Polyphonic Re-telling of Russian Thinkers in Stoppard's Voyage

Park-Finch Heebon(박희본) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2009 현대영미드라마 Vol.22 No.2

In Voyage, the first play of The Coast of Utopia (2002) trilogy, Tom Stoppard dramatizes the fervent youth of idealism and conflicting ideas among a group of mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and writers. Stoppard bases his dramatic portrayal of this first generation of the Russian intelligentsia on multiple sources. However, in his episodic, cyclical, and panoramic re-telling of their personal and intellectual reactions to oppressive reality in Russia, the playwright adds his own interpretative color by providing each character with an equally articulate voice, allowing them to debate freely their differing perspectives on social and personal reforms. Stoppard has brought alive the historical figures taken from the source texts and has made their philosophical debates, idealistic visions, and political and personal conflicts more vivid by presenting their opposing views in counterpoint, while bringing them together in a polyphonic whole. The play is also interlaced with distinctively Stoppardian wit and humor, making it more humane and accessible to contemporary audiences and providing them with both entertainment and education. This paper explores how the playwright juxtaposes and re-presents the many voices in Voyage, and how duality and polyphony help him to achieve his desired dramatic effect.

테렌스 래티건의 『브라우닝 버전』에 나타난 아가멤논 신화의 전유

박희본(Heebon Park) 한국영미어문학회 2014 영미어문학 Vol.- No.112

This paper examines the critical dimensions of artistic appropriation in Terence Rattigan's 1948 stage play, The Browning Version. While focusing on the play's dramatic/literary use of the myth of Agamemnon's murder dramatized earlier in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, this study shall expose to critical scrutiny the ambivalence inherent to such an act of multi-layered re-contextualization, adopted and adapted on the one hand to portray the pragmatic post-war English society and the English psyche oppressed in the age of austerity, and yet on the other hand to suggest the possibility of a different future. The paper will look at the strategies of duplicity, transformation and reversal which have allowed the playwright to negotiate the meaning of the mythic narrative in a different socio-cultural framework to offer a humanistic analysis of the conflicts and uncertainties of life. It is argued that Rattigan's once overshadowed and overlooked work be revaluated through these critical paradigms, along with its thin beam of light carrying both timely and timeless resonances.

테렌스 래티건의 단막극 2부작 Separate Tables 다시 읽기

박희본(Park, Heebon) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2014 현대영미드라마 Vol.27 No.2

전후 영국사회의 금기를 다룬 연극과 영화

박희본(Park, Heebon) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2017 현대영미드라마 Vol.30 No.2

연극과 영화에 형상화된 전후의 불안과 긴장

박희본(Park, Heebon) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2015 현대영미드라마 Vol.28 No.1

스트린드베리 비극의 재해석: 패트릭 마버의 After Miss Julie에 드러난 계급과 젠더 정치성

박희본(Park, Heebon) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2020 현대영미드라마 Vol.33 No.1

This paper examines Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie (2003), a dramatic reimagining of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) that relocates the classic naturalist tragedy to a post-WWII British setting, recontextualizing and providing contemporary resonance to the class-driven gender politics of Strindberg’s play. This study first investigates Strindberg’s text and its Preface, in order to clarify his stance on late nineteenth century class differences and gender roles. This is followed by a discussion of Marber’s relocation of these issues into mid-twentieth century Britain in After Miss Julie, adding intensity and dramatic tension to the psychological drama. This process of proximation is set in the kitchen of a Labour peer’s large country house outside London on the night of his Party’s ‘landslide’ election victory in 1945. The inevitably pyrrhic euphoria of this event, which appears to herald a hopeful future for an undeniably class-bound society, offers ironic comment on New Labour’s victory and decline in 2003, when the play was premiered. Marber’s reinterpretation is also significant for its reevaluation of the female characters, including a more humanized portrayal of Miss Julie and an augmented role for the working-class Christine, who appeared as a marginalized ‘female slave’ in the original, and who now subverts the original power-politics by quietly taking ownership of the situation near the end of the play. In conclusion, After Miss Julie not only succeeds (comes ‘after’) the original play, but causes an independent cultural product to emerge, based on (‘after’) but not faithful to its precursor text. This creative infidelity enables Marber’s transcultural adaptation to provide new insights regarding Strindberg’s play, while exploring its contemporary resonance through a two-way adaptive process that gives ‘afterlife’ to the original author’s vision.

