which has much to do with domination and power. Hellman shows these ideas through women in love. Carrie has an unconscious desire for her brother and treats him like a toy in the attic. The attic is the place where childhood desire is stored and forgotten. Julian’s independence through success disturbs and irritates her, so she ruins his success. Lily also has an obsessive desire for her husband. She is suspicious of her husband’s fidelity and is consumed by the thought that she has been and will be betrayed by others. She also believes that Julian married her for money and that he will betray her after he becomes rich. She ruins his business for fear of losing him. Hellman puts emphasis on Lily’s lack of self-knowledge. Lily lacks the self-knowledge to prevent her husband’s failure. The necessity for self-knowledge and its disastrous effects of its absence are Hellman’s constant concerns in her works. In Toys in the Attic, Hellman shows that too much love and the lack of self-knowledge bring harm to other people.

Tom Stoppard’s stage play Indian Ink is an adaptation of his own radio drama In the Native State. The two dramas foreground the conversation between a British female poet and an Indian male painter, backgrounding colonial India in the 1930s, when Indian civil disobedience and independence movement against British Empire arose and developed seriously. Stoppard appropriates post-colonial studies and deals with various colonial/imperial issues. However, Stoppard’s ‘post’-imperial representation mimics the discursive formation of the imperial hegemony, compromising the mystification of history and the ‘ethics of empire.’ Imperial discourse appropriated mimicries for strategic camouflage, creating the Other ‘as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.’ Stoppard articulates the post-imperial mimicries which could be appreciated by the post-imperial audience. His adaptation, mimicry and gaze project the ‘ethics of empire’ Without criticizing the ‘ethics of empire,’ his ironic compromise resides in the universal signification of mythical ‘rasa’ of human relationship, getting rid of historical responsibility of imperial domination. Indian Ink juxtaposes the past of colonial India, and the present of post-imperial London and post-colonial India. This theatricality of juxtaposition lets the audience taste the mixed juice of postcoloniality, even though it should be still discursively and practically reflected.

Beckett called What Where a “memory play” and, on this premise, I discuss the play as a visual icon that contracts some aspects of his life and writing career in abstract terms. In the first place, I relate the so-called ghostly quality of his works to Paul de Man’s discussion of prosopopoeia as a trope for the voice. Thus, Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom are ghosts or personas that haunted the closed space of his brain, dramatized here as a rectangular playing area, at various stages of his writing career. Next, I analyze three different versions of What Where: two for the stage and one for the TV screen. As he rewrites the text for TV, the body of the actors is gone except for the faces and these fragmented faces are transformed into blurred images against the black background on screen on the brink of dissipation. Last stage versions retain the one dimensional, visual art quality of the screen version achieving the pure image even with the corporeal body of the actors. I discuss the aesthetic quality and power of these pure images.