Look Back in Gender (Routledge Revivals) (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In this challenging book, Michelene Wandor, the most respected commentator on sexual politics in the theatre, looks again at the best-known British plays of the last thirty years from Look Back in Anger onwards. She investigates the representation of the family and different forms of sexuality in these plays and re-views them, above all, from a perspective which throws into sharp relief the function of gender as a powerful theatrical dynamic and an important determinant of plot, setting and the portrayal of character.

Juxtaposing the period before 1968, when statutory censorship was still in force, with the years following its abolition, Wandor scrutinizes the key plays of among others, Osborne, Pinter, Wesker, Arden, Delaney, Bond, Orton, Hare, Brenton, Churchill, Gems and Edgar. Each one is set firmly in its social context with, in the first period, an examination of the influence of World War II, the testing of gender roles, the development of the Welfare State and changes in family patterns, and, in the second period, the impact of feminist, Left-wing and gay politics.

Throughout both periods, two generations of playwrights and theatregoers transformed the theatre into a forum in which they could articulate and explore rapidly changing interpersonal relationships and the interaction of those relationships with the wider political sphere. These changes lead Wandor to some startling conclusions about the different gender focus of male and female playwrights, and raise fundamental questions about the nature of the so-called 'political' plays of the Seventies and Eighties.