|
''Another Country'' is a play written by the English playwright Julian Mitchell. It premiered on 5 November 1981 at the Greenwich Theatre, London, and transferred to the West End in March 1982. The play has developed a strong connection with Oxford Playhouse, which revived the play in 2000 in a new production directed by Stephen Henry (transferred to the Arts Theatre, Westminster, from September 2000 until January 2001). It was revived again at Oxford Playhouse in February 2013 by OUDS-supported Oxford University student company Screw the Looking Glass. In September 2013 a successful collaboration between Theatre Royal Bath and Chichester Festival Theatre was directed by Jeremy Herrin, transferring to Trafalgar Studios in 2014. The play won the Society of West End Theatre Awards Play of the Year title for 1982. ==Plot synopsis== ''Another Country'' is loosely based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess, renamed "Guy Bennett" in the play, and examines the effect his homosexuality and exposure to Marxism has on his life, and the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school he attends. The setting is a 1930s public school - modelled on Eton and Winchester (the latter being where Mitchell himself went to school) - where pupils Guy Bennett and Tommy Judd become friends because they are both outsiders in their own ways. Bennett is openly homosexual, while Judd is a Marxist. The play opens with the discovery that a pupil named Martineau has hanged himself after being caught by a teacher having sex with another boy. ACT 1 follows the reaction of some of the students to his death as the senior boys try to keep the scandal away from both the parents and the outside world. Barclay, the Head of Gascoigne's House, moves towards nervous breakdown, blaming himself for the boy's despair. Bennett, the only openly gay member of the school, pretends nonchalance but is deeply troubled by the suicide. His best friend Judd, the school's only Marxist, believes the death is a symptom of the school's oppressive regime. When the parents of the aristocratic Devenish threaten to remove him from the school in light of the scandal, Fowler (a prefect) attempts to crack down on the perceived perversion in his House, and to persecute Bennett in particular. The other students initially defend Bennett's provocative and incendiary behaviour (partly due to Bennett's ability to blackmail them with knowledge of their own homosexual trysts). Meanwhile, although Judd is reluctant to become a member of Twenty-Two himself (since he feels that this would endorse the school's system of oppression), he agrees – after much pressure from his peers Menzies and Bennett – in the hope of preventing the hated Fowler from becoming Head of House in the wake of the Martineau scandal. However, Judd's moral sacrifice is for nothing. In ACT 2 Fowler intercepts a letter from Bennett to his lover Harcourt, and Bennett's supporters fade away. Bennett is beaten, Judd is humiliated, and it is Devenish who is ultimately invited to join the school's exclusive ‘Twenty-Two’ society (which references Eton's 'Pop') in the place of Bennett, shattering Bennett's childhood dream. In the play's closing scene, Bennett and Judd recognise that the school's illusory hold upon them has been broken and that the British class system relies strongly on outward appearances. They begin to contemplate life anew, inspired by the example of Devenish's rebellious uncle, Vaughan Cunningham (who, in a subplot, visits the school). Bennett picks up Judd's copy of Das Kapital, and muses, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all this was true?’ 〔Mitchell 1982, passim.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Another Country (play)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|