Revelation or Damnation? Depictions of Violence in Sarah Kane s Theatre

With her controversial stage art, the young playwright Sarah Kane broke new dramaturgic ground and made a lasting impression that changed British drama forever. Even though it is part of the canon covering post-war drama, Kane's work has often met with misunderstanding and fierce criticism due to the uncountable representations of atrocities. How can we make sense of Kane's seemingly crude and bleak theatre? Mainly concentrating on the play Cleansed, the author examines the nature of violence in Kane's writing. What purpose does it serve? Is it simply employed for its shock value? Or is it rather used as a metaphor? Kane herself considered her third full-length play as a play about love. In suggesting a figurative reading of the late playwright's texts, the author shows how Kane embraces violence as a metaphor of the various sufferings both love and life perpetrate upon the human being. Locked beneath the revolting cruelties, we can find a vivid theatricality, powerful images, and a unique rhythm and sound of language.

Auteur

Lea Gutscher, M.A., was born in Stuttgart in 1979. She studied English, Italian and Political Science in Stuttgart and Berlin and also spent some time abroad in London and Parma. She currently works as an editor in the field of media and public relations and is still a connoisseur of British drama and a regular theatre-goer.

Échantillon de lecture
Text Sample:
Chapter 3, Sarah Kane s dramatic art:
3.1, Kane s writing: similarities and points of difference in her plays:
In the short period between 1993 and 1999 Sarah Kane wrote five plays which constitute her lifework. Each of them is marked by the explosive theatricality, the lyricism, the emotional power, and the bleak humour that are hallmarks of Kane s writing. Just as her models Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Kane departed from the path of (British) naturalism. Kane was a constant experimenter. Each of her plays has its own quality and develops an independent style of its own. Even though there is an evident development in her work, a red thread which (thematically) links all of her plays, different styles crystallised in the process of her writing, which allow the subdivision of Kane s theatre. The critic Ruby Cohn makes out two radically different theatre styles in Kane s work, the result of which are three violent and two linguistic plays. While Kane s first three plays, Blasted, Phaedra s Love, and Cleansed, are characterised by their excessive violence, her last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, show a language oriented dramaturgy and put emphasis on a poetically dense language. The atrocities of her first three plays are substituted in her last two works by verbal devices. The imagery thus moved from a mainly physical to a textual realisation and in her last two plays it is words, rather than action, that build the play. However, Kane s linguistic plays do not entirely renounce the poetic imagery which dominates her first three plays. In Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, language does not substitute the visual images, it rather comprises them. In each of her plays Kane employed different stylistic and linguistic techniques. Hence, enfold[ing] a different architecture, every single play is special and stands on its own as a piece of art. However, as pointed out above, there are also parallels and similarities such as a common thematic core which unites the five plays: they all deal with extreme emotional forces and mental states. Kane s characters are torn between feelings ranging from love to hatred. They move between the extreme ends of pleasure and pain. The depiction of these concrete psychic, mental and emotional extremes finds its counterpart in a stage scenery, setting and time which are more abstract, often dreamlike and unreal. Except for Blasted, in which the text indicates that the action takes place in Leeds, Kane s plays are all very imprecise and general in terms of their setting. And even in the case of Kane s first play the opening stage direction alludes to the universality of the place: A very expensive hotel room in Leeds the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world (1:3). Phaedra s Love, a retitled free adaptation of Seneca s Phaedra, as well as Cleansed, take place in an unnamed country. Both plays lack identifiable locations. There is also a timeless feeling about Kane s writing. Cleansed and Blasted are the only plays in which the sense and the passing of time are indicated by means of the changing weather and different seasons. Kane s last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, lack scenic indications to setting, time and place altogether. In never precisely specifying time and location by never explicitly stating when and where a specific action happens, the plays achieve a certain universality.
Uncertainty is one of the typical traits of Kane s theatre. There is mystery in everything. There is always a certain degree of ambivalence. Her characters, too, are incomprehensible to us. We cannot understand them. They are obscure to each other and to the audience. Kane indulged in these ambiguous characters who resist being pigeonholed. However, in spite of their being capable of the most horrible actions towards each other, it would be wrong to over-generalise and label them evil. In a Kane play designations such as good and evil, victim and perpet