While Irish theatre assures that it reflects Irish reality and aims at building a national identity in which religion is a significant marker, the plays of O’Casey contradict with this tendency. This ...study aims at discussing the conflict between an anti- Christian and pagan beliefs and Christian values in favor of anti- Christianity over Christianity. In this article, the researcher takes O'Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned as an example. The study discussed the tension between the pagan and Christian values as represented in the conflict between the pagan and religious characters, represented by Father Fillfogue who is the representative of Christianity; while The Celtic god Angus represents Pagan Celtic anti-Christian religion. Finally, the study proved that O'Casey presented a skeptical attitude toward Christianity and favored pagan Irish local, regional beliefs.
Playing the Cock Skloot, Floyd
Harvard review (Cambridge, Mass. 1992),
06/2011
40
Journal Article
Woman is th' passionate path to hell!" The plot is simple: the Cock materializes at various places in the village, his actions spreading disorder and disruption, leading to outbreaks of wild dancing ...and flirtation and kissing and drink-fueled licentiousness. Driven out at last, the Cock departs along with all the village women, one of whom declares as she leaves, "a whisper of love in this place bites away some of th' soul!" Most of the male characters are terrified of the Cock. According to Annie Gottlieb in her book Do You Believe in Magic?, "the Love Generation" believed "we could recapture the animal innocence of the body ... in the compressed lexicon of the sixties, love-making was like hitch-hiking, one of those all-purpose gestures." If you weren't in a fraternity, if you didn't have a girlfriend back home somewhere, the theater was one of the few places to meet women because, when a play required actresses, the directors had to recruit them from the Lancaster community.
Modern British and Irish dramatic works are among the plays most widely read by students. This volume conveniently introduces 10 major plays by British and Irish dramatists. Each chapter is devoted ...to a particular play and includes a brief biography, a plot synopsis, a discussion of major themes and characters, an overview of the play's historical background, an analysis of the work's dramatic style, an overview of the play's critical reception, and a list of works for further reading.Modern British and Irish dramatic works are widely enjoyed by general readers and high school students. But because they are rooted in literary Modernism and generally reflect particular historical and cultural concerns, they can also be difficult for students to understand. This volume concisely and conveniently introduces 10 masterpieces of British and Irish drama in an accessible manner.
In this book Nicholas Grene explores political contexts for some of the outstanding Irish plays from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. The politics of Irish drama have previously ...been considered primarily the politics of national self-expression. Here it is argued that Irish plays, in their self-conscious representation of the otherness of Ireland, are outwardly directed towards audiences both at home and abroad. The political dynamics of such relations between plays and audiences is the book's multiple subject: the stage interpretation of Ireland from The Shaughraun to Translations; the contentious stage images of Yeats, Gregory and Synge; reactions to revolution from O'Casey to Behan; the post-colonial worlds of Purgatory and All that Fall; the imagined Irelands of Friel and Murphy, McGuinness and Barry. With its fundamental reconception of the politics of Irish drama, this book represents an alternative view of the phenomenon of Irish drama itself.
This article argues that the rejection of Sean O¿Casey¿s The Silver Tassie by Yeats has had consequences for how we think about O¿Casey¿s drama in general because The Tassie is now regarded as a ...break in O¿Casey¿s development. In the first instance this leads to the idea of a Dublin Trilogy rather than a Dublin Quartet. The latter sequence makes much more sense since it is unified by setting, continuous developments in the use of theatrical space and form, theme, and politics. By incorporating The Tassie into O¿Casey¿s early writing we are enabled to consider again how his work as a whole functions in formal, thematic and political terms.
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