“The enclosed, subjective universe”: Dramatizing the mind in modern British theater

Prapassaree Thaiwutipong Kramer, Purdue University

Abstract

In a growing number of plays the main concern is no longer “an imitation of human action,” but rather the dramatization of how the mind absorbs reality and transforms it according to its needs. In the memory play—such as Brian Friel's The Loves of Cass McGuire and Dancing at Lughnasa, Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Amadeus, and Tom Stoppard's Travesties—the narrator assumes the power to project his thoughts onto the stage, but the text provides clues to the distorted nature of the presentation stemming from limitations of the narrator's knowledge of himself and others. In the dual-perspective drama-such as Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, Friel's Philadelphia Here I Come and Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind—some of the action takes place in the “objective” realm, while the remainder represents projections of the protagonist's inner state; presentation of the “outer world” aids in the spectator's understanding of the motives behind those projections. In dream plays—such as Harold Pinter's No Man's Land and Old Times—the action, though at first glance conventionally “objective” in presentation, moves entirely into the interior realm, being best understood as the invention of the protagonist's dreaming brain. Finally, in the monologue drama—represented here by Friel's Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney, Pinter's Landscape and Silence, and Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu, Krapp's Last Tape, That Time, Happy Days, and Not I—conventional action disappears entirely, replaced by a series of examinations of the characters' consciousness. As dramatic focus moves from the objective realm of the interpersonal to the subjective realm of the purely personal or “intrapersonal,” it also moves from an emphasis on the present condition and future possibilities of the characters to an almost exclusive emphasis on retrospection, and from a small set of well-accepted conventions towards the propounding of severe ontological and epistemological puzzles, ending in a state of indeterminacy. Mise en scène takes on added significance as a unifying element amid this chaos. Additionally, by incorporating elements traditionally exclusive to lyric poetry and narrative fiction, these “mindscape” plays break down traditional genre boundaries.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Adler, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Theater|Modern literature|Literature

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