Modern & Postmodern

Question 1

Summary of Murder in the Cathedral?

Answer 1

Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, first performed in 1935, that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral during the reign of Henry II in 1170. Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event.
• The play, dealing with an individual’s opposition to authority, was written at the time of rising fascism in Central Europe.
• The action occurs between 2 and 29 December 1170, chronicling the days leading up to the martyrdom of Thomas Becket following his absence of seven years in France. Becket’s internal struggle is the main focus of the play.
• The book is divided into two parts.
Part 1: Archbishop Thomas Becket’s hall on 2 December 1170.
The Chorus starts singing and it is an element which keeps commenting on the action on the stage.
Three priests are reflecting about rise of temporal power, i.e. the power of the worldly over spiritual. Becket accepts his martyrdom, which is taken as his selfishness.
2ND PART: four knights misinterprets King’s issues with Becket as an order of his killing.
They accuse him of betrayal while he says that he is loyal to the king.
Priests ask him to leave but he denies saying he is ready to die. He goes to the Cathedral where the knights attack and kill him. The knights defend their act saying that it was done order to make sure that church’s power not intervening with the state power.

Question 2

Summary of Family Reunion?

Answer 2

• The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot. Written mostly in blank verse (though not iambic pentameter),
• A mixture of elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth-century detective plays to portray the hero’s journey from guilt to redemption.
• The play is in two acts set in Wishwood, a stately home in the north of England. At the beginning, the family of AMY, who is Lady Monchensey is assembling for her birthday party discussing the death at sea of the wife of the eldest son Harry, who soon appears after eight years haunted by the belief the he is pushed his wife to death. The plays deals with his guilt about that incident. Agatha reveals that his father tried to kill Amy when he was in her womb, thought Agatha stopped that from happening Amy is resentful to her. Harry announces that he is leaving Wisherwood leaving John to take over the place. Amy dies from the shock.

Question 3

Summary of The Cocktail Party?

Answer 3

The Cocktail Party is a play by T. S. Eliot. Elements of the play are based on Alcestis, by the Ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The play was the most popular of Eliot’s seven plays in his lifetime
• It was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. In 1950 the play had successful runs in London and New York theatre (the Broadway production received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.)
• Plot: LAVINIA leaves EDWARD as they have separated after five years of marriage, just before they have organized a cocktail party. She is borught back to the party by psychiatrist they both consult. They find that they must face the realities of life. Edward’s love interest also wants to live a life of honesty and becomes a Christian martyr in Africa. After two years Edward and Lavinia host anther cocktail party.

Question 4

The Elder Statement is a play by?

Answer 4

Eliot

Question 5

About W.B. Yeats?

Answer 5

• In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore began the Irish Literary Theatre to present Irish plays.
• Abbey Theatre was inspired from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the “ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager à l’anglais.”
• The group’s manifesto declared, “We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory … & that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed”
• There theatre properly started in 27 December 1904 opened the Abbey Theatre. Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News were featured on the opening night.

Question 6

Summary of Cathleen ni Houlihan?

Answer 6

Cathleen ni Houlihan is a one-act play written by William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1902.
• Lady Gregory wrote the naturalistic peasant dialogue of the Gillane family and Yeats wrote Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s dialogue.
• Maude Gonne portrayed Cathleen ni Houlihan in the play’s first performances at the Abbey Theatre.
• The play centres on the 1798 Rebellion. The play is startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state.
• The play is set in Killala in 1798.
• Plot:
• Michael and Delia are going to marry and Peter and Bridget, parents of Michael are concerned about the dowry. Michael shays he has arranged for the marriage and got the dowry. A mysterious woman sings praise of the patriots and calls herself Cathleen Ni Houlihan and men must make sacrifices so that she can get her land from the foreigners.
• Neighbours enter the house and Patrick tells his family that the French ships have landed at Killala bay. The 1798 Rebellion is taking place. Michael vows to join the French army, abandoning his parents and his fiancée. Cathleen leaves, saying that “They shall be speaking for ever, / The people shall hear them forever.” Patrick only saw a young woman walking like a queen.

Question 7

Summary of The Countess Cathleen?

Answer 7

• The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by William Butler Yeats in blank verse (with some lyrics). It was dedicated to Maud Gonne, his belonging. Ireland is suffering from famine. The idealistic Countess of the title sells her soul to the devil so that she can save her tenants from starvation and goes to Heaven.

Question 8

Summary of At the Hawk’s Well?

