ESSAY CEMETERY

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing and Patrick Marber's Closer , written fifteen years later, have much in common. The plays are structured in two acts and twelve scenes. Both feature two principal couples who exchange partners, one of whom is a writer; the characters frequently lie, cheat and make false assumptions about one another; meta-literary and self-reflexive techniques are often used to endow both works with additional depth. The Real Thing and Closer are also both set in London. Although the plays share the same urban setting, the backdrop of the city is utilized in different ways, and with a very different effect.             Closer is set almost entirely in public spaces. Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna move between a hospital, an aquarium, a gallery and a museum, a restaurant and a public park. In all of these, of course, privacy is out of the question. When the characters are situated in locations inaccessible to other people, however, these are rarely cozy

Featuring exclusively female characters, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is indeed filled with remarkable women. The 1988 play contains women from across the globe who have distinguished themselves over the span of a thousand years, from Joan, the ninth-century pope, to Marlene, a twentieth-century career woman. The women, despite their vastly diverse backgrounds, have all had to sacrifice their femininity, freedom, and their families in order to pursue their individual goals in a male-dominated, male-oriented world. Churchill cleverly uses historical figures to create powerful criticism of contemporary feminism, particularly of that present in 1980s England, and explores what it really means to be a "top girl". With disorienting theatrical and linguistic technique, she ensures the audience's active participation and encourages critical socio-political thinking and self-reflexivity.             From its very beginning, the play disorients and confuses, subverting thea

Themes ·        Art ·        Popularity ·        Money ·        Metaliterary criticism ·        Suspicion ·        Tension Style and devices ·        Answering a question with a question ·        Repression/ reluctance to deal ·        The scenes are ordered backwards in time, except for scenes 5, 6, 7 which are in chronological order. ·        Dialogue that occurs on two levels because the knowledge of both sides doesn’t agree. Response ·        Tension regarding intellectual things – Emma has an inferiority complex? ROBERT: Oh… not much more to say on that subject, really, is there? EMMA: What do you consider the subject to be? ROBERT: Betrayal . EMMA: No, it isn’t. ROBERT: Isn’t it? What is it then? EMMA: I haven’t finished it yet. I’ll let you know. ROBERT: Well, do let me know. ·        Perhaps alcohol is symbolic of guilt, an emotion which is never expressed but implicit (or at least, ought to exist in the context of the

Scene I The play begins in a pub in the spring of 1977. Emma and Jerry are drinking together. Emma is friendly and tries to get Jerry to be friendly. Jerry opens up when he's had a couple of drinks. They are both married with kids; they had a marital affair for seven years. Jerry is a literary agent and Emma's husband Robert is a publisher. Emma shares that she might separate from her husband, because he has been cheating on her. Robert and Jerry are friends. They recall when they used to be in love. Jerry had bought a house to which they would sneak off. Jerry brings up Casey, a man with whom Emma is rumored to have been having an affair. Emma says she told Robert about the affair during a long conversation of the night before. Jerry feels bad because of his friendship with Robert. Scene II Robert and Jerry are in Jerry's house. It is still the spring of 1977. Jerry has invited Robert. He has a hard time saying anything and Robert brings up the issue