A Streetcar Named Desire 
(20^TH CENTURY SOCIO-POLITICAL DRAMA)

Title of play: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Date of first stage performance: First performed on Broadway on December 3, 1947, and closed on December 17, 1949, in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Date of film adaptation: First adapted into film by Warner Brothers in 1951 and directed by Elia Kazan.

Author: Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier III.

Author’s date & place of birth: Born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi.   

3 significant details of author’s personal circumstances/times in which play was written:

·         Williams himself was from the South and his Southern accent resulted him to gaining the name Tennessee in college. His Southern origins may have also influenced the fact that A Streetcar Named Desire explores the conflict between the Old South (represented by Blanche Dubois) and the New South (represented by Stanley Kowalski).

·         Williams’ entered the University of Missouri to study journalism; however his father forced him to withdraw from school because Williams had failed a required course. As a result his father made him work at the same shoe company where he himself worked. After three years at the shoe factory, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown so he returned to a college in St. Louis.

·         Tennessee Williams was homosexual. He took inspiration from other gay writers such as Hart Crane, in fact the epigraph to A Streetcar Named Desire is taken from Hart Crane’s poem titled “The Broken Tower”. Thus it can be argued that Williams identified Crane as a homosexual writer trying to find a means of self-expression in a heterosexual world.

Structure of play: Acts/scenes, timescale:

A Streetcar Named Desire is structured into eleven scenes, which trace the development of the relationship between Blanche, Stanley and Stella over the space of a few months. The original stage production placed the two intervals after Scene 4 (after the poker night) and Scene 6 (after Blanche’s date with Mitch). Williams’ dramatic structure also involves a dual movement in time. Whereas the onstage action keeps moving forward until Stanley rapes Blanche, we are also taken backwards in time to Blanche’s primal sexual trauma, the discovery of Allan’s homosexuality and his subsequent suicide. Of course, when Blanche finally describes this event to Mitch, years after it took place, it has entirely changed its ‘meaning’: at the time she was shocked, appalled and disgusted, but now she feels guilt, sorrow and remorse. Significantly the play begins in the spring and ends in the ‘fall’. 

Characterisation:

Main characters in play & very brief summary of

·                     Personality

·                     Role in play

·                     Key quotation (act, scene, line reference)

Blanche DuBois:  

Blanche is an insecure, fragile and aging Southern belle, who has a drinking problem. She is very snobby towards her brother-in-law, Stanley. She often talks about Stanley as if he is inferior to her, for example at one point she says to her sister:

“Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve.”  (Sc. Two, 141).

Stanley Kowalski: 

Stanley is a passionate, brutish working class man who is married to Blanche’s sister, Stella.  He hates Blanches’ snobby attitude and the aristocratic, image of the Old South which she represents. He is Polish and represents the emerging diverse New South and so doesn’t appreciate Blanches’ bigotry towards him, at one point he educates Blanche informing her:

“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.”  (Sc. Eight, 197).

Stella Kowalski: 

Stella is Blanche’s younger sister and Stanley’s wife. She is madly in love with her husband and cares deeply about her sister, so she often in the middle of Blanche and Stanley’s antagonism towards each other. She tries to shield her sister from harsh realities. She appears as someone very much in love and has a very passionate relationship with Stanley, something which Blanche does not understand. Stella reveals: “Why, on our wedding night- soon as we came in here- he snatched off one of my slippers and rushed about the place smashing the light-bulbs with it.

Blanche, astonished, replies: “He did- what?”   (Sc. Four, 157)    

Harold “Mitch” Mitchell: Mitch is a kind, sensitive man who lives with his mother. He tries to court Blanche, with a mind to marry her and to introduce a bride to his dying mother; however Blanche toys with his emotions. In scene six, Blanche deceives Mitch about her sordid sexual past. Believing in her sexual inexperience Mitch says:

“I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my- experience- I have never known anyone like you.” (Sc. Six, 176-77)

In response to Mitch’s admission Blanche can’t help but to burst into laughter, making the audience more aware of her shady past.

