Artist-in-Residence Daily Log, Japan-Britain Exchange on Sarah Kane's Theatre (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dramatic shift: Conservative to Avant-garde in Sarah Kane’s “4.48 Psychosis”
Religación. Revista De Ciencias Sociales Y Humanidades, 2021
Drama is a genre in literature that recreates not only existing actions but also interprets the different versions of truth put on stage. Sarah Kane, a dramatist, is usually associated with the new theatrical form of writing called the in-yer-face theatre. Kane, after writing her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, commits suicide. For this reason, many critics consider this play a 'suicide notes' which makes it limiting since these critics do not pay attention to her extensive use of styles and her experimental shift from conservative to avant-garde dramatic constructions. While her earlier works Blasted, Phaedra's Love, and Cleansed were centred principally on shock irritating violent and relatively hostile metaphors, the style of her two last plays Crave and 4.48 Psychosis shifts blatantly as they are written in a conspicuously poetic style. Her last play which is the focus of this study swings from conventional to the unconventional style of writing given that she deviates from the classical presentation of drama. This study uses the theoretical backdrop of Postmodernism for its analysis. The paper demonstrates that analysing 4.48 Psychosis in connection to Kane's life and death is restrictive and biased as it procures a plethora of innovative scopes. It, therefore, assesses how dramatic experimentation is used to expose some of the recurrent themes in contemporary drama. 10.46652/rgn.v6i28.792
Staging The Unstageable: Exploring Sarah Kane's Blasted As A Seminal Text Of In-Yer-Face Theatre
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES) An International Peer Reviewed English Journal, 2024
The English theatre, its inception, and progressive evolution has been an exciting field of study in English literature. It has effectively caught the attention and imagination of readers and scholars alike. It represents an arena where various issues, historical events, and motifs collide and merge. Its long tradition has evolved from and traversed through the medieval miracle, mystery, and morality plays to the most experimental theatrical forms of the 20th century. As the experimentation grew more vigorously in the later years of the 20th century, many dramatic theatres appeared, including the Epic Theatre, the Theatre of Cruelty, and the Theatre of Oppressed, etc. All these theatres discarded conventional dramatic representation, and the playwrights began to write plays that dealt more with the actual circumstances of society, which frequently startled the audience and readers. The performance of these plays forced the audience to reflect critically and objectively on the challenges facing society. It brought in a distancing effect and put a kibosh on the audience's emotional attachment to the characters. Another such theatre to hammer the supposed passivity of the audience developed in 1990s London, namely, the In-yer-face Theatre, which was established through the plays of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Anthony Nielson, etc. Plays in this theatre portrayed taboo subjects such as frightening situations, unfathomable brutality, blatant sexual misconduct, drug addiction, mental health issues, misogyny, explicit language, etc. In this context, this article aims to evaluate one of the plays written by Sarah Kane, Blasted, to illustrate how she presented violence and how, in general, the techniques of In-yer-face Theater are put into practice.
"Only love can save me and love has destroyed me": Interpersonal and self-inflicted violence in Sarah Kanes's theatre, 2017
In my dissertation, I analysed two examples of violent, disturbing scenes from the British theatre of the nineties, one concerning interpersonal violence and one self-inflicted violence. They are respectively from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and 4.48 Psychosis. I chose this author because of her originality, she is a valiant exponent of the kind of theatre popular in England at the time, but she also offered more to think about of many of her fellow writers. And I tried to show how much can be hidden in a single violent scene; it is not about the actual acts of cruelty, but about the meaning of violence and what it stands for. Violence is not shown for its own sake; therefore Kane’s theatre is incredibly full of metaphors. Many different types of violence exist, and at the time theatre-goers could bump into all of them. In these works, there can be found physical, emotional, psychological violence, sexual abuse, and even violence towards the damage of one’s possessions. And what is more, a single act of violence could include more than just one type of violence. It may be a natural consequence to wonder why it was normal to witness to so much cruelty in the stages of the time. As a matter of fact, in post-Thatcherism England, and especially in London, a new challenging theatre avant-garde appeared. A very explicit one, who dealt with typically avoided subjects, and was influenced by several Scottish plays like the theatre version of Trainspotting. This phenomenon was called ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre, because what was staged physically and emotionally affected the audience as if all the cruelty of the world was literally thrown on the spectators. The new young writers were angry: they struggled to emerge as not a lot of funding was reserved to the arts; as a consequence, it was hazardous to invest in the production of a play by an unknown playwright. They also hoped the world could have changed after the end of the cold war. Instead, they saw new wars and new genocides; they were touched by the negative aspects of capitalism and consumerism, inequality and urban problems like the spread of drug, and acts of violence committed by young people. So, they reacted putting all the