Este estudo tem como objetivo central propor uma leitura diferente para a peça The Homecoming, escrita por Harold Pinter. Desde sua estreia nos palcos ingleses, em 1965, a fortuna crítica da obra tende a partir de dois diferentes vieses para analisá-la: por um lado, parte da crítica enxerga a peça através das características do Teatro do Absurdo termo estabelecido por Martin Esslin para um grupo de peças do período pós-guerra europeu em seu livro The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) ; por outro, um grupo de críticos tenta definir a peça através dos conceitos da psicanálise freudiana enfocando o Complexo de Édipo. Nossa proposta de leitura para a peça contrapõe o texto teatral a seu momento sócio-histórico e cultural, tentando relacioná-los e indicar de que modo estes se influenciam mutuamente. Uma breve contextualização geral das obras de Harold Pinter e das características que a tornaram tão célebre, assim como um breve panorama do teatro inglês nas décadas de 1950 e 1960 iniciam nosso estudo para que a importância de Harold Pinter seja compreendida. A partir daí, o texto de The Homecoming será analisado tendo como ponto de partida a teorização de Peter Szondi (2001) acerca do drama burguês, do Teatro do Absurdo e do contraste com o momento sócio-histórico da Inglaterra na década de 1960. Por fim, um levantamento acerca da primeira montagem de The Homecoming no Brasil, traduzida como A Volta ao Lar em 1968, e de seu processo de censura durante a Ditadura Militar será fornecido, retomando a importância da obra para o teatro brasileiro e sua história. / This study proposes a different interpretation of Harold Pinters play, The Homecoming. It premiered in 1965 and most of the critical works on it usually tend to examine the play through two different biases: on one hand, some critics use the theory established by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) where he evaluates a group of post-war European plays to analyze the play; on the other, different critics apply concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis especially the ones related to the called Oedipus complex to comprehend the play. Our proposed interpretation analyzes the dramatic text considering its socio-historical and cultural moment, relating such fields and identifying how they influence one another. A brief overview on Harold Pinters works and their celebrated characteristics, as well as a panorama on British drama in the 1950s and 1960s decades will open our study, so that Harold Pinters significance can be understood. Later, The Homecoming will be analyzed through the ideas of Peter Szondi (2001) on bourgeois drama, the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd and the relations between the text and the British socio-historical moment during the 1960s. Finally, a survey on the first Brazilian production of The Homecoming, translated as A Volta ao Lar in 1968, and on its censorship by Brazilian military dictatorship will be presented in order to stress the importance of the play to Brazilian theater\'s history.

Este estudo tem como objetivo central propor uma leitura diferente para a peça The Homecoming, escrita por Harold Pinter. Desde sua estreia nos palcos ingleses, em 1965, a fortuna crítica da obra tende a partir de dois diferentes vieses para analisá-la: por um lado, parte da crítica enxerga a peça através das características do Teatro do Absurdo termo estabelecido por Martin Esslin para um grupo de peças do período pós-guerra europeu em seu livro The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) ; por outro, um grupo de críticos tenta definir a peça através dos conceitos da psicanálise freudiana enfocando o Complexo de Édipo. Nossa proposta de leitura para a peça contrapõe o texto teatral a seu momento sócio-histórico e cultural, tentando relacioná-los e indicar de que modo estes se influenciam mutuamente. Uma breve contextualização geral das obras de Harold Pinter e das características que a tornaram tão célebre, assim como um breve panorama do teatro inglês nas décadas de 1950 e 1960 iniciam nosso estudo para que a importância de Harold Pinter seja compreendida. A partir daí, o texto de The Homecoming será analisado tendo como ponto de partida a teorização de Peter Szondi (2001) acerca do drama burguês, do Teatro do Absurdo e do contraste com o momento sócio-histórico da Inglaterra na década de 1960. Por fim, um levantamento acerca da primeira montagem de The Homecoming no Brasil, traduzida como A Volta ao Lar em 1968, e de seu processo de censura durante a Ditadura Militar será fornecido, retomando a importância da obra para o teatro brasileiro e sua história. / This study proposes a different interpretation of Harold Pinters play, The Homecoming. It premiered in 1965 and most of the critical works on it usually tend to examine the play through two different biases: on one hand, some critics use the theory established by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) where he evaluates a group of post-war European plays to analyze the play; on the other, different critics apply concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis especially the ones related to the called Oedipus complex to comprehend the play. Our proposed interpretation analyzes the dramatic text considering its socio-historical and cultural moment, relating such fields and identifying how they influence one another. A brief overview on Harold Pinters works and their celebrated characteristics, as well as a panorama on British drama in the 1950s and 1960s decades will open our study, so that Harold Pinters significance can be understood. Later, The Homecoming will be analyzed through the ideas of Peter Szondi (2001) on bourgeois drama, the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd and the relations between the text and the British socio-historical moment during the 1960s. Finally, a survey on the first Brazilian production of The Homecoming, translated as A Volta ao Lar in 1968, and on its censorship by Brazilian military dictatorship will be presented in order to stress the importance of the play to Brazilian theater\'s history.