Answer 8

At the Hawk’s Well is a one-act play first performed in 1916 and published in 1917.
• It is one of five plays loosely based on the stories of Cuchulain, who is the mythological hero of ancient Ulster.
• It uses features of the Japanese Noh Theatre for the first time in England. They use masks, costumes and have a dance to narrated traditional tales.
• On a desolate mountainside guarded by a hawk-like woman, an old man was there for fifty years, waiting for the miraculous waters from the well to rise up, so that he can drink it. Cuchulain arrives hearing about the water. .

Question 9

Plays by J.B. Priestley?

Answer 9

• The Good Companions (1931) dramatization of his novel
• Dangerous Corner (1932)
• Laburnum Grove (1933)
• Time and the Conways (1937)
• I Have Been Here Before (1937)
• When We Are Married (1938) is comedy first performed in London at the St. Martin’s Theatre, London in 1938.
• A group of three couples gathers at the Helliwells’ home to celebrate their silver anniversary. When they discover that they are not legally married, they worry about what will their neighbours think? – and all three couples find themselves analyse their marriages.
• They Came to a City (1943)
• An Inspector Calls (1945)

Question 10

Summary of An Inspector Calls?

Answer 10

• An Inspector Calls (1945) is a play first performed in the Soviet Union in 1945.
• The play is a three-act drama which takes place on a single night in April 1912,
• Upper middle-class BIRLING family, lives in a fictional town of Brumley, is visited by a man calling himself Inspector GOOLE, who questions the family about the suicide of a young working-class woman in her mid-twenties.

Question 11

Plays by Chrisopher Isherwood and WH Auden?

Answer 11

Christopher Isherwood (1904-86) and W.H. Auden wrote three plays together.
The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? A Play in Three Acts(1935),
The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts

On the Frontier: A Melodrama in Three Acts (1938)

Question 12

Summary of The Dog Beneath the Skin?

Answer 12

The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? A Play in Three Acts(1935),
Plot: Alan Norman is on quest to find Sir Francis Crewe who is the missing heir of Honeypot Hall in Crewe. He is with a dog travelling Europe and England. The dog turns out to be Sir Francis himself. Sir Francis leaves his village to join a revolutionary movement.

Question 13

Summary of The Ascent of F6?

Answer 13

The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts, is a poetic drama published in 1936.
Plot: Michael Ransom, a climber, accepts the offer of the British press and government and sponsors an expedition to the peak of F6, a mountain on the in Ostnia, near British border. He fails measurably.

Question 14

Summary of On the Frontier?

Answer 14

On the Frontier: A Melodrama in Three Acts (1938)
Plot: Ostnia and Westland are in war. Two rooms, one in an Ostnian household, one in a Westland household, each occupy half the stage, and the family in one house are unaware of the family in the other, but the son and daughter of the families are aware of each other.

Question 15

Plays by Noel Coward?

Answer 15

Born in Teddington, near London, England—died March 26, 1973, St. Mary, Jamaica),
• English playwright, actor, and composer
• He was known for his comedy of manners
• Coward appeared professionally as an actor from the age of 12.
• He wrote light comedies as I’ll Leave It to You (1920) and The Young Idea (1923),
• But became famous with serious play The Vortex (1924), which was highly successful in London.
• In 1925 the first of his durable comedies, Hay Fever, opened in London. Coward ended the decade with his most popular musical play, Bitter Sweet (1929).
Private Lives, in full Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy
Still Life, as the film Brief Encounter (1945). Present Laughter (1939)
Blithe Spirit (1941; film 1945; musical version, High Spirits, 1964)

Question 16

Summary of Private Lives?

Answer 16

Private Lives, in full Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy, comedy in three was published and produced in 1930.
Plot: Elyot Chase and his second wife, Sibyl, in French Riviera on their honeymoon where he discovers his first wife, Amanda Prynne, and her second husband, Victor are there in the next room. Elyot and Amanda run off to Paris but found out that their love is based on a mutual craving for violent arguments and physical brawls.

Question 17

About Henrik Ibsen?

Answer 17

• Born in Oslo, Norway.
• Norwegian Playwright
• His plays used naturalism, which was a step ahead of Realism of the Victorian Era. They wanted their plays to be identical to real life.
• The plays were related to middle class, there was very little action, more dialogues, which were thought provoking rather than sentimental.
• A Doll House (1879)
Ghost (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)

Question 18

Summary of The Cherry Orchard?

Answer 18

• The Cherry Orchard(1903) opened at Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski. It is a comedy according to Checkov, but a tragedy according to Stanislavski.
• Plot: Madame Ranevskaya goes to Paris for four years to come to terms with her son’ death. She is in debt when she comes back to Russia. She has to decide about the disposal of her estate along with the Cherry Orchard. Ermolai Lopakhin asks her to develop the land and purchases the estate for a housing development. Ronevskaya leaves the estate with the sound of saws in the background.
• The play deals with Feudalism and extent of capitalism in Russia, which paved the path for the coming Communist Revolution lead by Lenin.

