2024, Vol.37, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

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

Lynn’s One for Sorrow, set against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in London, delves into the (im)possibility of extending “unconditional” hospitality toward a stranger/neighbor fleeing from a terrorist bombing scene. Exemplifying the turn to ethics in 21st-century British drama, Lynn’s play tackles the ethical dilemmas that arise when a call to hospitality clashes with fear of the stranger. The play centers on the generational conflict emerging within a white middle-class family hosting John, a guest of Asian background, who embodies difference and thus becomes an object of fear. This family serves as a microcosm of British society in the post-9/11 era, representing the crisis of cosmopolitanism and “fear culture” that permeates their existence and is perpetuated by post-truth media. Imogen’s direct address to the audience at the end of the play functions as an urging for bearing witness not only to the issues unfolding on stage but also to the underlying truths about their society and for confronting the significance of ethical responsibility towards the suffering Other.

This study aims to analyze Martyna Majok’s Ironbound(2015), and learn about the active way of life and existential attitudes implied in the work. The thesis is developed based on an analysis of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time(Sein und Zeit, 1927). The play’s protagonist, Darja, is a character who is thrown into the world. Although she hears an inner voice that tells her to resist the given reality and create her own future, she is unable to overcome the feelings of fear and anxiety that accompany it and succumbs to a passive life. It is her understanding of death that leads her to recognize the infinite possibilities of existential existence and to decide to move on to a new life. Facing death, which holds only the possibility of impossibility, paradoxically tells us that we exist in a world where only possibilities are possible. By not arranging the plot structure of the play according to the passage of time, Ironbound creates a circular principle on the stage that is contained in the temporality granted by death. The artist intentionally interrupts the flow of the plot by arranging 22 years in a non-linear timeline. However, this suggests that all the situations in the play are centered on the ‘here-and-now’. The protagonist’s life is being played on stage, but it is a frozen time, and only the sameness of evasion is being repeated. The playwright aims to remind the audience/reader that the stage they are gazing at is their past, present, and possibly their future, creating an opportunity for them to reconsider their own existential meaning.

This essay examines Mike Lew’s 2018 play Teenage Dick and its barrier-free production (2022) presented by National Theater of Korea (NTOK). Barrier-free, or barrier-conscious, performances have been the focus of recent critical attention in the field of disability studies in theater. Drawing upon discourses in empathy and disability theater, I argue for the political and aesthetic possibilities of barrier-free performance for non-disabled audiences. Set in a modern-day high school where disabled youths struggle under the ideology of ability, Teenage Dick rewrites Richard III to illustrate the violence of ableism and complicate the rhetoric of empathy that often informs popular cultural images and narratives constructed around disability. Richard’s revenge upon his oppressor Eddie, a football player who embodies ableist ideals, begins by manipulating others to supplant Eddie and become a school president, but it ends up by making Eddie disabled just like Richard himself. Such radical act of a disabled protagonist suggests the play’s poignant critique of disembodied empathy and its empty rhetoric of ‘putting oneself in the shoes of the other.’ While Teenage Dick largely depends on stage realism, embedded in the play is physical presence of disabled bodies that exceed the field of vision and disrupt the audience’s easy identification with disabled characters. Teenage Dick at the NTOK showcases how the play’s concern about disability and empathy can be performatively expressed in a barrier-free environment. Compared to the previous English productions, the Korean production – regardless of their intial intention – made visible the gap between characters and actors, thus creating alienating effects and destabilizing the viewer’s aesthetic perception. I suggest that such aesthetically and emotionally discomforting experience leads to a renewed awareness of the theatrical and social environment on the spectator’s part.