Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls Dramatic methods

Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls

Dramatic methods Dramatic Language Dramatic Staging Dramatic Structure (see previous lect. )

(a) Dramatic Language The language of drama is a language that is performable (i. e. acted out before an audience) Gestures, actions, use of props, social grouping and emotional states are implicitly present in dramatic language. Different from non-dramatic poetry or prose

Dramatic Language - Language use Tone & attitude of women towards one another in establishing relations of power & solidarity Overlapping dialogue Different speech codes / registers to characterize class differences Male/female styles of speech Pronouns (‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’) Naming – labels, terms of address Expletives Silences

Subtext - draws on the cultural knowledge and assumptions shared by the audience for the purpose of demystifying them Allusions (esp. in Act 1) Irony Humour – comic balances the tragic

(b) Dramatic Staging All female cast Staged settings Staged actions (e. g. movement, laughing & crying) Costuming Use of visual ‘absences’ (e. g. no physical presence of men, Marlene never seen in her own home)

Brechtian technique of alienation - a defamiliarizing process in which the audience is constantly made aware that they are watching a play the constructed-ness of role-playing - E. g. casting adults to play the roles of Angie & Kit; surreal act of conjuring dead women from the past Doubling

Symbolic significance of visual props & gestures: Dressing (e. g. Angie’s dress in Act 2 & 3) Drinking (e. g. wine, whiskey) Tables (e. g. restaurant table set for dinner in Act 1, three desks in Act 2 Sc 3, kitchen table without dinner in Act 3)

Distinctiveness of Churchill? As feminist playwright Concerned with woman’s struggle for autonomy in an unjust society Consciousness-raising of sexual stereotypes & gender discrimination against women But TG is a feminist play that is self-critical of the women’s movement Critiques one style of feminism (bourgeois feminism) & contrasts it with another (socialist feminism)

Experiments with dramatic form & structure Breaks away from the structure & conventions of realism Juxtaposition of the real & surreal (esp. in conjuring women role models from history & literature in Act 1); fragmented time & backward progression All female cast with the reversal of sex roles to expose and satirise gender stereotyping Overlapping dialogue – the ‘naturalness’ of speech that is constructed Doubling

Dramatic effects Imagine the scene – how would the audience respond & by what dramatic methods? Feelings evoked? - climatic or anti-climatic, distant or involved, empathetic or dispassionate How does the scene develop our attitudes towards a particular character / situation / thematic issue in relation to the play as a whole?