Sarah Kane

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 as 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 unconventional style of writing given that she deviates from the classica...

Provocative, superficially shocking, brutal, sensationalist are just some of the terms which have been applied to Kane’s theatre. Her work has been discussed in terms of neo-Jacobean or neo-Classical sensibilities, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and approached through the Lacanian concept of the Real and trauma theory. Taking the term Kane used herself to describe her work and its aims—experiential—this paper will trace some genealogies of pertinent types of experiential theatre of relevance to Kane’s work, and will go on to explore how Kane works with elements of this heritage in a manner which reflects upon the question of experience in postmodernity.

Straipsnyje apžvelgiamos šiuolaikinės naratyvo konstravimo tendencijos, glaustai pristatomi dramos naratyvinių
epizodų tipai, laiko ir erdvės ypatumai, pjesės naratoriaus ir struktūros pokyčiai.

The article is analysing the new drama narrative design tools, briefly representing the types of narrative
episodes in drama, time and space features, changes of the play narrator status and general
structure. Even though narratology as a science has more than a halfcentury tradition, the biggest
attention was paid to literature, considering drama as an art with too simple narrative strategies,
directly telling the story on stage through action.

Numa sociedade mediática em que o espectador é submetido à agressão visual quotidiana, regressa-se ao teatro como janela privilegiada para a observação da violência e dos seus perpetradores. Sarah Kane, uma das mais controversas dramaturgas contemporâneas inglesas, oferece ao público textos sem pudores, onde personagens com passados e presentes traumáticos, desfilam numa proximidade incómoda. A partir de uma leitura em que se considera o Trauma como tema e como ferramenta de análise de um registo não linear de escrita, procura-se qualificar a ligação entre o evento narrado e a (des)confortável posição de testemunha do espectador. A exposição das fragilidades do ser humano é, na escrita de Sarah Kane, um exercício de mestria que aqui se questiona do ponto de vista da conexão com o reviver do trauma em palco, explorando reacções e confrontos com a realidade de quem observa. No momento em que as cortinas se fecham, clarifica-se o poder dos eventos (re)criados em palco, ou somente no texto, e se estes dão origem a testemunhas silenciosas ou conscienciosas.

Rad se se bavi analizom drame Psihoza 4.48 britanskog dramskog pisca Sare Kejn. Osnovni cilj rada je da ukaže na mogućnost tumačenja nezavisno od biografskih podataka autora i time ispita način konstituisanja subjekta i  odnos zdravlja i bolesti/ludila.

In examining the notion of entelechy – defined by Aristotle as the ‘final cause’ in drama – Zornitsa Dimitrova shows that depictions of ‘unsavoury’ content are only justified insofar as they are part of larger networks of aesthetic codification. The unsavoury cannot be an end in itself; neither can it function as an aesthetic category in its own right. Rather, it is a means related to pathos, or suffering, in Greek tragedy and bībhatsa, the ‘odious sentiment’ of the Sanskrit drama. Within such networks of codification, the purpose of the unsavoury is to carry forward the drama to an emotionally uplifting end: katharsis in the Poetics and ananda in Nāṭyaśāstra. This purposiveness – already visible in the entelechial nature of the dramatic plot – relates to a concept of mimesis implicitly understood as a term actional and interactionist in character. But only with the emergence of postdramatic theatre and the dissolution of plot does the unsavoury begin to function as an aesthetic category in its own right.

Tragic Seneca has enjoyed a varied reputation. As T.S. Eliot put it, "In the Renaissance, no Latin author was more highly esteemed that Seneca; in modern times, few Latin authors have been more consistently damned". The author of this damnation of Seneca was the German early Romantic, August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his 1808 series of lectures on dramatic art. This essay examines these lectures in detail, exploring the motives for Schlegel's influential condemnation of Seneca Tragicus, and similarly explores his late 20th century revival, which had strikingly similar reasons for extolling Seneca as Schlegel had for condemning him.

