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From the late 1940s, until shortly before his death in 2007, John
Devitt was one of Dublin's most avid and discerning theatre-goers.
For John, attending the theatre was something more than an evening
out: it was a passion, a commitment, almost a vocation. A born
raconteur, John could talk about productions from the 1950s, 1960s
or 1970s as if he had just stepped out of the theatre, fresh from
the experience that meant so much to him. This book is much more
than a record of the oral history of Dublin theatre-going that his
memories contained - it is a glimpse into a life that was witty,
argumentative, and vigorous, but never dull.
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Pygmalion (Paperback, New Ed)
George Bernard Shaw; Introduction by Nicholas Grene
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‘Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf … you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba’ Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw’s feminist views. In Shaw’s hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his ‘creation’ has a mind of her own. This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence, with an illuminating introduction by Nicholas Grene, discussing the language and politics of the play. Included in this volume is Shaw’s preface, as well as his ‘sequel’ written for the first publication in 1916, to rebut public demand for a more conventionally romantic ending.
The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems
very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra,
or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all
three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the
relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of
male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic
endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all
nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this
combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic
interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting
point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes
of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and
analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations
are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A
chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness
of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of
Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the
critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from
the limitati
The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems
very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra,
or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all
three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the
relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of
male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic
endeavour.;In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all
nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this
combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic
interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting
point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes
of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and
analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations
are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A
chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness
of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of
Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the
critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from
the limitati
A collection of essays presenting an "insider" view of the Irish
poetic tradition. It brings together some of the best-known poets
and critics writing in Ireland today, exploring the multiple
traditions and influences within Anglo-Irish poetry from the 19th
century to the present.
Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in
the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish
playwright of his generation. The international success of
DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the
Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his continuing appeal
and importance. This is the first full scale academic study devoted
to his theatre, providing an overview of all his work, with a
detailed reading of his most significant texts. His powerful and
searchingly honest engagement with Irish history and society is
reflected in the violent Whistle in the Dark, the epic Famine
(1968), the often hilarious Conversations on a Homecoming (1985)
and the darkly Chekhovian The House (2000). Folklore and myth
figure more prominently in the spiritual drama of The Sanctuary
Lamp (1975), the Faustian Gigli Concert (1983) and the women's
stories of Bailegangaire (1985). The range and reach of Murphy's
theatre is demonstrated in this informed reading, supported by key
interviews with the playwright himself and his most important
theatrical and critical interpreters.
Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in
the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish
playwright of his generation. The international success of
DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the
Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his continuing appeal
and importance. This is the first full scale academic study devoted
to his theatre, providing an overview of all his work, with a
detailed reading of his most significant texts. His powerful and
searchingly honest engagement with Irish history and society is
reflected in the violent Whistle in the Dark, the epic Famine
(1968), the often hilarious Conversations on a Homecoming (1985)
and the darkly Chekhovian The House (2000). Folklore and myth
figure more prominently in the spiritual drama of The Sanctuary
Lamp (1975), the Faustian Gigli Concert (1983) and the women's
stories of Bailegangaire (1985). The range and reach of Murphy's
theatre is demonstrated in this informed reading, supported by key
interviews with the playwright himself and his most important
theatrical and critical interpreters.
'Nothing Quite Like It' by Nicholas Grene tells the story of an
unusual childhood. With his mixed background, he provides the
sharp-eyed and affectionate perspective of an outsider on his
experiences of childhood and adolescence.
A detailed critical study of the leading Indian novelist in English
and a key figure in the development of a distinctive postcolonial
literature. This study covers all of Narayan's work, offering an
accessible introduction to his life and fiction with detailed
analyses of the major novels. Although the chapters take the reader
through the successive phases of his career, they are organised on
a thematic rather than a chronological basis to allow a focus on
the most significant critical issues his work raises. So, while the
introduction sketches the outline of his life, the first chapter
explores how his own background was developed into the fictional
South Indian small town of Malgudi, the setting for almost all his
work. The second chapter deals with the controversial issue of
Narayan's politics, and the common criticism of his writing as
insufficiently politically engaged. The central chapter of the book
focuses on the submerged fables that animate some of his key
novels, including his best known, The Guide. The fourth chapter
considers Narayan's attitudes toward modernity as reflected in his
essays and his fiction. Finally, there is an analysis of Narayan as
storyteller and the special styles he devised to tell his
elliptical, subtle and understated tales.
'...the analysis of individual plays is measured and illuminating.
The book will be of interest to all Shavians, to students, and to
the many general readers who value Shaw's unsentimental idealism.'