4. Dramaturgy & language: choose a two page extract and comment on the choice of language and dramatic effects:

Act, Scene & page number: (Sc. Two, 134-135)

In this scene Stanley suspects that Blanche has cheated his wife (and thus him) out of her share of their family home, Belle Reve, and so insists on raking through Blanche’s trunk looking for evidence. As he rummages through Blanche’s faded finery all he finds are fake imitations of jewels and furs. The language Stanley uses is mocking and aggressive, he sneers to Stella “What is this sister of yours, a deep- sea diver who brings up sunken treasures? Or is she the champion safe cracker of all time?” (sc. 2, 134) Furthermore, Williams’ stage directions are rich with implied violence, which creates a tense, barely restrained violent atmosphere, as Stanley; “pulls open” the trunk, “jerks out her dresses” and “hurls” her furs about before he “kicks” it shut. Later he “seizes” her perfume bottle and “slams it down” before “shov[ing]” the trunk “roughly open” again, and when he finds her cache of love letters from her dead husband he “snatches them open” and “rips off the ribbon” which binds them. It can be argued that, just as Belle Reve comes to symbolises Blanche’s lost identity as a Southern Belle, Blanche’s trunk full of tatty costumes and cheap fakes symbolizes both her tragic past and also her current fantasy existence. 

The scene can also be seen as a struggle between Stanley and Blanche for physical space and emotional territory. When Blanche discovers Stanley’s invasion of her privacy she is horrified. She says: “Now that you touched them I’ll burn them! ...I hurt [Allan] the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t!” (Sc. 2, 139) Blanche’s language suggests that Stanley’s violent actions both contaminate her past and her future. As Stanley’s invasion of Blanche’s trunk can be said to prefigure the rape of his sister- in- law, her accusation can be seen as a foreshadowing of his later destruction of her social and sexual identity.

5.  Socio-political Themes: 2 quotations to illustrate each (with Act, Scene, page number)

1. Education: There is a sense of working class culture and a preference of physical work over intellectual pursuits. As a teacher Blanche is the only character in the play which shows some form of experience with institutional education, whereas the male characters like Mitch seem uneducated.    

Blanche: “‘And if God choose,

I shall but love thee better- after death!’

Why, that’s from my favourite sonnet by Mrs Browning!”  

Mitch: You know it?

Blanche: Certainly I do!” (Sc. Three, 149)

2. Class/Race: Mainly indicated by language; Blanche’s upper- class, values related to ‘Old South’ are contrasted with the setting and people of the emerging ‘New South’. Blanche appears to uphold the values of the Old South; creating for herself an image of a demure and sexually innocent lady, however her lies catch up with her in the end:

Mitch to Blanche: “God! That pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all that malarkey that you’ve dished out all summer. Oh, I knew you weren’t sixteen any more. But I was fool enough to believe you were straight.” (Sc. Nine 204)

Blanche: “Legacies! Huh…And other things such as blood-stained pillow- slips- ‘Her linen needs changing’- ‘Yes mother. But couldn’t we get a coloured girl to do it?’ No, we couldn’t of course. Everything’s gone but the-“ (Sc. Nine, 206).

3. Gender: There is a critique of women’s dependence of men in the post- war era. Both Blanche and Stella are forced to depend upon men; Stella depends on her husband Stanley for happiness and Blanche depends on various men financially. In the play she tries to depend on Mitch for financial security and respectability. Blanche’s final words serve as a critique on the treatment of women during the transition from the old to the new South, she says to the male doctor:

“Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” (Sc. Eleven, 225)

Stanley to Stella: “Lie Number One: All this squeamishness she puts on! You should just know the line she’s been feeding to Mitch. He thought she had never been more than kissed by a fellow! But sister Blanche is no lily! Ha- ha! Some lily she is!” (Sc. Seven, 186).