Kokkini (2013) has recently argued that the destruction of Euripides’ Hippolytus is crucially linked to his absolute rejection of erotic love. She argues that the participation in (or experience of) eros was considered an integral part of Greek male identity that no one could disregard without serious ramifications. With this in mind, it would seem then that Sarah Kane’s universe has nothing to do with this early account of the myth. More specifically, in Phaedra’s Love Hippolytus is no longer the chaste devotee of Artemis, but rather, an obese, depressed and atheist prince, who avails himself of every opportunity for intercourse with anyone at all. His endless list of lovers includes not only Phaedra, his stepmother, who is desperately in love with him, but also her daughter Strophe and a Catholic priest, as well. Nevertheless, a close reading of her work may well reveal that Kane, despite the displacement that her play evidently achieves, conveys a message which is well in accordance with the underlying essence of the ancient myth. This article will demonstrate that in Phaedra’s Love Kane presents Hippolytus’ indifference towards, and neglect of, erotic love in a way that may indeed reflect the Euripidean tragedy.

This thesis examines how mental illness has been represented in British theatre from c. 1960 to the present day. It is particularly concerned with the roles played by space and embodiment in these representations, and what emerges as bodies interact in space. It adopts a mixed methodology, drawing on theoretical models from both continental philosophy and contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific research, in order to address these questions from the broadest possible range of perspectives. The first part of the thesis draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to explore the role of institutional space, and in particular its gendered implications, in staging madness. The second part introduces approaches to the body drawn from the cognitive turn in theatre and performance studies. These are connected to the approaches of the first section through phenomenology’s concern with lived experience. Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher’s work on ‘the phenomenological mind’ provides important context here. In addition, Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology offers a solid basis from which to think about how to act ethically as both a producer of, and an audience member for, representations of mental illness. Through these explorations, this thesis suggests a model of madness, not as something to be bracketed as ‘other’ and belonging to a deviant individual, but as emerging between bodies in space – there is no madness outside of social, spatial and embodied contexts. This in turn suggests a new approach to understanding the role theatre can play in addressing the lived experience of mental illness. While many productions currently attempt, unilaterally, to reduce the ‘stigma’ of mental illness, this thesis suggests that, in fact, discrimination against people experiencing mental illness is more likely to be reduced through the interaction between an ethically minded production and an ethical spectator. Such a model does not claim to be able to reduce the experience of madness to a totalising concept which can be communicated through theatre, but rather insists that it is only through an embodied, empathic interaction that a true concern for the (‘mad’ or ‘sane’) Other can emerge.

This PhD dissertation presents a close analysis of one of the ageless discourses of human life – apocalypse, or the End – within the highly controversial In-Yer-Face drama of the 1990s British stage. The study particularly argues that there is a strong apocalyptic sense in the plays of the decade, and it discovers that the apocalyptic representation within these plays varies. Five plays by three prominent playwrights of the decade are used to illustrate and expand the focus. After a detailed examination of the apocalyptic discourse, it is claimed that Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Faust is Dead are based on certain philosophical ideas of the End, Anthony Neilson’s Normal and Penetrator reveal the apocalyptic through an extreme use of violence, and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis comingles representations of the apocalyptic and psychological trauma.

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 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.

Il presente lavoro cerca di mettere in evidenza la violenza che ingloba
la scrittura drammatica di Sarah Kane e si concentra  sull'esame dell'opera 4.48 Psychosis .  Inoltre si esaminerà  la violenza dalla prospettiva critica del teatro in faccia-In-yer-face theatre-  un genere drammatico emerso in Gran Bretagna negli anni '90.