Question 19

Summary of Uncle Vanya?

Answer 19

• Uncle Vanya (Published in 1897, produced in 1899) was a drama in four Acts.
• Plot: Ivan Voyanitsky, Called Uncle Vanya, feels disappointed when he realises that he has wasted his life in managing the estate and business of his former brother-in-law, Serebryakov, who for Vanya is a second-rate academic. Sonya is Serebrykov’s daughter and assistant to Vanya and is in love with a local physician. Vanya tries to shoot Serebrykov but nothing much changes.

Question 20

What is Kitchen Sink Drama?

Answer 20

• It developed in Britain in 50s and 60s in theatre, art, novel, film and tv.
• ‘Angry Young Men” was the term used for the main hero, who was disillusioned with the world.
• It dealt with the working class people’s social life where the domestic issues were shown in a realistic manner.
• It used to portray about the cramped apartments, their off time in pubs, and issues like homelessness.
• It was different from the well-made plays of earlier times.
• Films: It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), A Taste of Honey adapted from a play by Shelagh Dealaney(1958)(about a schoolgirl who gets pregnant after having an affair with a black sailor and them lives with a gay male friend.

Question 21

Summary of Look Back in Anger?

Answer 21

• Look Back in Anger (1956) follows Jimmy Porter and as husband and Alison as wife. Alison comes from an upper class background and Jimmy is from a working class. The couple lives with Cliff Lewis, who is Jimmy’s Friend. The play deals with the loss of power that people of England felt after the end of colonialism. It shows the frustration of youth in Britain and how they dealt with it. Alison and Jimmy are always in confrontation but they cant live without each other. A new woman comes when Alison leaves for her parent’s but then she came back and things come to normal.

Question 22

Top Gilr Summary?

Answer 22

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girl (1982), The Play introduces Thatcherism. It has Marlene, the head of London employment agency, and the compromises she makes to get successful in the career.

Question 23

About Bertolt Brecht?

Answer 23

Bertolt Brecht (1898- 1956)
• Born in Augsburg, Germany.
• He studied medicine, and served in army hospital
• First play Baal (1923), Drums in the Night (1922)
• He used Alienation Effect or Verfemdungseeffekt in his plays which didn’t follow the Aristotelian idea of making the audience to believe in whatever is happening on the stage, but instead the audience should be aware that it’s a play.
• Mother Courage and Her Children(1939)

Question 24

Summary of Mother Courage?

Answer 24

• Mother Courage and Her Children(1939)
• Four production between 1941 to 1952, last three directed by Brecht himself.
• It was adapted as a German film in 1959/60 with Brecht’s widow Helene Weigel as the lead.
• Plot: It deals with the Thirty Years War (1618-1648)
• ANNA FIERLING, who is nicknamed Mother Courage is in Swedish Army as a canteen worker and wants to have a decent living after the war. She loses her children Schweizerkas, Eilif and Kattrin in the war. It is ironical that she was getting profited by the very same war.

Question 25

Summary of The Threepenny Opera?

Answer 25

• The Threepenny Opera (1928) is a musical drama in collaboration with musical composer Kurt Weill.
• It adapted John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
• Plot: Macheath (Mackie) is a gangster who marries Pollu Peachum, who is the daughter of Mr Peachum, who is a leader of a ring of London Beggers. Mr. Peachum want Macheath to get arrested, but he runs away, though in the end betrayed by Suky Twady, a prostitute who informs the police. Queen Victoria pardons him on the Coronation day at the last minute.

Question 26

Summary of Life of Galileo?

Answer 26

• Life of Galileo (1938) with music from Hanns Eisler, directed by Leonard Steckel.
• The play is about Galileo Galilei , who was the great astronomer and physicist who struggled to prove his Copernican theory of heliocentric universe, where the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun and not the vice versa. In the end, as no one believes him he has to publicly recant his theory in order to save his life. Brecht showed him to be a weak man who in order to save his life, betrays science.

Question 27

What is Theatre of Absurd?

Answer 27

• It’s a theatre movement first mentioned by Martin Esslin in his essay called ‘The Theatre of Absurd’ in 1960 where he chose Ionesco, Beckett and Arthur Adamov to be a part of the group.
• The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence
• It believed in existentialism propounded by philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus where there believed that there is no purpose or meaning outside the world and every individual have to give a meaning to their own life. That is why it explored things like human nature and how they act, feel and live, which also includes their existential angst about their purpose in life and their anxieties about absurdities of life.
• The structure of plays were not linear but cyclic and speech were usually irrational and illogical and concluded in silence.
• There was a lot of use of repetition or action showing the mundane nature of life.