4. Power: Stanley uses his physical power to dominate the women in his life, he often acts very animalistic- which excites Stella but makes Blanche frightened of him. When he rapes Blanche he uses his power and physical strength as a tool to dominate her in the worst possible way, driving her to insanity.

Stanley’s physical power is shown through stage directions, when he assaults Blanche: [He springs towards her, overturning the table…]

Stanley: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” (Sc. Ten, 215).

Critical comments/reviews – 3 quotations (author, publication, date, page no.)

“Tennessee Williams's play is so inexhaustible that it is always worth seeing. With Rachel Weisz playing Blanche DuBois there is also no doubt this production will be a popular success. Yet, for all the evening's merits, the perfectionist in me questions Rob Ashford's production, which is often stronger on externals than the drama's inner core. […] It certainly looks handsome. As you enter the theatre you are instantly struck by Christopher Oram's evocation of New Orleans, with its spiral staircase and ornamented balconies extending right round the theatre. […]Weisz…is almost too beautiful, so that Blanche's sensitivity about her age seems misplaced. The sinuous drawl of the American south also sometimes eludes her. But what Weisz brings to the role is a quality of desperate solitude touched with grace. - July 2009, Donmar Warehouse in London. Michael Billington, Guardian.
“What Ms. Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal survival instinct that keeps her on her feet long after she has been buffeted by blows that would level a heavyweight boxer. […]Except, I might add, audiences, who are likely to find themselves identifying with disturbing closeness with a character who has often before seemed too exotic, too anachronistic, too fey to remind you of anyone you knew personally. Ms. Blanchett’s Blanche is always on the verge of falling apart, yet she keeps summoning the strength to wrestle with a world that insists on pushing her away. Blanche’s burden, in existential terms, becomes ours. And a most particular idiosyncratic creature acquires the universality that is the stuff of tragedy.” - 2009 BAM Harvey Theatre. Ben Brantley, The New York Times.
“This delicately pitched revival of Tennessee Williams's great play is crammed into the centre of the stage, with the audience up close and personal so that you can never doubt the lack of privacy in the tiny New Orleans apartment where the broken Blanche DuBois comes to stay with her sister, Stella, and Stella's Polish-American husband, Stanley. The battle between Blanche and Stanley over living space is a microcosm of the greater battle that the two wage over Stella and for control of the future – a future that doesn't have room for both of them.”-  At the Octagon, Bolton 2010. Lyn Gardner, The Guardian.

3 Other plays of the period (19..s) with very brief summary of plot

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949): Written by renowned American dramatist, Arthur Miller, the play tells the story of family man, Willy Loman. Loman is an unsuccessful, middle-aged American salesman stuck in a dead end job which he doesn’t like and which he gets no appreciation for, but he sticks with his job in the hopes of attaining the ‘American Dream’.

The play displays the displays the subtle realism which became a hallmark of American drama in the 1940s and 50s. It also balances nuanced characterization with a concern for the social environment, which was why the play received great critical acclaim and success.   

Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946): Tragedy by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. Structured into four acts, the play was written in 1939, and tells the story of a ragged collection of alcoholics in a rundown New York tavern-hotel run by Harry Hope. The saloon regulars numb themselves with whiskey and make grandiose plans, but they do nothing. They await the arrival of big-spending Theodore Hickman ("Hickey"), who forces his cronies to pursue their much-discussed plans, hoping that real failure will make them face reality. Hickey finally confesses that he killed his long-suffering wife just hours before he arrived at Harry's, and he turns himself in to the police. The others slip back into an alcoholic haze, clinging to their dreams once more.

The play displays an uneasy mix of expressionism and realism; it exposes the human need for illusion and hope as antidotes to the natural condition of despair.

August Wilson’s Fences (1986): Fences is mix of drama and comedy that emphasizes the tribulations and confusions people were going through, during the changing early sixties. This two-act play follows the story of Troy Maxson, a former star of the Negro baseball leagues who now works as a garbage man in 1957 Pittsburgh. Excluded as a Negro from the major leagues during his prime, Troy's bitterness takes its toll on his relationships with both his wife and son who now wants his own chance to play.

