Gender, Fracture and the Architecture of Sarah Kane's 'Blasted'. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
As we look back on it, the early 1990s are regarded as an exciting period in British Theatre. Playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and Anthony Neilson represented the beginning of a new theatrical renaissance (Bicer 75). This new angry generation produced art that was labeled as provocative, speculative, confrontational, sensational, shocking, taboo-breaking, brutal, bleak, gloomy and dark. For Kane specifically, her first production of Blasted in the London Royal Court Theatre was a self-conscious depiction of the traumas of war using the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s as a central motivation. Kane’s techniques are of the school of post-dramatic theatre pioneered by Hans-Thies Lehman in that they challenge audiences by cleansing and breaking down traditional dramatic methods of classical dramaturgy (Bicer 76). The performance starts in a hotel in Leeds with the seduction and eventual sexual assault of the character Cate by journalist Ian. While initially shocking, our interpretation of the scene is now as a means of staging post-dramatic pain and catharsis and shows the violation of women in pain dialectically.
Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley
Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley Özlem Karadağ ABSTRACT This study aims to explore personal and collective traumas in three representative in-yer-face plays: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. These three playwrights, who are among the most outstanding playwrights of the British theatre and in-yer-face movement, wrote their plays after the 1990s, which were still overshadowed by the horrific historical events of the twentieth century. Again, written shortly before and after the millennium, they usher in the ghosts of a traumatic past and fear of the future. First, the in-yer-face movement will be placed in the theatre tradition by examining its ties with the Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the Theatre of Catastrophe. Under the guidance of Trauma theory and taking into consideration the effects of the historical and cultural background of Britain after World War II, this study will then attempt to show that in the plays under discussion dystopian and traumatic elements become more and more central. Each character both because of his/her problematic personal background and collective catastrophes and radical changes is heavily traumatized. Story-telling, the telling of trauma, becomes central to the plays. It triggers trauma, but it also suggests a fragile chance of redemption for the characters and possibility for a better future. Recurrent trauma shatters their apathy or refusal to remember horrific events, memory of which must be recovered for the characters and culture to be healed. However, a sense of dystopia prevails.
'Rethinking Sarah Kane’s Characters: A Human(ist) Form and Politics’. Modern Drama 57.2 (June 2014).
The common lore of Sarah Kane scholarship is that Blasted’s characters are initially naturalistic, denoting Cartesian or liberal humanist subjectivity, and latterly determined products (i.e. “animals” or linguistic fragments). My article shows that such assumptions are erroneous. Kane’s characters, Ian and Cate, are naturalist; however, an examination of character of the naturalist theatre tradition reveals not a fixed and autonomous agent but an individual who is complexly organised of natural and cultural parts and founded upon a compatibilist model of mind. By reflecting upon the “conglomerate” naturalistic character articulated by August Strindberg in his “Preface” to Miss Julie (1888), I show Kane’s changing dramaturgical treatment of character to reveal not different models of self but one hybrid individual capable of change and self-determination. Rethinking Kane’s characters thereby as human(ist) (but not liberal humanist) subjects, my article brings into focus the sort of emancipatory politics that attaches to Blasted: that people change and the human species has some capacity to determine its future.
‘THEATRE IS ONLY ALIVE IF IT IS KICKING.’ SARAH KANE AND BLASTED
Ensuing John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, a new angry young generation has appeared with more provocative and shocking works which have later been called 'in-yer-face' theatre by critic Aleks Sierz. It would not be wrong to say that Sarah Kane with her first play Blasted is the key figure of 'in-yer-face' theatre. Presenting dirty language, sex, nudity, violence on stage are shocking techniques that leave an indelible impression. In Blasted, Kane connects the interpersonal violence with the forgone conclusions of the war which is dirty, and she depicts this idea in a harsh way in which audiences may feel that as if Kane throws up on them while telling her story.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the characteristics of in-yer-face theatre in Sarah Kane's Blasted.
In-Yer-Face Mouths and Immobilisation: Parodies of Samuel Beckett's Theatre by Sarah Kane
2020
Building on the final chapter of my book, in which I compare Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis to Beckett's Not I, and my work on irony in feminist visual cultures, this article positions Kane's theatre as a parody of Beckettian themes. Kane’s "In-Yer-Face" style of theatre is considered as both paying homage to her idol Beckett as well as a critique of the Irish playwright’s representations of women.