"This article analyzes the Senecan background to Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love by focusing upon both playwrights’ predilections for graphic violence and sexual content. Kane’s version of the Phaedra story presents sex, death and mutilation as acts that often defy meaning – these phenomena have such a strong experiential impact that they are slow to move into the referential realm of sign and symbol. By placing these acts centre stage, Kane also implicates the audience. Of course, we cannot propose the same performance effects for Senecan tragedy, owing to lack
of evidence. Nonetheless Seneca’s work, like Kane’s, plays upon dramaturgic techniques of showing and telling: Phaedra’s passion is nefas, simultaneously immoral and something she physically cannot speak. Death is also meaningless in Seneca: the final scene shows Theseus trying and failing to make sense of his son’s torn body. Both Seneca and Sarah Kane push the boundaries between theatrical illusion and visual reality and, in the process, comment on the nature of theatre itself."

Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) scandalised its early audiences with its staging of sexual violence, war crimes, and cannibalism. One reviewer famously described it as a ‘disgusting feast of filth’, an appraisal which unwittingly captures the centrality of questions of appetite to the play’s ethical project. In this essay, I argue that attention to the consumption of meat is crucial to a fuller understanding of the play’s well-documented interest in sexual violence and militarism. I trace how Kane brings meat into an economy of exchange, hospitality, and gift-giving which, while ostensibly driven by care, is nonetheless thoroughly structured by violence.

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.

Abstract
This chapter studies the relations between the experiential theater of Sarah Kane and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater theory. Postdramatic theater is a new interpretation of the artful representation of the human-being through a set of novel aesthetics that get rid of the traditional dramatic concepts such as authoritative dramatic text, mimesis, representation, and linear and regular flow of events. In this sense, this study examines how and to what extent some significant characteristics of Kane’s plays, especially their breaking away from the text and traditional plot construction, and the apocalyptic discourse are conducive in revealing the postdramatic in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. (Although the original study is in Turkish, I have its English translation as well. If you are interested in reading the chapter in English please contact me.)

Caryl Churchill's plays thematically embody elements of many-isms such as feminism, sexism, capitalism, and socialism, labeling her dramaturgy as an eclectic combination of social philosophies and political ideologies. Although genuinely creative and original in her writing and theatrical practices, Caryl Churchill does not refrain from making use of preceding European theatrical theory, practice, and culture. In this sense, she is a playwright who benefits considerably from the thematic and technical aspects of the Brechtian epic theatre, which can be observed in her Mad Forest. Sarah Kane, on the other hand, with her experimental dramaturgy that stretches and twists features of realism and naturalism into new post-dramatic forms, is no less different from her predecessor Caryl Churchill in terms of embracing challenging, confrontational ideas and reflecting them in her plays. Notwithstanding with her openness to novel dramatic styles, Sarah Kane, too, acknowledges earlier dramatic aesthetics as seen in her Phaedra's Love, which is an adaptation of the classical Roman playwright Seneca's Phaedra. Likewise, it can be observed that Sarah Kane utilizes certain features of the Brechtian epic theater in her Cleansed. Considering these, this article studies how and to what extent Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane maintain the Brechtian dramatic elements in their Mad Forest and Cleansed, respectively. By examining this tripartite interaction among Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, the study also tries to reinterpret the dramatic relations among these seemingly distant playwrights of different generations.

Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill are two major playwrights of ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ which basically aims to shock and shake the audience and to create somehow "cathartic relief" by the extreme use of language, nudity and images of violence. Kane’s "4.48 Psychosis" is almost like a diary of Kane, probably revealing her own psychosis before her committing suicide. The play is the presentation of one’s depression in a monologue-like speech. Ravenhill’s "Shopping and Fucking" presents contemporary British youth life in which sex, drugs and crime dominate over human relationships. One may comment that these two examples of ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ are aggressive and provocative in tone, beyond "normal" boundaries.

