Cosi Literary Elements

Twentieth Century Play

English

The play is set in Australia in the late 1960s, against a backdrop of social dissent against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War.

There is no narrator; the play is presented largely from Lewis' point of view.

The play reflects the bipolar nature of some of its main characters. It swings from hopeful , positive and almost celebratory to depressing an hopeless.

Leis the is the protagonist; initially, when they butt heads over the way in which the play is to be produced and directed, Roy is the antagonist.

Roy does not like Lewis and feels that he cannot do the job properly so he calls for him to be fired from the project.

The play is actually performed which is the climax to both the play we are watching and to the lives of the inmates who have come together to produce something initially considered to be far beyond them.

The smell of burning in the theater when Lewis arrives foreshadows the introduction of Doug, who is a pyromaniac, and also foreshadows the fact that the majority of the patients suffer from incurable mental illness despite receiving treatment. Doug remains a pyromaniac throughout the play.

Roy chooses the play because he says it provides an idyll but this is understated in that it provides him with the idyllic and somewhat rose-colored images of childhood that he always yearned for and convinced himself that he actually had - but that never existed.

Justin alludes to the story of the Emperor's new clothes, using the allusion to explain the difference between the sane and the insane; often the only difference is that the sane are able to hide their insanity differently and with more success.

The imagery is all visual in that the characters each portray a visual image of how their insanity manifests itself. The only exception to this is Doug whose insanity is portrayed using imagery that appeals to our sense of smell. The smell of burning in the theater is introduced before we meet Doug and so he is represented by this imagery.

At the start of the play Roy seems more capable and confident than Lewis does, which gives the impression that he is the sane one in charge of events and that Lewis is suffering from some kind of mental incapacity.

There is a parallel between Roy's delusions of grandeur inside the confines of the asylum, and Nick's delusions of grandeur out in the world. Both manifest themselves in the same way.

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