August Wilson is the most influential and successful African American playwright writing today. He is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences, The Piano Lesson, King Hedley II, Ma Rainy's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, Jitney and Radio Golf. Consequently, his plays have been produced all over the world.

 Betrayal 

            (20^TH CENTURY SOCIO-POLITICAL DRAMA) 

Title of play: Betrayal (1978)  

Date of first stage performance: First staged at the National Theatre in 1978 and later revived in the Almedia Theatre, London, in 1991. 

Date of film adaptation: First adapted into film in 1983 starring Jeremy Irons, for which Pinter wrote the screen play.

Author: Harold Pinter  

Author’s date & place of birth: Born 1930 in London.  

3                   significant details of author’s personal circumstances/times in which play was written:

·                     Pinter started out as an actor and his early experiences in theatre were useful when he turned his hand to writing for the theatre.  As his career progressed he also directed and wrote successful screenplays.

·                     Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, into a Jewish family in the London Borough of Hackney, an only child who apparently conducted conversations with imaginary friends, which may or may not have been evidence of a future career in the theatre.

·                     The play was inspired Pinter's extramarital affair with BBC Television presenter Joan Bakewell, which occurred for seven years, from 1962 to 1969. The truth about the affair was not official, however, until the publication in 1996 of Michael Billington’s authorised biography The Life and Work of Harold Pinter which identified the Bakewell affair as the subject matter of Betrayal.

Structure of play: Acts/scenes, timescale:

The play is separated into nine scenes. It begins in 1977 goes backwards in time. This usually means that the audience knows more than the characters and you get instances where the characters misremember things. So the details become progressively more significant: all the inevitability of the future is felt. The first scene takes place after the affair has ended, in 1977; the final scene ends when the affair begins, in 1968; and, in between 1977 and 1968, scenes in two pivotal years (1977 and 1973) move forward chronologically.

Characterisation:

Main characters in play & very brief summary of

·                     Personality

·                     Role in play

·                     Key quotation (act, scene, line reference) The play has three characters plus one (as there is an unnamed waiter that appears in one of the scenes).    

Emma: is Robert’s wife. She is thirty-eight years old at the beginning of the play, which moves backward in time; Emma is dissatisfied in her marriage and ready to separate from her husband. She confesses to her husband that she’s having an affair, she announces the affair to her husband on holiday, declaring: “We’re lovers” (Sc. Five p. 84) Her husband 

Robert is forty year old publisher who publishes Emma’s lover’s work (Jerry) he reacts to the news of the affair casually replying: “Ah. Yes. I thought it must be something like that, something- along those lines.”  (Sc. Five p. 84) His calm and cool exterior to the news, that his wife is having an affair with his best friend, is unnerving. His best friend in question, 

Jerry is a forty-year-old writer. He is inherently a romantic, and it is this impulse that leads him to betray Robert, his best friend. In having an affair with Emma he is also betraying his own wife, Judith. We learn that it was Jerry who instigated the affair with Emma while a party was in progress at Robert’s house in 1968; he made a drunken pass at her. Jerry is the more romantic of the two men and the more naïve. He does not realize that Robert discovered the affair at least as early as 1973. Jerry only comes to understand the situation four years later, when the play begins.

1.                Dramaturgy & language: choose a two page extract and comment on the choice of language and dramatic effects: Act, Scene & page number:

(Scene five, p. 77-78)

In this scene Robert and Emma are in the hotel room in Venice talking about the book Jerry wants to publish. The sentences are short and sharp between the couple, they hardly say much but the silences, short replies and pauses speak louder than anything else.

Even though they are in a fairly domestic scene, in a hotel room, with Emma ‘on [the] bed reading’ and Robert: ‘at the window looking out’ it is clear that Pinter is trying to indicate that the distance between the couple spatially is also a metaphorical of the distance between the couple in their marriage. This distance and unfamiliarity is only heightened by the silence between the couple in the beginning of the scene.