Que veut dire Martin Crimp lorsqu’il explique que, dans ses pièces Attempts on Her Life (1997) et la trilogie Fewer Emergencies (2005), « l’espace dramatique est un espace mental, pas un espace physique »  ? Comment comprendre cette « mentalisation » du drame initiée par Samuel Beckett (That Time, Not I, Footfalls), continuée par Harold Pinter (Moonlight, Silence) mais aussi explorée par Sarah Kane dans Crave (1998) et 4.48 Psychosis (2000), et poursuivie aujourd’hui selon diverses modalités poétiques par d’autres auteurs britanniques (Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green…) ? Est-il possible de concilier l’écriture et l’exploration dramatique de la psyché – et si oui, comment ? – avec le phénomène concurrent d’une « quantisation » de la scène, dont témoigne la multiplication de pièces « quantiques » par des auteurs comme Michael Frayn, Simon Stephens et Nick Payne ? Depuis la fin des années 1990 jusqu’à aujourd’hui, de telles pièces renouvellent le rapport du théâtre à l’espace physique – et non mental – en s’appliquant, à la suite de Tom Stoppard, à dramatiser les découvertes et les hypothèses révolutionnaires de la physique quantique. Parallèlement, l’émergence d’un théâtre que l’on pourrait dire non plus tant « in-yer-face » que « in-yer-head » appelle à s’interroger sur le développement d’un corpus de pièces dont l’intérêt porte sur le fonctionnement de la psyché humaine, de l’inconscient et de la conscience, et à analyser les modalités et les implications de l’écriture et de la mise en scène de l’espace mental ou du psychisme (mind) sur la scène britannique des vingt dernières années. Tandis qu’Aleks Sierz décrivait, au tout début des années 2000, la violence frontale, viscérale et spectaculaire, essentiellement physique et ancrée dans l’expérience sensorielle, développée au cours des « nasty nineties » par des écritures scandaleuses et subversives, les dramaturgies de l’espace mental explorent le non-dit, l’indicible, l’oblique, le trou, le fantôme, approchant ainsi « l’endroit le plus sombre [qui] est toujours sous la lampe » (Crimp, Atteintes à sa vie). Portées par les pièces expérimentales de Crimp et les derniers textes de Kane, mais également explorées par d’autres auteurs de théâtre depuis l’entrée dans le vingt-et-unième siècle – y compris ceux désignés initialement comme les autres piliers de l’esthétique « in-yer-face » (Ravenhill, Neilson, ou encore Ridley) –, les « réalités rivales »  invisibles de nos imaginaires mais aussi des théories quantiques se donnent à voir sur la scène du théâtre britanniuque. Des théâtres de l’absence, qui s’élaborent autour du sacrifice du personnage féminin principal (Attempts on Her Life de Crimp, 4.48 Psychosis de Kane), jusqu’aux théâtres de l’incertitude, qui abordent l’indétermination psychique par le biais de la thématique quantique et de la catégorie des possibles (Copenhagen de Michael Frayn, Heisenberg de Simon Stephens, Constellations de Nick Payne), en passant par les théâtres de la dissociation, qui explorent le traumatisme et les manifestations de la souffrance psychique et cognitive (Blue Heart de Caryl Churchill, Three Women and a Piano Tuner de Helen Cooper), les contradictions entre les multiples versions du drame, qui se déploie sous une forme fragmentée, déconstruite, plurielle et inaboutie, (re)localisent le véritable drame de l’humain dans le doute, l’indéterminé, les probabilités. A travers la violence et la performativité du langage, de telles pièces renversent la perspective en s’appuyant sur un changement de paradigme qui permet d’interroger la vérité impossible du sujet dont le visage se spectralise, « scotché au verso de [s]on esprit » .

If citing or quoting from this document please reference it as follows:
‘Nina Kane: Artist-in-Residence Daily Log, 29 January - 10 February 2018, Wakabacho Wharf, Yokohama, Japan. Japanese translation by Tomoco Kawaguchi’, Academia. Edu, 18 January 2019, https://www.academia.edu/38163823/Artist-in-Residence_Daily_Log_Japan-Britain_Exchange_on_Sarah_Kanes_Theatre, (access date).

