"Towards the Theatre of Cruelty? A Study of the Theatrical Language in Sarah Kane's Cleansed.” (original) (raw)
Related papers
"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.
‘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.
A Semiotic Analysis of Cruelty in Sarah Kane's Drama
Master Thesis, 2021
This thesis uses the semiotic perspective to deal with cruelty in Sarah Kane’s drama. Stage drama needs specific dramaturgy; it is different from other types of drama in that it is written to be performed and not to be merely read. Thus, it would usually include items that help to transform it from text into a live performance. In the semiotic analysis, these items are termed sign systems. The task of semiotic analysis is to break down the dramatic piece into its components of sign systems and analyze each of them in relation to the others. Semiotic analysis is not concerned merely with how many components are there or what they might be, rather it is concerned with how the general meaning is created and what each sign system signifies. Sarah Kane is a post-modern dramatist; she belongs to a dramatic movement known as in-yer-face that had appeared in the 1990s. Sarah Kane's drama is distinguished by its richness of multiple sign systems and their significant presence in all of her work. She uses drama to send strong messages about society and human nature and she does so by her heavy reliance on cruelty, physical or psychological. Thus, the researcher attempts to define how sign systems were used by Sarah Kane to present cruelty and to what ends.
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.
Staging the Extreme: Forms of Cruelty in Contemporary British Drama
2016
Forms of Cruelty in Contemporary British Drama MASTERARBEIT zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA) an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Elisabeth KNITTELFELDER am Institut für Anglistik Begutachterin: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Maria Löschnigg Graz, 2016 … was ist, zeigt sich nur, wenn es außer sich ist. Georges Bataille without the risk of real danger. Art has the power to incite our imagination, to evoke our worst fears which would normally be buried in our unconscious and thus to alter our very sense of self, our relationships and our understanding of the world. It is this notion of confrontation, of exposing oneself to that which is frightening, terrifying and painful in oneself and in our world in order to trigger a transformation that stands at the centre of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis and has since then been taken up by numerous other thinkers and writers, such as Antonin Artaud or Howard Barker. Of all arts, theatre is so well suited to excite and confront its audience because of its physical immediacy and proximity. As Tom Sellar aptly formulates, "[n]o other art form can suggest connections between small, everyday 1. Origins and Definitions: Aristotle's Tragedy and the Concepts of Catharsis […] So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause, And, in this upshot, purpose mistook Fall'n on th'inventors' heads. (Hamlet 2011: 129) From the beginning of drama in ancient Greece onwards cruelty has constituted a prominent performative element. In classical Greek tragedy infanticide, suicide, incest, rape, mutilation and cannibalism were common and accepted features of a play. In the 'Tragedy of Blood', in particular the 'Revenge Tragedy', of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Theatre violence, madness, murder and torture were immensely enjoyed by the audiences, as long, however, as morality was properly restored in the end. The question therefore arises as to the purpose of cruelty in drama. "The content of tragedy", Aleks Sierz states, "is a meeting between the waywardness of fate and some of our most intimate fears" (2001: 10). The main and most plausible reason for the existence of tragedy, as Sierz further points out, is to redeem the audience of such fears and feelings. In Aristotle's Poetics it is argued that the experience of a tragedy can and shall have the effect of a purification, of a catharsis, upon the spectator.
2017
Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) This material is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Gröndahl, Laura; Watson, Anna