Oscar Wilde Retried in Mark Jackson’s Documentary Trial Play Salomania

박희본(Heebon Park) 한국영미어문학회 2016 영미어문학 Vol.- No.120

This paperexamines Mark Jackson’s Salomania, a 2012 stage representation of the1918 libel trial by a Canadian dancer, Maud Allan, against the BritishMember of Parliament, Noel Pemberton Billing. Jackson’s play issignificant not only as an important addition to the documentary trialplays, but also as a further contribution to the dramatic literature aboutthe trials of Oscar Wilde, with which it creates an indirect dialog. Thetheatrical and social background of the trial is considered first, in orderto gain an understanding of the context, the characters, and the issuesinvolved. As with Wilde’s trials, Allan’s attempt to clear her name wasoverturned by allegations of sexual perversity, in the “trial of thecentury,” which revealed mismanagement of the British legal system andthe absurdity of attempts to make art legally accountable. The ensuingcourtroom drama is reconstructed by Jackson by taking selections from contemporary court transcripts. Salomania probes the roots of Victorian,Edwardian, and (by implication) contemporary society, questioning howprejudice, homophobia, and xenophobia can occur in the courtroom of acivilized society. Jackson offers little commentary of his own on theissue, but makes his point by juxtaposing the horrors of trench warfarein World War I with this concurrent travesty of justice on the homefront. In showing Wilde and Allan as sacrificial victims of cultural, legal,and homophobic hysteria, Salomania offers a timeless culturalinvestigation into the relationship between art, law, and society.

Voicing the Suppressed

Park, Heebon(박희본) 새한영어영문학회 2018 새한영어영문학 Vol.60 No.3

This paper examines Nicholas Wright’s 2011 stage play, Rattigan’s Nijinsky, a re-fashioning of Terence Rattigan’s unproduced BBC television script, Nijinsky (1974). Wright’s palimpsestic text is interspersed with his own depiction of a dying Rattigan, worried about his artistic legacy. The metadramatic adaptation transforms about half of Rattigan’s original screenplay for the theatre, in addition to Wright’s own commentary on the source text and the characters and events surrounding it. Taking into account a recent reappraisal of Rattigan’s contribution to British theatre for his humanist sympathy for the outsider and for his analysis of the repressed English psyche, this study explores how Wright’s play works as a metadrama, and what it reveals of the relationships and tensions between Rattigan the suppressed homosexual and the frustrated playwright, and his emotionally ambiguous creations.

래티건의 『로스』에 극화된 T. E. 로렌스의 기억, 의지, 정체성

박희본(Heebon Park) 한국영미어문학회 2021 영미어문학 Vol.- No.142

This paper examines Terence Rattigan’s Ross (1960), a previously neglected biographical history play that offers a psychiatric approach to the enigmatic life of T.E. Lawrence. Known as Lawrence of Arabia for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916~1918) against the Ottoman Empire during WWI, Lawrence’s loyalties were divided between British imperialism and Arab nationalism. Feeling that the Arab cause that he had fought for had been betrayed by the British establishment after the conclusion of hostilities, he retreated into anonymity and, in 1922, secretly joined the Royal Air Force under the pseudonym ‘Ross.’ Rattigan’s stage biopic investigates the mystery of this hero, proposing that his actions were driven by his personal will and its destruction by Turkish captors in Deraa, where he was sexually assaulted, causing him to acknowledge his homosexual masochism. This depiction of a crisis of sexual and national identity, leading to withdrawal from public attention, can be seen to mirror Rattigan’s own complex personality and concealed homosexuality. In addition, the playwright’s portrayal of Lawrence’s disillusionment and self-loathing constitute a criticism of Western politicians who saw Lawrence as a dispensable tool of empire-building. Finally, this study finds that Rattigan’s dramatic craftsmanship is at its best in Ross, in which the description of the psychological turmoil of a legendary figure mixes humor and pathos, through an episodic structure featuring seamless dream-sequences and flashback scenes.

스토파드의 『사랑의 발명』 : 과거 재현과 현대적 재해석

박희본(Heebon Park) 신영어영문학회 2009 신영어영문학 Vol.43 No.-

In his 1997 stage play, The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard re-presents the fantasies and realities of A. E. Housman, an English classical scholar and romantic poet, contrasting his life and loves with those of his dramatic (and contemporary) foil, Oscar Wilde. Also at the heart of the play is the poignant meeting between the older Housman (“AEH”) and his younger self (“Housman”). Stoppard’s text deals (at a philosophical level) with the nature of love, poetry, scholarship, aesthetics, and attitudes to homosexuality in late Victorian England, the latter focus designed to challenge audience members into reappraising their preconceptions. This paper examines the ways in which the playwright employs uniquely Stoppardian juxtapositions to re-interpret the past and to re-examine philosophical concepts about art and love.