Tom Murphy’s Alice Trilogy: Through the Looking-Glass of the London Critics

作者

  • Peter James Harris UNESP

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https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v9i0.3696

关键词:

Tom Murphy, Alice Trilogy, Portuguese translation.

摘要

Tom Murphy is generally considered to be one of Ireland’s two most important living playwrights. Although Alice Trilogy, which premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in November 2005, was his first new play in five years, it was awarded no more than a tepid reception by the London critics. The article begins by tracing intertextual links between Murphy’s trilogy and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (1872), arguing that an awareness of these links is particularly helpful in understanding the psychology of the angst-ridden central character of the play. A survey of nineteen reviews of the play published in the London press reveals that, for the majority
of the critics, the intertextuality between the two works was,  urprisingly, not considered to be noteworthy. The article also makes passing reference to the first Brazilian production of Murphy’s play, a studio performance of an unpublished Portuguese translation, staged in São Paulo in December 2006. 

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    HARRIS, PETER JAMES lectures in English Literature and English Culture at São Paulo State University (UNESP), in São José do Rio Preto, Brazil. Born in London he has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in Irish Studies from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is the author of Sean O’Casey’s Letters and Autobiographies: Reflections of a Radical Ambivalence (Trier: WVT, 2004). He has also published articles on twentieth-century Irish playwrights and on Roger Casement’s 1910 Amazon expedition. In 2006 he completed a post-doctorate in the Drama and Theatre Department of Royal Holloway University of London, where he was a Visiting Research Fellow studying the presence of Irish dramatists on the London stage in the period from Independence to the present day.

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已出版

2007-06-17

期次

栏目

Drama