김유 교수

Contemporary Scottish drama emerging in the 1990s, dubbed often as ‘post-devolution plays’, can be defined as post-nationalist plays in the sense that they share the desire to investigate the boundaries of the nation-state. Employing a variety of motifs such as travelling, border-crossing and borderland encounter, they attempt to move beyond a narrow sense of Scottishness. They focus on differences ‘within’ Scotland, challenging the conventions of Scottish nationalistic plays, which thrived on a

The idea of hybridity has been central to the recent debates on postcolonial identity. The concept that the negotiations among diverse cultural elements produce the “third space” of identity, challenges any binary opposition based on cultural purity. However, this political aspect of hybridization has been questioned since the hybridized identities have not changed the existing social hierarchies. Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, a critical exploration of British Asian identity in the

This paper explores the dilemmas of forging alternative Black British identities in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2003 play, Elmina’s Kitchen. Kwei-Armah, the established Black British playwright, presents the intergenerational differences in the community of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in London, encouraging the audience to examine the dilemmas involved in creating a sustainable community within the mainstream white society. Elmina’s Kitchen centres on the predicament of Deli, a reformed ex-con who tries in

This paper explores Roy Williams’ complex representation of British black youth in two of his works, Lift Off (1999) and Fallout (2003). Williams, a leading contemporary British black dramatist, challenges the mainstream media’s stereotypical portrayals of black masculinity and black-on-black crime, which are largely based on the perception of urban black youth as hyper-sexualized, degenerate and criminal-minded. Unlike the first and the second generations of British black dramatists, who relied

When Edgar’s Maydays, a historical play on three generations of political defectors, was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983 at the Barbican Theatre, the degeneration of socialism in the post-war Britain and Eastern Europe was portrayed in such a vivid way. The controversy surrounding Maydays, condemned as “a monster play on a subsidized stage,” was even more compounded by the fact that the play was actually performed to the middle-class audience, which had been traditionally rega

Ayub Khan-Din(1961-), a British Pakistani actor and dramatist, began his playwriting career in the racialization of British Muslims in the 1990s, accelerated by the Salman Rushdie affair and the Gulf War. Focusing on generational and cultural conflicts within a mixed-race family in England, East is East(1996) swerves away from the established media representation of British Muslims which has reduced a multifaceted Muslim identity to a single political movement. The play was well received by whit

If Thatcherism attempted to recast and forge new relationships between past and present, the people and the state, and between people themselves, the plays of Edgar, Hare, Churchill, Brenton and Griffiths in the 1980s were a crucial ideological intervention against the Thatcherite hegemony of the repressive constructions of the nation. What distinguished the works of Griffiths and Edgar in the 1980s from those of other political dramatists was their vigorous exploration of the dilemmas which con

Trevor Griffiths’ criticism of the Labour Party in Bill Brand, a 1976 TV drama series about a left-wing Labour MP, is closely linked with a recurrent theme in his cannon, the possibility of socialist revolution in Britain via parliamentary socialism. Bill Brand is based on Griffiths’ critique of Labourism, one of the traditional ideologies for the British Left which sees the Labour Party as “only one true vehicle for progressive politics.” In Bill Brand Griffiths criticises Labourism from a stru

This paper examines the historical drama of contemporary British dramatists, David Edgar, Howard Brenton, David Hare and Trevor Griffiths with a post-Marxist perspective on history and class. It aims to illustrate the changing ways in which history is represented by the post-1968 brood of writers who saw the theatre itself as a weapon of political struggle. My emphasis is on the coherence rather than the contradictions in their historical perceptions. Despite the varying perceptions in their vi

The elusive character of Gertrude in Hamlet has raised a range of conflicting issues among theatre critics and performers, and has been continuously interpreted as either ‘a whore’ guilty of incestuous sin or a nurturing, caring mother and wife. Although the contemporary representations of Gertrude have relied on the ‘avowal or disavowal of oedipal subtext,’ they have not swerved from this dominant good/evil dichotomy. Distinguished from other revisionist re-writings of Hamlet over the last coup