| Summary: | 博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 99 === Given that different perspectives and interpretations of space can form and represent a character’s daily life, this dissertation explores the relationships between various characters’ social behaviors and production of space in four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays. I will further try to explain the representation of the real life in these plays as well as the characters’ endeavors to overturn spatial limits and obstacles. More specifically, this study proposes a new reading of the production of space in Ayckbourn’s plays instead of discussing the plays in terms of how they continue the tradition of drama through comedic and farcical theatrical techniques, as is often done in previous studies. I point out that the space of the four plays is a critique of capitalism. In my argument, this space is subversive to help the characters away from fossilized thinking; with subversive power, another possibility or innovative option is thus offered.
Chapter One examines the spatial meaning of everyday life and people’s relationships within the power structure in House & Garden. The play describes a family life in a day. In the play, the two places, where people start their initial social relations, the house and the garden, have distinct significations. By employing Henri Lefebvre’s concept of triadic space, this chapter delves into relationships of production in the family and marital life that reflect the characters’ behaviors and their social relationships in the power structure produced from the family.
Chapter Two explores Communicating Doors wherein, through the transition of time, each character is impelled to make decisions whether they should take the time travel, thus changing the consequences of predestined events. The characters, both from the present and the past, encounter one another through a door. They have to save themselves by resolving a potentially fatal situation through time travel, with the communicating door used as an apparatus to make the impossible possible. The time travel itself reveals different outcomes by reversing the arrow of time. To the characters from different time periods, time reversal is also a creative action that can provide solutions to problems and crises. In my discussion, I attempt to apply Lefebvre’s contention that the art of living is a crucial element of terminating alienation toward a total man that can help terminating alienation and restoring the wholeness of man.
Chapter Three portrays the imagination and representation of the cityscape in Private Fears in Public Places. I propose that the characters are the walkers/ flâneurs in the city whose life experiences and spatial practices construct the phantasmagoria of the metropolis, where relationships of production and people’s conceptions of the society converge. In the eyes of the walkers/ flâneurs, not only the city life but also the scarcity of passions and belonging, and fear of revelation of one’s internal feelings are each exposed. The playwright collages undulating flowing filmic scenes to form the characters’ social relationships and the look of the city. The city then becomes the site where people are interconnected; it also represents the intersection of memories and experiences.
Chapter Four examines Comic Potential. In the play, a robot tries to integrate into the world of human beings after a series of spatial transformations. Humanity is underscored in this play, regardless of various spatial power struggles and transformations in modes of production. The story is a celebration of humanity involving the subversive power of crisis resolution. Jacie’s transformation into a human being seems to be derived from her longing for the goodness of humanity.
In sum, I propose that socio-demographic transformation of the characters’ interaction with space in the four plays reveals how we, as humans, cope with our surroundings from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, and even future space. The relatedness between human beings and space should count on preserving the goodness of humanity so that human beings can study the meaning of their existence. Humanity is the key connection in the spatio-temporal transformation in the progressing world.
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