From 28th January-9th February 2018, Nina Kane undertook a dramaturgical residency at Wakabacho Wharf, Yokohama, Japan at the kind invitation of directors Tomoco Kawaguchi and Satoh Makoto. The residency was funded by the Kanagawa Prefecture (many thanks to them). The aim of the trip was to further dramaturgical exchange on  staging Sarah Kane's plays in Japan and the UK - a research relationship that has existed between Tomoco Kawaguchi and Nina Kane since 2012. The daily log here was written and published on Wakabacho Wharf's facebook page as part of a public record of the visit for the Kanagawa funders' evaluation purposes. It also formed an artistic record for the wider research project. This particular trip focused on a staged, in-house reading of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, and initiated a two-year project between the partners on ths play.

This document can also be found online at https://www.tomococafe.com/posts/3698759.

This paper figures the new principle for British modern theatre in particular, in the frame of ‘post-traumatic’ history which will free all repressed traumas of history and community that is neglected by them, and be taken back to them with inherent violence of their images. Last decade of 20th century began with the harsh and brutal performances of the group of opposing young directors whom had a problem with their generation. Categorizing them in the same group, Aleks Sierz named them ‘in-yer-face theatre’. This much of violence on the stage exemplified deep traumas which were buried in the traumatic history. Sarah Kane one of the main figures of this group fulfilled the aim of political theatre by the process I borrowed from recent psychoanalytic researches. She wrote her fifth and last play, ‘4.48 psychoses’, just before her suicide in 1999. Mentioning reinterpretation of traumas after the mid 20th century, I focus on Judith Herman and Cathy Caruth’s surveys, as the members of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) studies. This group has posed new definition for traumatic dreams and memories by devising the term ‘traumatic reenactment’. The victim who suffers from these kinds of dreams and memories is lack of drama. It seems part of him has died and everything has stood in that horrible moment which belongs to the past. In this sense, this singular possession by the past extends beyond the bounds of a marginal pathology and has become a central characteristic of the survivor experience of our time. Yet, what is particularly striking in this singular experience is that its insistent reenactments of the past do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred. Curing these traumas, we both urgently demand historical experience. By reinterpretation of new tragedy in the frame of post-dramatic theatre we could access to a traumatic history. The relationship between community and individuals is inseparable and there will be the unity and tension simultaneously between them. By this relation the spectator acts as a witness and even victim since at the same time he was the observant of his own trauma and others too. So, the entire scene becomes traumatic reenactment of a singular traumatic event which has been fixed in the specific moment of past. By reenacting the past, each actor or spectator stays in the liminal state, as a ritual performance. This moment is the moment of pure consciousness. This will be happened by transgressing the boundaries between the Real and reality, as Jacque Lacan mentioned.  Thus, this will be the reborn of the new tragedy which is happened as a tension between two senses: terror/ need. As a result, in the explosion of the Real the missing memory is transformed to narrative language which moves both groups to the shared memory, and this is the aim of political theatre. ‘4.48 psychoses’ can be an appropriate scene for representing this kind of tragedy. 

Keywords: British theatre, tragedy, traumatic reenactment, Sarah Kane, 4.48 psychoses

This thesis intends to show that the work of playwright Sarah Kane has been mislabelled ‘New Nihilist’, a tag that miss directs her audience and diminishes her contribution to British theatre. Each chapter will deal with one of her first three plays, Blasted, Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed. They will delve into the use of violence as a metaphor for love and the innately human urge to make connections with others. The search and hopefulness of a unity with another is paramount to Kane’s characters. The paper will show how the use of heterotopian settings allows the degradation and brutality of humanity to be explored within the safety of a visual unreal locale. Whilst discussing the complicit nature of the audience, and relationships between actor and voyeur, the work of Kane will be given a new label, that of Heuristic Realist. These experiential works will be shown to be uplifting, hopeful and true love stories, and as such not works that can be included under the title, ‘New Nihilist’.

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.