This study discusses Caryl Churchill's play Owners in terms of confusion of gender roles and capitalistic concerns through a socialist feminist criticism. The play is based on motherhood, social control, possession and material concerns. Marion's wish for an excessive possession and power brings greed and violence through subverting her feminine identity to quest gender roles. Male characters are submissive in contrast to Marion. Buddhist and Taoist philosophy in contrast to Western culture is expressed through the character Alec's passivity by exceeding his masculine roles. The depiction of the character Marion subverts the conventional patriarchal norms, still bringing no improvement for women in collectives. Marion achieves an individualistic material success when she exceeds her boundaries as a female and represses another woman. At this point analysing the play through the socialist feminist lens becomes meaningful in Churchill's depicting the egoistical figures like Marion that brings no improvement in women's social position.
The purpose of this study is to discuss physical humour arising from the characters' quest for identity and to depict how the themes of death/ chance/ fate/ reality/ illusion function in the existentialist world of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Humour plays a significant role in the analysis of this tragicomedy. The theatre of the Absurd expresses the senselessness of the human condition, abandons the use of rational devices, reflects man's tragic sense of loss, and registers the ultimate realities of the human condition, such as the problems of life and death. Thus the audience is confronted with a picture of disintegration. This dissolved reality is discharged through 'liberating' laughter which depicts the absurdity of the universe. Stoppard uses verbal wit, humour and farce to turn the most serious subjects into comedy. Humour is created by Guildenstern's little monologues that touch on the profound but founder on the absurd. The play has varieties of irony, innuendo, confusion, odd events, and straight-up jokes. Stoppard's use of the 'play in play' technique reveals the ultimate fate of the tragicomic characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They confront the mirror image of their future deaths in the metadramatic spectacle performed by the Players. As such, the term "Stoppardian" springs out of his use of style: wit and comedy while addressing philosophical concepts and ideas.
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