Question 28

About Eugene Ionesce?

Answer 28

• Eugène Ionesco(1909-1994)

• He was born in Paris and wrote in French. He worked as a proof reader and decided to learn English.
• His one act antiplay, The BALD SOPRANO(1949, La Cantatrice Chauve) was revolutionary in dramatic technique and started the movement Theatre of the Absurd.
• Plot: Two people having a mundane dialogue about the weather, life and children discover in the end that they are husband and wife.

Question 29

Summary of The Chairs?

Answer 29

• The Chairs (1952) An old man with his wife is wanting to deliver his last massage to posterity, is waiting for the audience, and is disappointed by empty chairs. They think that an orator, who they have given the job, will convey his message to the people, they both commit suicide. The orator, however, is suffering from aphasia, and he can only speak in gibberish.

Question 30

Summary of Rhinoceros?

Answer 30

• Rhinoceros (1959) In a small town of France, people become rhinoceros, except for BERENGER, who is criticized in the beginning of the play for being a drunkard, and later for his paranoia and obsession with rhinoceroses. The play is believed to be targeting Nazism and Fascism.

Question 31

About Samuel Beckett?

Answer 31

• Irish Novelist, playwright and short story writer. Involved in Theatre of Absurd.
• He lived in Paris and wrote in English and French both
• He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.

Question 32

Summary of Waiting for Godot?

Answer 32

• Waiting for Godot(composed in French as En attendant Godot in 1948) subtitled in English as ‘a tragedy in two act’.
• It was premiered in French in 1953.
• The English version premiered in 1955 in London.
• Plot: Two tramps Vladimir(Didi) and Estragon(Gogo) are waiting for Godot, whose identity is never revealed. These two characters have no idea how to spend their life while waiting for godot. They want to make a point of their lives and even try to commit suicide. Later Pozzo the master comes with Lucky the servant and intends to sell him. Lucky delivers a gibberish speech almost like an academician. In the middle of the wait, a boy comes to inform them that Godot won’t be coming that evening. In the second act, the same thing is repeated and the play end at the beginning where both of them are still waiting for Godot.

Question 33

Summary of Endgame?

Answer 33

Endgame (1957) has four characters, Hamm, the master, is blind, wheelchair-bound, Clov, is his servant, who can’t sit down; and Hamm’s crippled and mad parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in a garbage can. They all live in one room with two windows. The play is about the complex relationship between Hamm and Clov.

Question 34

Summary of Happy Days?

Answer 34

Happy Days is a play in two acts.
• Winnie, lives with her husband Willie in her daily life while being buried to her waist, Willie, who can’t be seen much and communicates very little. She always says “Oh this is a happy day.”
• In Act II, she still talks about her happier days although she is buried up to her neck.

Question 35

About Harold Pinter?

Answer 35

Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor.
• His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others’ works
Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming
• The Room, written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol, directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd (which he reprised in 2001 and 2007).
The Birthday Party, Written in 1957 and produced in 1958, Pinter’s second play,

Question 36

Summary of Birthday Party?

Answer 36

A Piano player STANLEY WEBBER lives in a boarding house run by Meg and Petey Boles in South Coast, two strangers Goldberg and McCann come on his birthday looking for him. They interrogate Stanley with a series of ambiguous, rhetorical questions. Stanley then attacks Meg and, in the blackout that immediately follows, attacks and attempts to rape Lulu. Goldberg and McCann tell Stanley about the benefits of going with them to meet an unknown character called Monty. Peter tries to stop him, but couldn’t and Meg never comes to know about where they have gone.

Question 37

Summary of The Homecoming?

Answer 37

The Homecoming is a two-act play first published in 1965.
Max, a retired butcher; lives with his brother Sam, a chauffeur; and Max has three sons: Teddy, an expatriate American philosophy professor; Lenny, who appears to be a pimp; and Joey, a would-be boxer in training who works in demolition. Ruth, who is Teddy’s wife. It is revealed the Ruth had been “a photographic model for the body”. Lenny dances with her and pass her to Joey, who starts making out with her. Ruth demands food and drink and seems to be in power. Max volunteers that Ruth could come to live with the family, suggesting that she should works for them as a part-time prostitute. Ruth accepts their proposal and tells Teddy, who is leaving the house “Don’t become a stranger”