The following topics are suggestions only. You are encouraged to develop your own topic but please consult your tutor before proceeding. The essay should compare two or three plays.
- Fatalism in A Doll House and The Cherry Orchard
- Characteristics and function of melodrama in two or three modern plays
- Conflict between self-assertion and self-doubt in Major Barbara, A Doll House, The Cherry Orchard
- The tension between idealism and cynicism in Mother Courage and The Cherry Orchard
- The constructive/destructive dynamics of male-female relationships in Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Hairy Ape, The Homecoming
- Unheroic heroes of modern drama
- The importance and significance of money in Major Barbara, A Doll House, The Cherry Orchard, The Hairy Ape, Mother Courage
- The possibility of change—personal and political
- Life as purgatory in Six Characters, Mother Courage, Endgame
- Dysfunctional family portraits in plays by Pirandello, Brecht, Pinter, Beckett
- Class struggle in plays by Shaw, O’Neill, Brecht, Pinter
- Consequences of dispossession in postcolonial drama
- Positive colonial influences in postcolonial drama
- Imperial notions of “civilization”
- Ways of resisting colonial authority
- Portraits of families in relation to the community
- Nurturing and healing powers of the land
- Self-awareness or self-deception: the function of memory
- The use and implications of ironic reversals
