Modern Drama

In the 1890s, reading turn-of-the-century anthropology, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison began to develop her theory of the ritual origins of theatre. Embarking on a series of "inconceivably primitive and savage" journeys, she started to leave behind the world of aesthetic antiquarianism and beautiful Greek theatricals, in search of surviving primitive ritual: performances that could efface the boundaries between spectator and spectacle, immerse one in an ecstatic collectivity, and transcend both beauty and theatre itself, which (as she wrote with anti-theatrical gusto) she had come to "loath[e]." This essay explores Harrison's particular version of ritual theory, her creation of an artefact- and performance-based theatre history, and her rejection of theatre ("frivolous mimicry") for the primal dromenon, or rite, which remained for her the true essence of drama, – suggesting her importance for our understanding of theatrical modernism, the twentieth-century performance avant-garde, and what would eventually become some of the central concerns of performance studies.

With The Music Man, Meredith Willson deliberately positions himself (and his sympathies) in the middle of the "brows" controversy. The result is an extended panegyric on the superiority both of the middlebrow aesthetic – as epitomized especially by the boys' band, the barbershop quartet, and the genre of the musical itself – and of the fundamentally American values it supposedly generates.

Brick's behaviour in Tennessee Williams's Cat on at Hot Tin Roof has been understood in a variety of ways by critics. In this article, I argue that he exemplifies "homosexual panic," as this concept was developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet. Confronted with the possibility that his idealized relationship with his football buddy Skipper may be homosexual, he shuts down sexually altogether. In this respect, he resembles the Victorian bachelor who, according to Sedgwick, took refuge from the double bind of male bonds that were both prescribed and proscribed by retreating into what she calls "sexual anesthesia." I argue that the character she cites to illustrate this behaviour, Marcher in Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle, bears a significant resemblance to Brick. I suggest that a character in the grip of homosexual panic cannot convincingly be portrayed as escaping from this condition, and that this explains the problems Williams had with the last act of Cat. In his final version of the play, he shows Brick as unchanged after his scene with Big Daddy, a choice that is thematically right but dramatically unsatisfying.

This article examines the relationships among language, power, and gender in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. It shows how the central character in Ibsen's play, while conscious of the manipulative potential of words, nevertheless fails to negotiate that potential and ultimately chooses silence as a means to challenge her position in the patriarchal order. Such an analysis of the power of words represents a continuation of Ibsen's own analysis of the mechanisms of meaning and highlights the playwright's aesthetic self-consciousness, both of which are central elements in Ibsen's modernism.

This essay examines Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts, Heiner Müller's postmodern remaking of the Medea myth. I argue that Medea is the ideal centre for Müller's critique of the western subject, as she represents the destructive future that the East German Müller sees as both hopeful and inevitable. Müller explodes Medea's potential by using her not as a character but as material, creating various irresolvable juxtapositions and contradictions of character, structure, narrative, and performance. This forces a confrontation with the cultural and theatrical legacy of Greek tragedy and presents to artists and audiences a crisis of culture and interpretation.

Critics such as Dan Rebellato and Dominic Shellard are questioning the seminal influence of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger on the development of post-war British drama. The result is a renewed appreciation for the plays of Noël Coward and Terrence Rattigan. The present article seeks to define the contribution of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger to contemporary British drama by comparing it with Coward's The Vortex and Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. It argues for Look Back in Anger's enduring importance, claiming that it assumes a more complex and troubling relationship between perception, cognition, and articulation.

A radically satirical response to the American invasion of Iraq post-9/11, The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil combines traditional agitprop with the transnational impulses of postcolonial performance to imagine some kind of new world emerging from exile, diaspora, and the ashes of the old. Dramatizing the plight of stateless refugees from a fictional Middle Eastern country, its three Canadian playwrights deploy Canadian theatre's historically ambivalent position along the margins of American cultural and military power to attack American foreign policy as well as to critique Canadian complicity and hypocrisy. This essay examines the ideological origins of the play and the metatheatrical comic strategies that allow it to transcend what Noam Chomsky calls "the bounds of the expressible" and to speak the politically unspeakable.