British Book News '...Grene's study makes a valuable contribution
to a still-developing subject ... His analysis of the plays is
well-informed and perceptive, and he is always alert to the
exigencies of theatrical performance.' Times Higher Education
Supplement
"There are two things necessary to salvation ...money and
gunpowder" Major Barbara, Bernard Shaw's story of the conversion
contest between the arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft and his
daughter, the Salvation Army Major, is a provocative dramatization
of the relationship between money, power, and moral purpose. A
landmark in the history of British theatre when first produced at
the Royal Court in 1905, it remains strikingly relevant today, when
recent history has repeatedly highlighted the power of the arms
industry in shaping government policy, and globalization has
accentuated the political and ethical issues of social welfare and
international capital raised by the play. This edition includes
Shaw's definitive text and provides the most comprehensive
scholarly treatment of the play to date. A lengthy Introduction
traces the history of the text from manuscript drafts to the famous
1941 wartime film version starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison
and on to modern stagings. It reveals Major Barbara as one of
Shaw's most exciting and challenging plays for actors, directors,
and readers.
As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A
Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to
have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this
innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the
home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and
playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams'
A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have
been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of
class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and
beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their
own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame,
Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene
analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces
to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic
environment in modern drama.
As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A
Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to
have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this
innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the
home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and
playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to
Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal
crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and
themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century
and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created
their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in
Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog.
Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic
spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the
naturalistic environment in modern drama.
Nicholas Grene explores Yeats's poetic codes of practice, the key
words and habits of speech that shape the reading experience of his
poetry. Where previous studies have sought to decode his work,
expounding its symbolic meanings by references to Yeats's occult
beliefs, philosophical ideas or political ideology, the focus here
is on his poetic technique, its typical forms and their
implications for the understanding of the poems. Grene is concerned
with the distinctive stylistic signatures of the Collected Poems:
the use of dates and place names within individual poems; the
handling of demonstratives and of grammatical tense and mood;
certain nodal Yeatsian words ("dream," "bitter," "sweet") and
images (birds and beasts); dialogue and monologue as the voices of
his dramatic lyrics. The aim throughout is to illustrate the
shifting and unstable movement between lived reality and
transcendental thought in Yeats, the embodied quality of his poetry
between a phenomenal world of sight and an imagined world of
vision.
Shakespeare's Serial History Plays provides a re-reading of the two
sequences of English history plays, Henry VI-Richard III and
Richard II-Henry V. Reconsidering the chronicle sources and the
staging practices of Shakespeare's time, Grene argues that the
history plays were originally designed for serial performance. He
charts the cultural and theatrical conditions that led to serial
productions of the histories, in Europe as well as in the
English-speaking world, and looks at their original creation in the
1590s and at modern productions or adaptations, from famous
stagings such as the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1960s Wars of the
Roses through to the present day. Grene focuses on the issues
raised by the plays' seriality: the imagination of war, the
emergence of character, and the uses of prophecies and curses
through the first four; techniques of retrospection, hybrid
dramatic forms, and questions of irony and agency in the second.
Murphy Plays: 5 brings together four of the authors recent works:
The Wake, Too Late for Logic, The House, and Alice Trilogy. The
Wake recounts the story of a woman, returning from the USA to her
home town in Ireland. As her family learn of her years as a
prostitute, she finds the drewam of her homecoming turning into a
nightmare. A homecoming play that is haunting yet fiercely comic.
Too Late for Logic: "A major new play...these scenes are
beautifully imagined, ache with feeling, and flower into incidents
of piercing sadness or absurd laughter" (The Times) The House: "The
most compelling indictment of emigration ever committed to the
stage" (Irish Times) Alice Trilogy dramatises three stages in
Alice's life: 1980, in the afternoon murk of her attic, is Alice
losing her grip on reality? 1995, she has summoned a lost love to
meet her by the gasworks wall. 2005, at the airport: if the worst
has happened, why is it bearable?
This study provides a re-reading of the two sequences of English history plays, Henry VI-Richard III and Richard II-Henry V. Reconsidering the chronicle sources and the staging practices of Shakespeare's time, Grene argues that the history plays were originally designed for serial performance. The book looks at their original creation in the 1590s and at modern serial productions or adaptations, such as the famous Royal Shakespeare Company's 1960s Wars of the Roses and others.
The Politics of Irish Drama analyzes some twenty-five of the best-known Irish plays from those of Dion Boucicault to Sebastian Barry, including works by Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Beckett. The book looks at political contexts for these plays and, in arguing for the outward-directed nature of dramatic representation of Ireland, shows Irish drama to be an international as much as national phenomenon.
The Politics of Irish Drama analyzes some twenty-five of the best-known Irish plays from those of Dion Boucicault to Sebastian Barry, including works by Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Beckett. The book looks at political contexts for these plays and, in arguing for the outward-directed nature of dramatic representation of Ireland, shows Irish drama to be an international as much as national phenomenon.
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