Despite the tremendous strides made in recent years by Australian theatre and despite the dozen or more dedicated and professional playwrights which this has helped support there is nevertheless a greater sense of expectation than achievement in most public response to the plays and playwrights which have emerged. Distinctive, even distinguished, plays and writers can be found but there still s...

ENGL 302 Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Instr. R. Elliott. 10:00 MWF. After an opening glance at the Anglo-Irish comic tradition, this course will focus on plays written during and since the Irish Renaissance that flowered about 1900. We will discuss works by the major Abbey Theatre playwrights – W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Sean O’Casey – and link their writing...

In 2005, a new production of Jane Harrison's Stolen will be presented at the Sydney Theatre Company, seven years after its premiere in a co-production by Ilbijerri and Playbox Theatre companies in 1998 at the Melbourne International Festival for the Arts. The first draft of the play was presented by Ilbijerri at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 1993, and already, it signalled a new mode of stor...

The Theater of the Absurd is a new form of drama after The Second World War. Playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd reveal the conditions of human beings’ existence in modern society. This paper analyzes the artistic features and themes of the Theater of the Absurd.

No doubt Aristotle considered Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris among his favorite plays. He was impressed by its complex recognition scene to such a degree that he offered it several times in the Poetics as an example of how playwrights should compose such scenes. Nonetheless, he must have also admired Polyidus' variant of the recognition between Iphigenia and Orestes, since he mentions it as a v...