Irony and the modern theatre

"Irony and theatre share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht, and in notable relation to well-known representative characters in drama from Ibsen's Halvard Solness to Stoppard's Septimus Hodge and Wasserstein's Heidi Holland. To the degree that irony is existential, its presence in the theatre relates directly to the circumstances and the expressiveness of the characters on stage. This study investigates how these key figures enact, embody, represent and personify the ironic in myriad situations in the modern and contemporary theatre"-- "Irony, in its contrariness, has gained a reputation for indeterminacy, for being all but ungraspable except perhaps in the most traditional contexts of wittiness, paradox, the assumption of an opposite, or a perspective of stylish but world-weary commentary. Irony in the more complicated view can now be confounding, a perspective that has become more pervasive, or at least more presumed, in connection with postmodernist or deconstructive assumptions regarding the disassociative properties of language in particular. Irony does, in fact, imply opposition, a consistent if at times hidden presence of the alternate view; and when such alternation is reiterated or compounded, the contrary properties of the trope become correspondingly more manifest, leading potentially to progressive negation or even self-cancellation"--