plagarism

You need to look up the definition of plagiarism. Please cite what dialog from "The Glass Menagerie" is used in "Dancing at Lughnasa."

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Great but Forgotten movies: http://greatbutforgotten.blogspot.com

I WILL look it up, I assure you, but unless you are deranged - which I very much doubt - the chances are the definition will make reference to similarities in dialogue and whilst I'm prepared to concede this point are YOU not prepared to concede the similarities in PLOT and THEATRICALITY. Tennessee Williams had a character both narrating, commenting on the action and stepping fluidly in and out of the action in 1946, a good couple of decades prior to Dancing At Lughnasa. Even Williams did not pioneer the concept. Almost a decade before Menagerie Thornton Wilder created a 'Stage Manager' in Our Town, who actually moved simple props - a plank etc - to create scenery on a bare stage and comment on the action. A major difference is that Our Town was NOT about a dysfunctional family, if anything it was metaphysical exploring the universality of cyclical movement and spanning several generations.
By deliberately opting for not only a Male son to represent the dysfunctional family but ALSO setting it in EXACTLY the same period (The Great Depression) Dancing At Lughnasa draws attention to its similarities with Menagerie. Had it been set in practically any other decade the similarities - dysfunctional family, male narrator/actor would be less noticeable especially to the non analytical.

It does, however, appear that many more viewers have spotted that One Day (which I haven't seen or read) is a rip-off of Bernard Slade's play/film Same Time Next Year.

Once, again -- look up the definition of plagiarism. Similarities in plot and staging are not per se plagiarism.

"West Side Story" does not plagiarize "Romeo and Juliet," for instance.

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Great but Forgotten movies: http://greatbutforgotten.blogspot.com

Look, it's christmas. I don't want to get into a pissing contest. Clearly you have some sort of hang-up on this subject. Of COURSE West Side Story did not plagiarise Romeo And Juliet, but it DID make it clear that it was offering a modern, musicalized VERSION of Romeo And Juliet and virtually every review at the time, drew attention to this, as have reviews of subsequent productions, articles, reviews of the Film version etc. Many of these reviews/articles are specific, i.e. they equate the fire escape with the balcony etc.

PLUS there is one other saliant point. Romeo And Juliet was written five hundred years ago and is now in the public domain and fair game - as is the whole Shakespeare canon - for any interpretation/adaptation anyone wants to apply. In the 1950s, for example, there was a film entitled "Joe Macbeth" which was set in the twentieth century and featured organised gang crime, the leading character was actually named Joe Macbeth and was a mobster who killed a rival mobster, Duncan. Again there was no attempt at deception, the film made it quite clear that it was a modern 'take' on Shakespeare.

'The Glass Menagerie', I repeat, was written and first staged in 1946. It is quite likely that several people who saw that first production are STILL ALIVE and equally possible that they also saw a production of 'Dancing At Lughnasa' and noted the STRIKING similarities in the two plays.

Of course, if you are related to and/or have some connection with the author of 'Dancing At Lughnasa', I can understand your anguish at seeing him caught with his fingers in the cookie jar.

Happy Holidays

writers_reign, I have to wonder whether Dancing At Lughnasa is the first play you have seen since The Glass Menagerie and whether you paid attention to either. Playwrights have been dealing with dysfunctional families as far back as Aeschylus and the Orestaia, and the Great Depression has been a popular setting for narrative fiction since, well, the Depression itself. The experimental use of a narrator character moving in and out of the action has become so commonplace in the intervening decades as to merit no comment whatsoever.

You fail to see that, thematically, these two plays have just about zero in common (for instance, where's the latent paganism--a central concern in Lughnasa--in the Williams play?), you dismiss the difference between an urban U.S. setting and a rural Ireland location as "superficial," and you seem to see no difference between the two utterly different families (multiple sisters vs. an abandoned mother, an illegitimate child, a lapsed missionary brother).

This is so ludicrous, I have to wonder whether all these years you have been an expert comedian and I am only just discovering it.



"Oh look, the neighbors are recording us."

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs. You're a long way from home, DT, which may account for your whimsical comments.
Alas, I didn't see The Glass Menagerie in its initial production with Eddy Dowling but I have, over several years, seen around a dozen different productions. Lifetime I've seen something like 2,400 plays of all stripe and persuasion, from those four cats writing out of Athens in the fifth century BC through to the present season.

My point is dishonesty. You mentioned the Orestaia but I wouldn't necessarily say that Gene O'Neill ripped off The House Of Atreus and turned it into Mourning Becomes Electra. The playgoers of the twenties and thirties were, in some ways, the elite of society and, by definition, reasonably erudite, so they would have little problem reading Agammemnon for Ezra Mannon, Electra of Lavinia, Orestes for Orin and the War Between The States for the Trojan War. Rather than ripping off Sophocles/Euripedes/Aeschylus O'Neill was merely plucking a still-wet tragedy out of the ether and wringing a new setting out of it which may, or may not, have introduced a twentieth century audience to ancient Greek theater.

My quarrel with the cat who ripped of Tom Williams is that NOWHERE did he nod to Tom Williams and say 'he got there before me, folks, but I thought I'd put a spin on him'. I accept that he threw in minor changes, such as a larger dysfunctional family and a different country, but WHY, for christ's sake, didn't he have the wit to move the time-frame either forwards (50s/60s) or backwards (20s) so as not to make it so blatant. As I mentioned when I started this thread, back in the day Bernard Slade wrote a hit play called Same Time, Next Year, in which two young people, already in relationships/marriage, enjoy a one-night stand so much that they agree to repeat it on the same weekend EVERY year. They do so successfully for something like 30 years even though they are both happily married and have no intention of meeting more often.
This year, or perhaps last, a British writer used the exact same theme for a novel entitled 'One Day', which was released as a film earlier this year. Luckily this time many people who saw the film noticed the rip-off and began writing to newspapers etc.

I'm thinking of writing a song entitled 'I Have You Beneath My Dermis' but I'm not ripping off Cole Porter. Perish the thought.

Again, you need to look up the word "plagiarism." You have no idea what the term means.

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Great but Forgotten movies: http://greatbutforgotten.blogspot.com

For years I used to wonder if I was the only person in the entire world who thought that Dancing At Lughnasa was a blatant rip-off of The Glass Menagerie.

"One of the ten best plays of the year. The most elegant and rueful memory play since The Glass Menagerie" — TIME magazine, 1991

I guess you can stop wondering now, writers_reign. And please stop plagiarising TIME magazine.