2005, Vol.18, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

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

This paper analyzes how M. Butterfly unmasks the Western colonial/imperial politics of violence in the process of colonization on the Other. While focusing on the West's colonial/imperial collusion of their policies on the Indochina in particular and on Asia in general, David Henry Hwang, in M. Butterfly, explores how much the West's colonial/imperial policies have exasperated not only the conflicts in Indochina but also the relations between the East and the West. Set the Vietnam War as the thematic pivot of the play, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly studies the processes of degradation/inferiorization of Others with which the Western colonialism/imperialism has justified its violent dominations over Others. For this purpose, following the context of Edward Said's insight in Orientalism, M. Butterfly shows that imperialism is closely related with racism and sexism in order to inferiorize its Others thus to justify its domination over Others. In particular, M. Butterfly not only shows that the Western male chauvinism is encouraged and bolstered by its colonialism/imperialism to inferiorize its Others, but also argues that the Western male chauvinism becomes the main source of precipitating the destruction of the Western colonialism/imperialism by underestimating the will of the Other to resist. Therefore, at the end of the play, although the main hero, the Western male chauvinist, commits suicide, it does not mean that he has given up his distorted perspective on Asia and Asians; Rather, he is executed by the Western male chauvinist tradition in order to keep their perspectives intact. M. Butterfly implies that it is not possible for the reader/audience to predict any real changes or revisions in the West’s perspectives and politics on the East. Rather, the play strongly suggests that the West’s imperialist perspectives on the East will go on for a long while.

Focusing on how Chekhov has been received in Britain since the early 20th century, this paper examines the dominantly conservative critical tendency towards Chekhov’s plays. I argue that the 1977 adaptation of The Cherry Orchard by Trevor Griffiths (1935- ), one of Britain’s most accomplished contemporary political dramatists, stands as an effective intervention to the British critical tradition which has removed from Chekhov’s work its political significance and class implication. Griffiths recognized that he needed to reclaim the meanings lost in the established naturalist text which had long been labelled and circulated as non-political in the British theatrical tradition. He wanted to break with the prevailing critical convention reading the play as an elegy for the decline of civilization, and his adaptation disclosed a text which emphasized a positive acknowledgment of the necessity of the collapse of old order. Griffiths’s adaptation aimed to release the most popular modern play from its accumulations of middle-class respectability and to de-familiarize it. It is an act of critical strategy of making the familiar different and of replacing non-historicity with specific historicity. His political reading is reinforced by the effective utilization of sub-textual narratives lurking beneath the original text as well as by the radical characterizations of Trofimov and Lopahkin.

Catastrophe (1984) reenacts the violence of system as the Director, whom one may call Beckett’s most conspicuous embodiment of social authority, forces the theatrical system to abuse and victimize an actor (Protagonist). Beckett’s motivation with the play is known to be political since it was written to support Václav Havel, imprisoned by the Communist state for his antiestablishment activities. While the content of the transgressive action leading to his victimization is muted, the silenced individual vis-à-vis the tyrannizing directing system reveals Beckett’s political concern with individualism infringed upon by the dynamics of the systematized social relations. Catastrophe shows how Becketts latent individualistic, and hence ultimately anarchistic, tendency finally oozes out as an apparent criticism on the systemic victimization of an individual, triggered by a humanistic compassion for Havel, a political prisoner. The authoritarian theater politics in Catastrophe forms in a way a certain self-portrait of Beckett himself. His dictatorial and often hostile attitude toward the directors and producers whose approaches to his plays differed from his own is somewhat notorious and often a target of the complaints by various theater communities. His determined refusal to allow different theatrical interpretations of his work is quite ironical as we recall that his aesthetic principle stands against any act of naming. This irony brought on by Beckett’s self-reflection, however, adds more complexity to the very compact play.