Bir kurgu olarak tarih: Caryl Churchill'in Mad Forest, David Edgar'ın Pentecost ve David Hare'in Stuff Happens adlı oyunları

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how the content and techniques the contemporary British playwrights Caryl Churchill, David Edgar, and David Hare employed in their plays – Mad Forest (1990), Pentecost (1995), and Stuff Happens (2004) respectively – represent a postmodern understanding of history. For this purpose, the postmodern theories developed by Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Jean François Lyotard are chosen here to elucidate the concept and understanding of history in these plays. Reworking traditional drama techniques like those of the epic theatre, documentary and verbatim theatre as well as faction, these playwrights generate a view of history from a postmodern perspective. Foregrounding the unreliability of history as an allegedly objective narrative, each play they pen draws attention to the constructed nature of historical representations. In this respect, the dramatisation of historical reality in the plays within the scope of this study puts emphasis on the idea that history, contrary to what is argued by the traditional concept of history, is incomplete, subjective, and incoherent rather than progressive, objective, and coherent. While they all touch upon recent history prior to their composition, Mad Forest, using epic and post-epic theatre techniques, focuses on a pseudo-revolution taking place in Romania in 1989 which is imbued with discontinuities; Pentecost speculates on the line between fact and fiction in finding the history behind a painting that can change the assumed origins of European history; and Stuff Happens, by means of documentary drama and verbatim theatre techniques, deconstructs the metanarratives of history utilised by the US government after 9/11 to legitimise the Iraq War. Presenting multiple perspectives on the same historical occurrences, they potentially generate scepticism about the traditional history the reader/audience usually confronts in formal documents and the mainstream media. After analysis of the three plays this study comes to the conclusion that the representations of history in these works are in line with postmodern historiography and that they prompt new ways of dramatisation in contemporary British political drama. Keywords Postmodern Historiography, British Plays on History, Caryl Churchill, Mad Forest, David Edgar, Pentecost, David Hare, Stuff Happens