The Beasts and the Bees (Carol Ann Duffy)

Broken Ground ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 57-60
Keyword(s):  
Carol Ann Duffy

scholarly journals The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Attention

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

scholarly journals “Divided by a Common Language”: The Use of Verbatim in Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’ My Country; A Work in Progress

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Shauna O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
News Media ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Eu Referendum ◽  
The Eu

‘My Country; A Work in Progress’ written and arranged by the poet Carol Ann Duffy is a verbatim play that uses interviews conducted with people from various regions in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland to explore the causes of the EU referendum result. With the recent rise of populism across Europe, Britain, and America, an increased scepticism of established news media organisations, and a widespread disillusionment with the so-called political elite class, verbatim theatre’s “claim to veracity” and use of real-life testimonies seems to provide an attractive forum for both playwrights and audiences to investigate the underlying causes prompting these political and social movements. This paper examines how Duffy’s highly-fragmented arrangement of My Country’s verbatim voices in tandem with their re-citation and reterritorialization in the bodies of the performers on the stage ironically undermines the “claim to veracity” that its verbatim approach implies.

Monologue and Dialogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Isobel Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
Louise Gluck ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Dramatic Monologues

With the telling and retelling of stories by the narrator and characters, Homer’s Odyssey seems to invite the reworking of episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets favour the dramatic monologue for entering into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often representing female characters who are peripheral and largely silent in classical texts in order to articulate some element of the story that was previously untold. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and Judith Kazantzis use monologue and dialogue to create reworkings of the Odyssey that relocate Odysseus to the margins of the story and question the importance of his heroic adventures.

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