ENGL 235-01, Performing Nations: British, Irish, and Anglophone Drama, Spring 2012

Abstract

This course will explore major works of twentieth-century British and Irish drama by focusing on competing performances of national identity and cultural tradition. We will explore the shifting significance of terms like “Celtic,” “Anglo-Saxon,” “English,” “British,” “Irish,” and “Gaelic” in a wide range of cultural performances, from Revival pageantry to the wearing of a bowler hat, but we will pay special attention to what happens to such performances when they enter the space of the theatrical stage. What happens when certain culturally-loaded gestures are repeated? What happens when certain scenes, horrifying or infuriating outside the theater, are made morally uplifting or even pleasurable by their presentation on stage? As we read, watch, hear, and rehearse scenes, we will test out some of the important methodological tools drawn from three distinct intellectual fields: performance theory, theater history, and literary studies. We will study dramas from the heart of British imperial culture (Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral) to its dangerous extremities (Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot). We will examine uses of drama as political weapons (Pearse’s An Rí) and as acts of cultural memory (Churchill’s Cloud Nine, Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman).