“It Can’t Happen Here”: Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play

This article proposes revisiting Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play (1974). I contend that the play offers pertinent insights into how authoritarian governments come into being through the implicit cooperation of people who, wittingly or unwittingly, enter into a “conspiracy of obedience.” Although inspired by political issues that were current in Britain in the 1970 s and 1980 s, the play’s illustration of the fragility of democracy resonates with today’s political atmosphere, especially that experienced in the United States. By anchoring my argument to the theories of Bertolt Brecht, I aim to clarify Brenton’s intent and encourage a more parabolic reading of the play – perceiving totalitarianism not as the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, but as the consequence of people’s complacent and self-serving tendencies to comply with the status quo.

Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays

Borrowing from both a painting and the retrospective exhibition of David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, this paper targets two recent American plays: Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013) and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018). In both, the playwrights point to the neglect of history, or rather cultural memory, as I will insist on calling it, as one of the ills affecting a “historicidal” society such as that of the United States. An immersion into the present and concurrent obliteration of one’s cultural inheritance results in a populace easily manipulated in the interests of corporate control, and more importantly for the plays under consideration, into unhappiness and disconnection, an erlebnis, in sum, which proves lethal for individuals and the larger groups of which they form part. Both plays further seem to argue that the most troublesome of such a thing is how little consciousness of the problem there is, a surefire indication that induced amnesia is making alarming headway among the younger generations.

“My Skin Is Not Me”: The Transformations of William Shakespeare’s Othello in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet

Both Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990) and Harlem Duet (1997) are Canadian feminist appropriations of William Shakespeare. Both deal, at least partly, with Othello, and both can be considered subversive re-visions of Shakespeare’s play which aim to articulate oppositional intervention in the canon. These similarities notwithstanding, the plays have not often been studied concurrently. Also, while several critics have explored them, mostly separately, in terms of their adaptation/appropriation of Shakespeare, seeking to spell out the transformations they have brought to the “original” text, little has been said about how the iconic figure of Shakespeare still holds sway in these new dramas, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. Likewise, their dramatization of the character of Othello remains rather understudied. This essay explores the “new” Othellos of the two plays, contending that their positioning in the two texts evinces some similarities while their characterization differs widely, given the plays’ generic difference, but mostly the two playwrights’ rather divergent feminist perspectives which, in turn, substantially shape the plays’ respective appropriation techniques.