It is clear from the opening scene that Robert is meant to ‘appear’ bothered about something, as the stage direction indicates that he ‘looking out the window’, however in true Pinter-like style his agitation is implied rather in language or lack of language; as he does not hear the question Emma is asking him.

When talking about the book Jerry has picked out Robert responds that he doesn’t like it because he believe the subject matter to be ‘betrayal’ (77).  This of course is the subject matter of the play itself and we as the audience also know this, since the play (has a backward trajectory) and opens with Jerry and Emma’s affair.

The cause for Robert’s distraction soon becomes clear as he gives his wife the letter from her lover and his best friend, Jerry. Although the casualness in the way Robert talks about the letter and hands it over could indicate indifference, Pinter’s sparse dialogue, allows room for any actor playing Robert-to make it seem that Robert is devastated by the betrayal of his wife and best friend. The beginning of the scene where, Robert is looking out the window can be played as a grief-stricken husband trying to compose himself or delaying the moment where he has to face up to his wife's betrayal.   

 Socio-political Themes: (with Act, Scene, page number)

1.                   Education: It is clear they are educated, the male characters are initiated in the literary world, Jerry is a writer, Robert is a publisher and Emma loves to read:  

Roberts says to Emma about Jerry: He used to write to me at one time. Long letters about Ford Maddox Ford. I used to write to him too…That was the time when we were both editors of poetry magazine. Him at Cambridge, me at Oxford. Did you know that? We were bright young men….” 

         (Sc. Five p. 82-3)

There is a kind of twin-like similarity between Robert and Jerry, with their parallel careers and families.

2.                Class/Race: The characters are presented as sophisticated, Oxbridge graduates, upper middle-class, well-to-do and physically attractive. Thus the characters accept betraying and being betrayed without too much fuss. Robert’s discovery that his wife’s is having an affair is taken in the stereotypical middle-class, ‘stiff-upper-lip’ manner:

Robert reply to Emma’s announcement that her and Jerry are lovers: “Ah. Yes. I thought it might be something like that, something along those lines.” (Sc. Five, p. 84)

The old religious and social restraints that gave rise to a sense of sin or guilt, and demanded punishment and atonement or condoned jealousy, outrage and revenge, have been replaced by a more urbane containment within the accepted norms of society. There is also a sense that passion and desire is firmly under control, and it is perfectly played out, with enough financial resources to help it along. In scene eight, the house Emma and Jerry have rented is presented as a domestic space where they play ‘husband and wife’ Jerry comes ‘home’ and Emma comes out of the kitchen : ‘wearing an apron’. (Sc. 8, p. 121)

3.                 Gender: Robert appears as a misogynist when he bursts out to Emma: “…a game of squash isn’t simply a game of squash, it’s rather more than that. You see first there’s the game. And then there’s the shower. And then there’s the pint. And then there’s lunch…You really don’t want a woman buying you lunch. You don’t actually want a woman within a mile of the place, any of the places, really. You don’t want her in the squash court, you don’t want her in the shower, or the pub, or the restaurant…”   (Sc. 4, p 68)

His outburst discloses a defensive attitude, an attempt to distance women so as to get rid of their sexually threatening presence. The game of squash also seems symbolic- Robert and Jerry have not played squash for a long time, it is implied, because Jerry has engaged instead in the betrayal game, and Robert’s rather fierce speech is meant to win him back as a partner in the male game. The same disjunction between affair-with-wife and squash-with-husband appears in Robert’s disclosure about Casey: “I believe he’s having an affair with my wife. We haven’t played squash for years, Casey and me. We used to have a damn good game.”

In the play, betrayal has lost its theological and moral edge. It has also lost its singular position within the double standard by which men and women are judged. The woman’s betrayal is not regarded as different from that of the two men. Emma exemplifies a woman living in a society in which the liberation of women has become a fait accompli.

