By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was one of the major American playwrights of the twentieth century. Along with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, he may be regarded as one of the most important and influential writers for the US stage during the 1940s and 1950s. Miller’s plays contain a strong social message, and the message was usually rooted in his working-class left-wing politics which was formed during his youth.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Cherry Orchard was the last play Anton Chekhov wrote before his untimely death, in 1904. The play is in many ways an elegy for an old Russia that was in the process of dying at the turn of the century, with the new Russia powerless to be born. But despite this elegiac quality, Chekhov himself considered the play a comedy – a ‘four-act vaudeville’. Clearly further analysis of the play’s structure and style is necessary, in order to understand what makes The Cherry Orchard such a powerful piece of drama.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is widely regarded as Tennessee Williams’s greatest play, and in it we find an echo of many of America’s main social and political preoccupations and struggles of the 1950s. But the way Williams taps into the national psyche at a particular point in US history is subtle, and requires closer analysis. Before we offer an analysis of the play, however, it might be worth recapping the plot of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which had its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966, is one of the most famous plays by the Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s work has long been concerned with revisiting Shakespeare and offering a new take on his work; he even wrote the screenplay to the hugely successful 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous and widely studied American play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Albee’s play is about the dysfunctional and self-destructive marriage between a history professor and his wife, witnessed over the course of one night (or, technically, one very early morning) following a party.