2011, Vol.24, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

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

Contemporary Scottish drama emerging in the 1990s, dubbed often as ‘post-devolution plays’, can be defined as post-nationalist plays in the sense that they share the desire to investigate the boundaries of the nation-state. Employing a variety of motifs such as travelling, border-crossing and borderland encounter, they attempt to move beyond a narrow sense of Scottishness. They focus on differences ‘within’ Scotland, challenging the conventions of Scottish nationalistic plays, which thrived on anti-colonialism and parochialism. A sense of flexible identities and displacement are two dominant traits of contemporary Scottish drama within the new contexts of post-1989 Europe and the rapid expansion of globalization. What Greig’s plays share is a sense of displacement, which is caused by the disconnecting of the association between culture and place. Greig sets his plays in “non-place,” such as airport, shopping malls, hotels and refuge camps. In contrast to familiar, organic and localized anthropological “places”, these anonymous and functional “non-places” become associated with the mobile, hybrid subjectivities. In Europe(1994), a forgotten railway station in an unnamed border town becomes a battleground for the dynamic interaction among nationalism, global capitalism and border-crossing. The railway station is a typical example of “non-place”, a symbol of connections where the individual can experience Otherness. However, Greig does not present a performative act of border-crossing as an idealized, metaphorical locus of a new hybridity, which tends to overlook the real conditions of the border. The play insists that border-crossing is not a luxury, but a matter of life and death in a contested space where ethnic nationalism continuously competes with transnational capitalism.

This paper examines The Servant(1963), the first collaborative film between Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, focusing on a series of plays which structure the film. The collaboration changed both Losey’s and Pinter’s artistic reputation and world. The Servant proved to be the film that brought Losey the international reputation as one of the great masters of naturalism in the cinema and Pinter the chance to seek for a line of flight from the oedipal impasse in writing his plays. Especially Pinter’s screen-play as collaborator not as author(master) with Losey leads him to find not a competitive Oedipal politics but a micropolitics, a politics of desire. The central concern of The Servant can be regarded as the power struggle between the master and the servant. But the film goes beyond the politics of class and becomes a naturalistic film of impulse-images which present the originary world that exists and operates in the depths of the real Victorian environment of Tony’s house. The impulse-images of The Servant are generated by a series of violent plays and skillful mirror plays, such as doubling or tripling, distorting, fragmenting, magnifying, diminishing images, especially on the ensnaring convex mirror. Plays in the film gradually become violent male homosexual games from which Tony and Barrett cannot exit. Deleuze indicates that we can look for a salvation in the women in The Servant who are outside the originary world of men. By appropriating Deleuze’s seeking for a line of flight in the women, this paper argues that Susan and Vera always remain inside the originary world instead of its outside, although they are forced to disappear from the world after playing the roles of mediators for men’s game. That is, they will explode the world from its inside and open a new beginning from the implosion. Thus, from his first screen-play with Losey, Pinter can find his concomitant passions for film and not just politics but also sexual politics and he can liberate himself from his oedipalized room.

Tom Stoppard’s plays are noteworthy for the manner in which serious ideas are expressed not only through artful language and complex dramatic structures, but also through entertaining stage techniques. This paper examines the playful mode of textual and verbal interweaving in Travesties (1974), awareness of which is as crucial to a balanced appreciation of Stoppard’s dramaturgy as the exploration of debates developed in the play. This study focuses on the varying ways in which Stoppard employs the self-referential, foregrounding device of mise-en-abyme (a memory within a memory, a story within a story, the act of writing within the act of writing, and a-play-within-a play) in order to address a multiplicity of themes and styles in relation to art and politics. It is argued that Stoppard’s playful transposition of ideas and texts illuminates the context-dependent nature of perceptions and the uncertainty of memory, adding a sense of ambiguity and paradox through its infinite regress and suggesting the artificiality of narrative practices, while pointing to the intertextual and interdependent nature of life and literature.