cruelty they saw in real life in their works. They used many shock tactics and wanted to smash all the taboos they could. In fact, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre presents many explicit sex scenes, and there are often naked actors on the stage. Interestingly, a significant part of the violence lies in the words. The language is often coarse and aggressive. Dialogues are faster than before, and the use of slang is now normal, with an abundance of sexual references and racist terms. ‘In-yer-face’ theatre wanted the audience experience first-hand what was staged and then make people reflect. This is what experiential theatre is about. Sarah Kane loved it and also wanted to go beyond the boundaries of what was considered a good play. She was born in Essex, in 1971, and committed suicide at 28 years old in 1999. She wrote only five plays and a short script. But she had a huge desire to experiment, and she went a little further with every play. Indeed, her first play, Blasted, shared different features with more traditional well-made plays, while her third work, Cleansed, with its episodic structure, ambitious directions and abundance of metaphors marked a step farther from realism and, at last, 4.48 Psychosis does not even look like a play as regards its textual composition. Moreover, she wanted form and content to be one. She used violence to condemn complacency, to remind people of the cruelty humans are capable of. To demonstrate how much these new artists dared to show, that violence can be used to create a good work of art, and to show how meaningful a representation of violence can be..in the second chapter, I analysed the fourth scene of Cleansed. Here we find a gay couple, Carl and Rod, inside a mysterious institution controlled by a man who is at the same time a doctor and a torturer. He chose the idealist Carl as its victim, through whom to conduct an experiment in order to understand how strong one’s love can be. He tortures Carl until he betrays his companion and from then on, every time Carl tries to express his feelings for Rod, he cuts the part of the body Carl is using to communicate. The process works similarly to Dante’s retaliation. However, after that, a reader understands that the most gruesome of Kane’s plays is actually about the power of love. Love never dies in this play. Every character is in love with another, they are butchered and killed, but no one stops loving his or her partner. Hence, in the sequence of horrors, there is also a lot of poetry: Cleansed is a play that relies a lot on the visual imagery and, for example, flowers burst through the floor after a couple made love. On the other hand, 4.48 Psychosis lacks directions. It does not even suggest the number of characters involved. They are genderless, ageless and nameless. In some pages, there are free verses, in others numbers, lists or medical notes. Arguably, the play is set in a psychotic mind..or more than one mind: there is not a clear identity. However, there are some recognisable dialogues between a patient and a therapist or psychiatric. The narrative voice is for sure a clinical patient who accepts to try therapy. She is unutterably depressed and suicidal. Her own thoughts damage her, and I tried to explain how thoughts can harm a person and if this person is conscious of that. Obviously, this play is much more intimate and psychological than Cleansed. It shares less with the typical ‘in-yer-face’ plays and in some aspects is more post-dramatic, but it cannot be easily labelled. 4.48 Psychosis has often been regarded as a very autobiographical text or a suicide note, given that it ends with the protagonist’s suicide. The presence of autobiographic elements could not be denied, by the way, an author who can describe a mentally disturbed mind so accurately has to know at least what severe depression feels like, if not the psychosis itself. However, to state the play is only a piece of suicide art is too reductive and does not give justice to Kane’s work. In fact, it has been argued that with 4.48 Psychosis Kane went even beyond Beckett, beyond what was thought possible to stage. And violence was an essential part of the path she made to arrive at this result.
in After In-Yer-Face: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution, Bill Boles (ed.), Basingstoke : Palgrave, pp. 153-169, 2020
This chapter examines the emergence, in contemporary British drama, of a theatre no longer ‘in-yer-face’ but, rather, ‘in-yer-head’. It is argued that the human mind has become a new frontier on the late 20th / early 21st century stage, where our tendency to live inside our heads and the loneliness pandemic is explored in the socio-economic context of late-capitalist society as well as with regards to the increasing interest in the functioning of the brain and the psyche. Looking at the innovative dramatic forms and modalities of this postmodern ‘psychopoetics’ of the stage obsessed with indeterminacy, instability and uncertainty, the author shows how the dramatic space has become a mental space. Three major plays - Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997), Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000), and Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) - are examined using the concepts of absence and dissociation to suggest that the staging of vanishing female characters and their troubled mindscapes reflects the anxieties and traumas of our times.
Breath and Light: Season Opens Up New Directions for the Staging of Kane's Work - full version
Full version of the review of the Sarah Kane Season at Sheffield Theatres written for Litro Magazine including reviews of Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Blasted. See in the post below for the shortened and edited version that appeared in their online magazine, 19th April 2015. The full version here was published on the 21st July 2015. Please click on the link to download it. http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/07/breath-and-light-new-directions-in-the-staging-of-sarah-kane/