Component 2: Drama - Section B: Drama (closed-book) — Eduqas A-Level English Literature

A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois arrives in the French Quarter of New Orleans to stay with her younger sister Stella, who lives in two cramped rooms at Elysian Fields with her husband Stanley Kowalski. Blanche says she is on leave from her teaching post in Laurel, Mississippi, and admits that Belle Reve, the family plantation, has been lost. Stanley, suspecting he has been cheated of his wife's share, ransacks Blanche's trunk and cites the Napoleonic code. On poker night the drunken Stanley strikes the pregnant Stella; she flees upstairs to the neighbour Eunice and comes back down to him when he bellows for her from the street. Blanche is courted by Stanley's friend Mitch and tells him about her young husband Allan Grey, whom she found with an older man and who shot himself after she told him he disgusted her. Stanley gathers reports from Laurel of Blanche's affairs at the Flamingo hotel and of the seventeen-year-old pupil who cost her her job, and passes them to Mitch. On Blanche's birthday Mitch does not come, and Stanley gives her a bus ticket back to Laurel. Mitch arrives later, drunk, tears the paper lantern off the light bulb to look at her properly, and tells her she is not clean enough to bring into the house with his mother. Stella goes into labour. Alone with Blanche in the flat, Stanley strips away her last defence, breaks the bottle she snatches up and carries her to the bed as the scene ends. Weeks later a doctor and a matron come to take Blanche to the state institution while the men play poker in the next room. Stella, who has chosen not to believe her sister's account of the rape, sobs in Stanley's arms as Blanche goes out on the doctor's arm, and the game resumes. The Duchess of Malfi. Webster's tragedy opens at the court of Malfi, where Antonio, returned from France, sets out an ideal of princely rule the next five acts systematically falsify. The widowed Duchess is forbidden by her twin, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, and by her elder brother the Cardinal to marry again, and the brothers plant the malcontent Bosola in her household as an intelligencer, buying his service with an office he openly despises. The first act then reverses the expected direction of courtship: the Duchess, talked at for a whole scene, woos her own steward and binds herself to him in a contract witnessed only by her waiting woman Cariola. Three acts pass in which that marriage is secret, fertile and happy, so the suspense lies less in whether it will be found out than in how. Bosola's trick with the apricots confirms the pregnancy he suspects, a mislaid horoscope names the child, and by Act 3 the brothers know enough to move. The family flees to Ancona, is banished, and is separated on the road; the Duchess is brought back to her own palace as a prisoner, and the fourth act subjects her to staged deceptions and torments contrived to break her mind before it takes her life, the sequence stage-managed by Bosola in disguise. Her composure under it, and her refusal to give up her title, is the scene on which the play's reputation rests. Ferdinand, confronted with what he commissioned, disowns it and collapses into the delusional illness a doctor names as lycanthropia; the Cardinal, colder, silences his mistress Julia to protect a confession. Bosola, cheated of payment and converted late to a conscience he cannot use, turns avenger, and the last act gathers the survivors in darkness, mistaken identity and misdirected violence that kills almost everyone who matters, including the man he meant to save. Delio closes by presenting the Duchess's surviving son and commending an integrity the court has spent the play destroying.

