Kadriye BOZKURT2024-07-242024-07-2420212148-7782http://akademikarsiv.cbu.edu.tr:4000/handle/123456789/26112Contemporary English-Australian playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall’s play Love and Understanding (2004) depicts the chaos of modern world and the disintegration of the two young doctors Neal and Rachel as lovers because of their busy works and miscommunication. This play also introduces us the lonely and depressive Richie who resembles ‘trickster’ with his manipulative, narcistic, self-seeking, tricky character. Trickster as a character in literature and culture is an archetypical figure who mostly appears in many different identities and disguises and adorns with amusing, mischievous and clever personality; moreover, trickster achieves to survive and to arrange all the affairs for his/her own hand. Many well-known personalities such as Dionysus, Pan, Prometheus and Nasreddin Hodja in mythology, literature or folk tales, and Jack Sparrow, The Joker or The Mask in movies can be cited as examples for trickster being cunning, cheater and rogue to some degree. As it will be analysed in this essay, in Penhall’s play, Richie can be read as the modern version of trickster with his decadent slyness, hedonism, shallowness and piteous loneliness.engAraştırma Makalesi10.29000/rumelide.981526