Thesis Abstract The aim of this thesis is to compare the production history and reception of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, arguably one of his most famous and successful plays, in Irish and Czech contexts. Following its triumphant premiere at the Abbey Theatre in 1990 directed by Patrick Mason, the production transferred to London and Broadway, where it garnered further critical acclaim and several prestigious awards. The first Czech production, directed by Jan Burian, opened at Divadlo na Vinohradech in Prague in 1993, and over the course of the next twenty years it was staged another eight times on Czech professional - mostly regional stages. The opening chapter of the thesis focuses on the analysis of Dancing at Lughnasa using the method of close reading, as well as consulting secondary literature. The following chapter is divided into two parts, the first of them attempting to outline the background of the play by focusing on the events of the 1930s in Ireland. The second part is concerned with the context of writing Dancing at Lughnasa. Chapters four and five comprise the main body of the thesis and deal with the description of the five most significant productions in Ireland and the Czech Republic. These chapters focus on the context, the directors' concept, the acting and the critical acclaim....

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2008-02-18Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:59:50Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 sampaio_a_me_sjrp.pdf: 947406 bytes, checksum: 439f9305de41533c9a4b49fefb3caad1 (MD5) / Esta dissertação analisa a peça Translations (1980), de Brian Friel, a partir de uma leitura póscolonial da situação irlandesa do final da década de 1970. Como primeira produção da Companhia de Teatro Field Day, Translations fez parte do projeto de restabelecer a consciência política das artes em relação às tradições da nação, do sujeito irlandês e sua língua. Nossa proposta é a de que a peça de Friel se constrói como uma atualização histórica, a qual se desdobra em dois planos textuais, um denotativo e um figurativo, em que a relação colonial entre Irlanda e Inglaterra se apresenta como metáfora dos problemas contemporâneos que envolvem a República e o Norte. Assim, na busca por um conceito de identidade nacional e cultural irlandesa, pensamos a peça de Friel sob o enfoque da revisão histórica do nacionalismo, representada na releitura ficcional da colonização no período do século XIX. Para tanto, trabalhamos o desenvolvimento discursivo do nacionalismo irlandês para, então, focarmos na questão do discurso e suas formações e no pós-colonialismo como resposta às práticas hegemônicas. Por meio da seleção de trechos da peça – diálogos e rubricas –, analisamos a posição discursiva de cada personagem no embate cultural entre colonizado e colonizador, segundo as estratégias pós-coloniais de que se serve o escritor na representação do sujeito. Vemos que, em Translations, a busca por uma identidade livre de qualquer essencialismo revela uma consciência e intenção política do autor; além disso, subjacente a esse processo, está um exame “auto-crítico” da imagem do escritor pós-colonial e de seu posicionamento estratégico dentro da representação literária. / This dissertation is an analysis of Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), based on a postcolonial reading of the Irish situation at the end of the 1970s. As the first production of the Field Day Theatre Company, Translations was part of a project which was aimed at reestablishing a political conscience in the artistic world regarding the nation’s tradition, as well as the Irish subject and his/her language. We propose that Friel’s play takes the form of a historical updating which operates both denotatively and figuratively, in which aspects of the colonial history of Ireland and England are used as a metaphor for contemporary problems involving the Republic and the North. Thus, in seeking a concept for Irish national and cultural identity, we consider Friel’s play as a form of nationalist historical revision, represented as a fictional re-reading of nineteenth-century colonisation. We study the discursive development of Irish nationalism in order to focus on the issue of discourse and its formation, as well as on post-colonialism as a response to hegemonic practices. Based upon a selection of extracts from the play – both dialogue and stage directions –, we analyse the discursive position of the principal characters with regard to the cultural confrontation between colonised and coloniser, according to the postcolonial strategies available to the writer in his representation of the subject. In Translations, we see that the search for an identity free of essentialism reveals the author’s conscience and political intention; in addition, we demonstrate that Friel is conducting a self-critical examination of the image and strategic position of the postcolonial writer.