ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at plays which tie both oppression and revolt, namely Christina Reid’s Did You Hear the One About the Irishman …?, Abdul-Saboor’s Musafir Layl [Night Traveller], and Beckett’s Catastrophe. While the first deals with the oppressive mechanisms of a unified nationalist identity, the other two plays deal more generally with questions of oppression, dictatorship and to varying degrees toy with the notion of revolt, the latter with almost a rare sense of optimism for a Beckettian play. By coming back to Beckett, in this chapter, we are not returning to the same point where our discussion of theatre and revolutions has started, however, but in fact moving the discussion into a whole new dimension where Beckett himself seems to have reached beyond his first attempts in staging a fully-fledged gesture of uprising.
