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 […]
Tag: Theatre
10 of the Best Poems about Acting and the Theatre
Many famous poets have also been playwrights – consider, for starters, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, T. S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde – and many poets have written about the experience of treading the boards. Below, we select and introduce some of the best-known and best-loved poems about the […]
A Summary and Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
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 […]
A Summary and Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
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 […]
A Summary and Analysis of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady. Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes. Before we offer an analysis […]