In a way Emma appears a merely an extension to the men’s relationship, it seems that Robert is more betrayed by Emma and Jerry’s affair because it obstructs his friendship with Jerry: Robert says to Jerry: “…You don’t seem to understand that I don’t give a shit about any of this. It is true I’ve hit Emma once or twice. But that wasn’t to defend a principle. I wasn’t inspired to do it from any kind of moral standpoint. I just felt like giving her a good bashing. The old itch…you understand. (Sc. 2, p. 41).

4. Power: There is a clear power structure with power shifting dynamics from Jerry and Emma deceiving Robert about their affair and then to Emma and Robert deceiving Jerry, when Emma tells Robert about the affair.

In one scene there is clear indication of power-play; as Robert toys with Jerry by lying about going on the speedboat because he has guessed his wife has already told Jerry about them not working:

“Incredible day. I got up very early and- whoomp- right across the lagoon- to Trocello. Not a soul stirring.

Jerry: What’s the ‘whoomp?’

Robert: Speedboat.

Jerry: Ah. I thought-

Robert: What?”

(Sc. 7, p. 112).

Emma equally betrays Jerry by deceiving him about her husband’s knowledge about the affair. The conversation between her and her Jerry, after she has confessed appears like a game- with Emma holding all the cards and Jerry in the dark about everything. Emma tries to stay one step ahead of the game by gauging what Jerry knows while betraying both men:

“Emma: What do you mean by that?

Jerry : I don’t mean anything by it.

Emma : But what are you trying to say by saying that?

Jerry : Jesus. I’m not trying to say anything. I’ve said precisely what I wanted to say. (53).”

In this exchange Pinter directs our attention to the subtext- and the importance of what does not get said in arguments.

Critical comments/reviews – 3 quotations (author, publication, date, page no.)

The pivot is Robert…Superbly played by Samuel West, Robert initially seems a cold, calculating bastard viewing the fluctuations of adultery with sublime indifference. West gradually makes you see that the sardonic mask covers a broken heart: his discovery of Emma's affair shatters him; at his subsequent lunch with Jerry, where he ostentatiously sports a cravat, he conceals his wounds under tight-lipped smiles. […] Dervla Kirwan as Emma has the capacity to act thought: her great moment comes in a Venice hotel, where her realisation that Robert knows all is registered by nothing more than a faint lowering of her eyelids. […] Toby Stephens invests the adulterous Jerry with a paradoxical innocence. […] The virtue of Michell's production is it leaves no crevice unexplored; and it is much aided by William Dudley's design which, with its swirling white curtains, beautifully counterpoints the formal symmetry of Pinter's exquisitely crafted play.-June 2007 Donmar Warehouse London, Micheal Billington.


“Mr. Leveaux's production, on the other hand, often keeps us at a distance. Rob Howell, the set and costume designer, and David Weiner, the lighting designer, have given the production an opulent minimalism, with sparsely furnished but majestic rooms soaked in changing light. The evening is emotionally color coded, beginning with drab neutrals and moving toward the rich crimson dress in which Ms. Binoche ends the evening. The whole thing is as glacially glamorous as a Barney's window. It does tend to overwhelm the actors, however, who can look rather small and helpless in ways that, however symbolically appropriate, dilute psychological impact. And the concluding moment of each scene is usually drawn out to the point of diffusion. Nonetheless, there are images that stay with you from this production, developing like photographic negatives in the memory. Mr. Slattery's brusque demeanor and barking delivery could use more variety. But every so often there's a change in posture, a tilt of the head or a slight leaning away from the others that sears in its suggestion of repressed pain.” -Roundabout Theater Company Nov 2000,  BEN BRANTLEY, The New York Times.

