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The Tragic Clash of Cultures in Vincent O`Sullivan`s Shuriken
( Derek Mcgovern ) 21세기영어영문학회 2016 영어영문학21 Vol.29 No.2
Shuriken (1983), the first stage play of New Zealand playwright Vincent O’Sullivan (1937- ), is based on the real-life mass shooting of Japanese prisoners that occurred during World War Two at New Zealand’s only prisoner-of-war camp. 48 Japanese and one New Zealander died in the shooting, and it remains the only incident of its kind to have occurred on New Zealand soil. O’Sullivan’s play, although mostly fictionalized in terms of its characters and the events that precede the shooting, constitutes an attempt to understand why this tragedy (or massacre, as some have deemed it) occurred. This paper, taking its lead from O’Sullivan’s stated conviction that there was nothing that could have alleviated the Japanese prisoners’ distress at being incarcerated by an enemy, nor anything that could have helped their New Zealand captors to appreciate fully the true nature of their despair, examines how the play ominously foreshadows the fatal shooting through a series of cultural misunderstandings on both sides. In doing so, it demonstrates how O’Sullivan’s play refrains from overtly blaming either the Japanese prisoners or the New Zealanders for the tragedy. In addition to arguing that the cultural clashes depicted in Shuriken have universal relevance, this paper also examines how the play employs elements of non-naturalism to illustrate the cultural gulf between the two sides.
Derek McGovern 새한영어영문학회 2021 새한영어영문학회 학술발표회 논문집 Vol.2021 No.10
British playwright, novelist and social commentator J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)’s most famous theatrical work, the thriller-cum-socialist morality play An Inspector Calls (1946), underwent a major revival in the early 1990s, leading to a positive critical reappraisal that has not abated to the present time. In 2015 the play received its first major television adaptation in a BBC production of the same title, written by noted playwright Helen Edmundson and directed by the BAFTA-award-winning Irish director Aisling Walsh. The adaptation by hailed by the Guardian as a sensitive reworking of the play that “translates into gripping 21<SUP>st</SUP>-century television.” This presentation examines the principal changes that were made to the play in adapting it for the medium of television. In particular, it addresses how the adaptation removes some of the ambiguity surrounding the play’s mysterious character, Inspector Goole, through the addition of purely visual scenes that indicate that he is a supernatural being rather than a human, arguing that this change disrupts Priestley’s delicate balance between realism and science fiction, while at the same time distracting the audience from the play’s moral concerns through its new emphasis on the Inspector. The presentation also examines how the adaptation, through its inclusion of often poignant flashbacks involving the play’s exclusively off-stage character, Eva Smith, seeks to encourage greater audience identification with her plight.
Ambiguity Preserved: Shanley’s Screen Version of His Play Doubt: A Parable
( Derek Mcgovern ) 21세기영어영문학회 2018 영어영문학21 Vol.31 No.3
American playwright John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable is a morality tale that addresses both the elusiveness of certainty and the implications of judging a person’s guilt without proof. Its plot concerns the suspicions of a senior nun, Sister Aloysius, at a Bronx Catholic parochial school in 1964 that her parish’s popular young priest, Father Flynn, has sexually abused the school’s only African-American student. The evidence against the priest is far from conclusive, however, and the play ends without definitively resolving his guilt or innocence, thereby obliging each member of the audience to determine if Sister Aloysius was justified in driving the priest away from his parish. This article examines the ambiguity surrounding Father Flynn in the play and then compares the work with the 2008 film adaptation, which Shanley himself wrote and directed, viewing the latter as the playwright’s attempt to establish a definitive version of his play. In particular, this article demonstrates how the adaptation, through a number of new scenes and a much larger cast of characters, carefully maintains the play’s ambiguity with respect to Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence. The article also demonstrates how the film, partly through the use of visual means, underlines how the same event can be interpreted in different ways, thereby further illustrating the elusiveness of certainty.