Loot. Loot is a two act farce set in one room of the McLeavy house on the day of a funeral. McLeavy, a widowed, church-going Catholic who believes in the Church, the newspapers and the police in roughly that order, is preparing to bury his wife under the supervision of Fay McMahon, the nurse who attended her and who has already begun campaigning to become the second Mrs McLeavy, a post she has held seven times under other names. McLeavy's son Hal and Hal's friend Dennis, an undertaker's assistant, have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and need somewhere to keep the proceeds for the few hours before they can be moved abroad. The only container in the house large enough is the coffin, so the money goes into it, its occupant is displaced into a cupboard, and the rest of the play is the farce machinery of keeping both facts out of sight. Into this arrives Inspector Truscott of Scotland Yard, who announces himself as an official of the Metropolitan Water Board and conducts, under that cover and without a warrant, an interrogation of everybody in the house. Truscott is a brilliant detective in the sense that he deduces the truth almost at once, and a useless one in the sense that he has no interest in it except as leverage. Hal is constitutionally unable to lie and confesses repeatedly; Truscott declines to believe him. Fay is exposed as the author of a long series of convenient bereavements. The evidence accumulates, the coffin travels, the concealments multiply, and at the close Truscott arranges the only settlement that suits everybody on stage: the stolen money is divided four ways between the two thieves, the nurse and the policeman, and McLeavy, the one character who has committed no crime and who has said so to the police, is arrested on a fabricated charge and removed to a custody the play makes clear he will not survive. The last line belongs to Fay, and it is about appearances. The Revenger's Tragedy. Middleton's tragedy is set at the court of an unnamed Italian dukedom whose ruling house is defined by appetite rather than by character. It opens with Vindice watching a procession of the Duke, his Duchess, his heir Lussurioso, his bastard son Spurio and the Duchess's sons, and naming each in turn as an entry in a catalogue of vices while holding the skull of his betrothed, whom the Duke poisoned nine years earlier for refusing him. A second offence starts the plot: the Duchess's youngest son is arraigned for an assault on the wife of the courtier Antonio and the Duke suspends sentence, so the court's law is established at once as an instrument of the court. Vindice takes service in disguise as the pander Piato and is hired by Lussurioso to procure his sister Castiza, an errand that tests the whole household: the sister refuses, the widowed mother Gratiana does not, and the revenger becomes the author of his own family's corruption. Vindice then redirects Lussurioso towards the affair between the Duchess and Spurio, so the heir is imprisoned for bursting in on his father, while the Duchess's elder sons, manoeuvring to have him executed, contrive instead their own brother's death through a misread warrant. The Duke is killed in the third act by a device that turns Vindice's memento mori into the instrument of revenge, and the killing is arranged so that the dying man witnesses the incest his own house has bred. Hired in his own person to murder his own disguise, Vindice is by the fourth act employed against himself, and he and his brother Hippolito reclaim their mother by threat rather than argument. The fifth act converges on two masques of revengers in which the survivors of the ducal house destroy one another, and Antonio inherits by outliving them. Vindice, unable to resist claiming authorship of what he has arranged, confesses within a line of his triumph, and Antonio sends both brothers straight to execution.

Betrayal. Betrayal traces a seven year adulterous relationship in reverse, opening in 1977 with its aftermath and closing in 1968 with its first declaration. Jerry, a literary agent, and Emma, who runs a gallery, meet in a pub two years after the affair has ended; Emma reports that her marriage to the publisher Robert, Jerry's oldest friend, is collapsing and that she has just confessed. The second scene, later than the first rather than earlier, takes Jerry to a confrontation in which he discovers that Robert has known for four years and said nothing, so the friendship Jerry believed he was protecting had already been hollowed out. From there the play steps backwards: the winding up of the rented Kilburn flat in 1975; a domestic afternoon in 1974 in which Robert, already informed, plays host; the Venice hotel scene of 1973 in which a letter collected at an American Express office forces Emma's admission; a return to the flat immediately afterwards, where Emma conceals from Jerry what Robert now knows; and a long restaurant lunch at which Robert, drinking steadily, conducts a conversation whose cruelty is audible only to an audience that knows what he knows. Two scenes remain. In 1971 the affair is at its domestic height in the flat, and a pregnancy is announced that belongs to the marriage rather than to the affair. In 1968, at a party in Robert and Emma's house, a drunken Jerry makes the declaration that begins everything, in language that insists on its own originality. Nothing here is withheld as plot; the audience is given the outcome first and then watches three people walk towards it, so that every pleasantry about squash, Venice, children and publishing arrives loaded with information the speakers do not yet possess or have chosen to bury. The subject is less adultery than the self deceptions that make adultery liveable, and the small talk that carries them. Lady Windermere's Fan. Wilde's first society comedy turns on a secret the audience is given and the heroine is not. Lady Windermere, rich, married and newly twenty one, has been raised to believe that people divide cleanly into the good and the bad. On the morning of her birthday ball a visiting duchess reports that her husband has been paying large sums to Mrs Erlynne, a woman shut out of respectable houses because of an old scandal, and a bank book appears to confirm it. Lord Windermere, who will not explain himself, insists that Mrs Erlynne be invited to the ball; his wife, humiliated in her own drawing room, accepts the courtship of Lord Darlington and leaves a letter announcing that she is going to him. What she does not know, and what Wilde discloses to the audience at the close of the second act, is that Mrs Erlynne is her mother, believed dead for twenty years, and that the payments buy silence rather than an affair. Mrs Erlynne intercepts the letter, follows her daughter to Darlington's rooms and argues her back into her marriage; when the men return unexpectedly and the fan Lady Windermere was given that morning is found where it has no business being, Mrs Erlynne takes the compromising appearance on herself and ends any prospect of her own return to society. The last act distributes knowledge unequally and leaves it there. Lady Windermere never learns who saved her, Lord Windermere never learns where his wife spent the night, and Mrs Erlynne asks for the fan as a keepsake, accepts a proposal from a rich and incurious peer and goes abroad. Wilde subtitles the play A Play About a Good Woman, then declines to say which woman he means, closing on two men who cannot agree whether the same person is clever or good.