“…watching Ian Rickson's beautifully lucid and perceptive revival, I became aware how much the play deals with the shifting balance of power in triangular relationships, and with the pain of loss. It is acknowledged that, by using reverse chronology to chart a seven-year-long affair, Pinter probes the corrosive nature of betrayal. Emma and Jerry, the married lovers, have palpably betrayed both their partners. Robert, Emma's husband, has also betrayed Jerry, his closest friend, by not revealing to him his discovery of the affair. And since Jerry and Robert, respectively an agent and publisher, treat literature as a commodity, they can both be said to have betrayed the idealism that in their youth led them to worship poetry, that of Yeats especially, for its aesthetic joy.”-June 2011, Micheal Billington, The Guardian.  

3 Other plays of the period (1970s) with very brief summary of plot

Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party” (1977): Beverly Moss invites her new neighbours, Angela and Tony, who moved into the road just two weeks ago, over for drinks. She has also invited her neighbour Susan, divorced for three years, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Abigail is holding a party back in their house. Beverly's husband Laurence comes home late from work, just before the guests arrive. The gathering starts off in a stiff, insensitive, British-middle-class way as the virtual strangers tentatively gather, until Beverly and Laurence start sniping at each other. As Beverly serves more drinks and the alcohol takes effect, Beverly flirts more and more overtly with Tony, as Laurence sits impotently by. After a tirade about art, Laurence suffers a fatal heart attack. Within this simple framework, all of the obsessions, prejudices, fears and petty competitiveness of the protagonists are ruthlessly exposed.

It is a suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. The play developed in lengthy improvisations during which Mike Leigh explored the characters with the actors, but did not always reveal the incidents that would occur during the play.

Alan Ayckbourn’s “Absurd Person Singular” (1972): Divided into three acts, it documents the changing fortunes of three married couples. Each act takes place at a Christmas celebration at one of the couples' homes on successive Christmas Eves.

The play made its London début at the Criterion Theatre on 4 July 1972, transferring to the Vaudeville Theatre in July 1973, where it ran until 30 September 1974, completing a run of 973 performances.

Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two” (1977): is a semi-autobiographical play by Neil Simon. The plot focuses on George Schneider, a recently widowed writer who is introduced to soap opera actress Jennie Malone by his press agent brother Leo and her best friend Faye. Jennie's unhappy marriage to a football player has dissolved after six years, and she's uncertain if she's ready to start dating yet. Neither is George, whose memories of his first wife threaten to interfere with any effort to embrace a new romance.

Produced by Emanuel Azenberg and directed by Herbert Ross, the play had its world premiere at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on October 7, 1977 with Judd Hirsch as George, Anita Gillette as Jennie, Cliff Gorman as Leo, and Ann Wedgeworth as Faye.

              

“Kehinde” by Buchi Emecheta  

Emecheta Buchi. Kehincde. London: Heinmann, 1994. (African Writer's series)  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BUCHI EMECHETA was born in Lagos in Nigeria. Her father a railway worker, died when she was very young. At the age of ten she won a scholarship to the Methodist Girls’ High School, but by the time she was seventeen she had left school, married and had a child. She accompanied her husband to London where he was a student. Aged 22, she finally left him, and took an honours degree in sociology while supporting her five children and writing early in the mornings. Her first book, In the Ditch, detailed her experience as a poor single parent in London.

SUMMARY

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Kehinde is a short story about a woman named Kehinde and her husband, Albert who have always intended to leave England and return to Nigeria. However when the opportunity arises, Kehinde realises she is reluctant to leave London and the independence she has enjoyed there. On the other hand, her husband, Albert, longing for the prosperity and status that will be his in Nigeria, is determined not to be thwarted in his plans. He thinks that his wife should obey him, like a good Nigerian woman should and so forces her to make terrible choices (****SPOILER one of which is to abort their unborn baby). Kehinde, plagued with guilt, is led onto an unexpected path by the spirit of her dead twin.     

       

CHARACTERS

Kehinde

Is the protagonist, who the novel is named after. She is a successful Bank manager who is the bread winner in the home. She is conscious of the freedom women have in England, compared to Nigeria and so doesn’t want to leave. However she is also aware of her role as a Nigerian wife, a wife who is required to obey her husband, as a result she is torn between her satisfaction of her life as a working woman, who is her husband’s equal and her obligations as a Nigerian woman, which deems her to be subject to him.