To fully realize plays in another culture, it is important for the actors and audience to understand the meaning of the words that are being spoken in the context of the culture of the play. This thesis examines the various dramaturgical problems that arise in producing British plays with dialect in the United States, and uses sociolinguistic analysis to explore the various solutions that have been applied to bridge the gap between script and audience. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004) and Irvine Walsh’s Trainspotting, (adapted for the stage by Harry Gibson in 1995), are both deeply connected to the dialect in which they are written. The first part of this thesis examines the complications that come with performing these plays in America, but ultimately argues that dialect in these cases becomes our key into the world of the play and perhaps even the essence of their appeal to an American audience. In the case of both How the Other Half Loves by Alan Ayckbourne (1970) and Losing Louie by Simon Mendes da Costa (2005) a separate script was created for the American audience which translated the original British English into American English. The second part of this thesis then explores the dramaturgical decisions that had to be made in translating these plays and how these decisions affected the finished product.

A Mad World, my Masters est une pièce de jeunesse de Thomas Middleton qui fut représentée en 1605 au théâtre des Enfants de Saint-Paul. Cette pièce, qui n’avait jamais été traduite en français, a été représentée en 1998, pour la première fois depuis le XVIIème siècle, dans le théâtre reconstitué de Shakespeare, le Globe de Londres. La scène du Globe s’est révélée être un outil extraordinaire pour redonner vie à cette comédie exubérante et pour en faire comprendre les ressorts dramatiques. Quant à la traduction, elle a permis d’analyser en détail les complexités du langage d’un auteur trop longtemps méconnu. / A Mad World, my Masters is one of Thomas Middleton’s early plays. It was first performed in 1605 by the Children of Saint Paul’s in London. This comedy had never been translated into French. It was revived in its original version in 1998, for the first time since the printing of the Second Quarto (1640) at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. The bare stage and open playing space of this replica made it possible to draw the best out of this exuberante comedy and to make its dramatic efficiency clear to modern audiences. Translating the play also made it possible to analyse in detail the complexities of the language of an author who had been little studied until his Complete Works were published in 2007 by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.

Thesis Abstract The present thesis offers to read six plays by three contemporary British playwrights - Sarah Kane's Crave (1997) and 4.48 Psychosis (1999), Caryl Churchill's The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), and Tim Crouch's ENGLAND (2007) and The Author (2009) through the lens of Julia Kristeva's essay on abjection, Powers of Horror (1982). Kristeva theorizes abjection as that which retains some resemblance to the subject or object, but is neither - or no longer belongs to the subject. Being confronted with the abject is unpleasant because it is threatening for the subject. It contains all that is habitually removed from life and does not belong in the symbolic order - corpses and excrements. Likewise, the maternal body needs to become abject for the infant to realize its own borders and bodily integrity. Kristeva proposes that the abject finds its way back into the symbolic order through literature, and reads a number of writers as being concerned with the abject. In the theatre, as well as in the visual arts, abjection has been a useful theoretical starting point, despite the fact that it is seen by a number of critics as something which cannot truly be grasped, and as resisting description and verbal imposition. Each playwright and each play includes a different aspect of the abject. Central to...

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.