Saint Oscar

Saint Oscar

Synopsis

Terry Eagleton's plays in this first collection of his work for the theatre - St Oscar , The White , the Gold and the Gangrene , Disappearances , and God's Locusts - transgress what he terms 'the jealously patrolled frontiers between 'art' and 'idea . In spirit they owe at least as much to Oscar Wilde, the Irish Oxfordian socialist and proto-deconstructionist, as, for example in their use of prose and ballad forms, they do to Bertolt Brecht. Eagleton sees in Wilde's work 'a kind of secret compact' between artistic and theoretical experiment. A similar compact emerges in these startling dramas of (post)colonial Ireland and, in Disappearances , the neo-colonial 'third' world, mixing commitment, passion and satirical wit, savage and playful, in a manner characteristic of Eagleton's later critical writing. Saint Oscar , about Oscar Wilde, and The White, the Gold and the Gangrene , based on the life and tragic death of James Connolly, originally toured Ireland respectively in productions by Field Day of Derry and Dubbeljoint of Belfast. God's Locusts , written to commemorate the Great Famine and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, castigates British officialdom for its callous inhumanity in mismanaging the relief operation.

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