Albert

Kehinde’s husband, who is dissatisfied with his role as a store manager in a supermarket. He is also dissatisfied with his wife’s higher occupation, earnings and the Western culture which deems that he treats his wife as his equal, as a result he longs for the status and patriarchal influence of Nigerian culture, which he feels he is entitled to. 

***Spoiler when he goes back to Nigeria he marries a younger woman who gives him another son- something which devastates Kehinde who is not told until she arrives in Nigeria.

Joshua

Kehinde’s son who has adopted western ways but when is taken to Nigeria, to be educated; he assumes the same patriarchal nature of his father. When he returns back to England he demands that his mother turn out all her lodgers and give up her house to him.

Bimpe

Kehinde’s daughter who is also taken back to Nigeria and decides to stay.

Mr Gibson

Mr Gibson is Kehinde’s, young Caribbean lodger who later becomes her lover. 

THEMES

Themes 1:  Generational tensions/ Feminism/ Masculinity/ Patriarchy

Emechta’s Kehinde, Kehinde relishes the freedom she has as a woman living in Britain, a freedom she knows she would not have had in Nigeria. Emecheta makes us very aware of this when she writes, “Kehinde was aware that she could talk to her husband less formally than women like her sister, Ifeyinwa, who were in more traditional marriages. She related to Albert as a friend, a compatriot, a confidant.” (page 6) However, with her son Joshua newly returned from Nigeria with strong patriarchal values, Kehinde’s freedoms as a woman are challenged as Joshua sees the house as his natural right as a man.  However, Kehinde is unwilling to allow her son to dominate her. She asserts: “This is my house.” (137) Despite Buchi Emecheta’s rejection of the Feminist label in her essay "Feminism with a Small f!" The feminist sentiments in the Kehinde are evident throughout the text. The last few pages of the novel emerge as a power- play between mother and son. In fact the last chapter, where Kehinde and her son fight for dominance over the house is aptly named “The Rebel”, as Kehinde is rebelling against the male- dominated Nigerian culture, which is embodied in her son.

Question: How important is the theme of generational tensions in the text? In what ways does Emecheta’s exploration of this theme work to illuminate the changing dynamics of postcolonial experience?

 Theme 2: Culture Clashes/ Identity  

When Kehinde refuses to give Joshua her house, he is stumped: “he had expected her to be the ideal Ibusa village mother but she lived in London, not the village…” (138) It is at this moment that Joshua experiences a ‘cultural clash’; recently returned from a patriarchal Nigeria, he had expected his mother to roll over and bow to his demands like the typical Nigerian woman. However Kehinde, has adopted a hybrid identity, this is symbolized by Emecheta through Kehinde’s story of her twin or ‘Taiwo’ (141). We learn Kehinde’s twin died at birth, however throughout the story, the voice of Kehinde’s taiwo guides her by rebelling against certain things that she objects to. For example when Kehinde learns that her husband has entered into a polygamous marriage in Nigeria and also when she learns that he has had another child.

Since the voice rebels against things that are typical in Nigerian culture but seen as illegal or wrong in Britain, it could be argued that the voice is representation of Kehinde’s ‘western’ side. At the end of the story Kehinde says to her taiwo, “‘Now we are one.’” (141) This line shows us that Kehinde is no longer torn between Nigerian culture or  British culture but finds an in-between identity; which is a mixture of Nigerian and British, which makes her feel comfortable.   

Further Reading

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Gardner, Susan. “Culture Clashes, Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo: Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta” The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Nov. 1994) pp. 22- 23.   

Knepper, Wendy. Postcolonial Literature. London: York Press, 2011. 

Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South-Asian Diasporas. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Oronjo Ogunyemi, Chirwenye. Africa Wo/man Palava: The Nigerian Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1996.

 

Umeh, Marie. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Michigan: African World Press, 1996.

Werlock, Abby H. P. British Women Writing Fiction. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2000.