Measure for Measure. Duke Vincentio of Vienna, admitting that the city's statutes against sexual licence have gone unenforced for fourteen years by his own account and that he is too implicated in the neglect to revive them himself, deputes his authority to Angelo, a man of famously severe reputation, and announces his departure. He does not in fact leave. Disguised as a friar, he remains to watch what deputed power does to the man who holds it. Angelo at once revives a capital statute against Claudio, a young gentleman betrothed to Juliet, who is pregnant by him, their marriage having been delayed over a dowry. Claudio's sister Isabella, on the point of entering an enclosed order, is persuaded to plead for his life. Her first interview with Angelo wins her nothing but his desire, and at the second he makes the proposition that gives the play its moral crisis, offering Claudio's life in exchange and observing that her word would not be believed against his. Isabella refuses and tells her brother so, and when he begs her to consent the play reaches its hinge: the disguised Duke steps forward and assumes control of the plot. He produces Mariana, whom Angelo abandoned when her dowry was lost at sea, and arranges the substitution by which she takes Isabella's place. When Angelo breaks his word and orders the execution anyway, a second substitution saves Claudio, the head of a prisoner already dead of natural causes being sent in his place. The Duke then returns in his own person at the city gate and stages a public hearing in which Isabella and Mariana are first disbelieved and then vindicated, before unmasking himself as both friar and prince. Angelo is condemned and then pardoned at Mariana's suit, which Isabella joins; Claudio is restored alive; Lucio, whose slanders pursued the Duke through his disguise, is sentenced to marriage. The play closes with the Duke proposing twice to Isabella, who is given no reply to speak. Murmuring Judges. Hare's second state-of-the-nation play anatomises English criminal justice by cutting between three institutions that rarely meet: the Bar, the police and the prisons. It opens in a crowded Old Bailey courtroom where Mr Justice Cuddeford passes sentence on the men convicted of a robbery. Among them is Gerard McKinnon, a young Irishman and first offender who drove for the others and who receives five years. From that single sentence the play fans outwards. Irina Platt, a young black barrister newly arrived in the chambers of Sir Peter Edgecombe QC, comes to suspect that the case was strengthened by an item of evidence the arresting officer added to the record, and that Gerard's nationality made the addition easy to believe. Sir Peter, a fluent and genial silk whose energies go to the civil work that builds a career and to the social life that may yet bring him advancement, treats her scruples as inexperience and prefers the appeal run on safer ground. At the same station PC Sandra Bingham watches her colleague Barry Hopper cut the corners she has learned to tolerate, and reaches Irina's conclusion from the inside. Around them Hare cross-cuts to the prison where the sentence is being served and where the rhetoric of rehabilitation meets the daily fact of overcrowding, and to the chambers, receptions and evenings at the opera in which senior figures assure one another that the system, whatever its faults, is the best in the world. The two women meet, compare what each knows, and the play closes with Sandra asking to speak to her Chief Superintendent while Gerard remains inside. Nothing is put right on stage. What Hare offers instead is the shape of a system in which no single person is wicked, everyone can justify what they do, and nobody is placed to act.