Sarah Kane

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

Paper given at the Bond@50, University of Warwick symposium, 2nd November 2012. An updated and extended version of this paper can be found in my PhD thesis. See profile info for link.

"This paper explores something of the connection between Edward Bond's and Sarah Kane's theatres. It recognises the importance of ghosts in Bond's 'Lear' and Kane's 'Cleansed', and asks what we can infer from their substantive presences on the stage. It also recognises the importance of language as a political tool for each playwright, and applies some working principles of breath to the reading of these plays. The paper concludes with some reflections on gender, and on the political implications of crude stitching in both 'Cleansed' and 'Saved'."

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.

Resumen

El cuerpo en el territorio artístico ha sido utilizado no solo como medio de expresión de emociones sino también como el elemento central del discurso artístico. En las teatralidades contemporáneas este discurso se hace latente; el artista del mundo contemporáneo indaga e investiga, interrogándose en profundidad sobre la función de un cuerpo en escena, que no cumple solo con la función de transmitir un texto al espectador, sino que resemantiza la obra convirtiéndose en un elemento más de la puesta en escena.

Teniendo en cuenta esta premisa centro el presente artículo en la obra de la dramaturga inglesa Sarah Kane, porque en ella el cuerpo es el responsable de resemantizar y materializar las convulsiones del amor contemporáneo.

Palabras clave: amor, cuerpo, Sarah Kane, teatro contemporáneo inglés.



LOVE CORPORATIONS IN VIOLENT TIMES: considerations around the writings of Sarah Kane

Abstract

This article questions about the modalities of war representation throughout puppets or objects in the contemporary theatrical creation, starting from a corpus of several European shows: Kamp and The Big War” by the Netherlands Company Modern Hotel, which evoke respectively the extermination Nazi camps and the first Word war; Zanjas of the French company Zapoï and the older founder of the Georgian Rezo Gabriatze: The Stalingrado Battle. The focus is particular: rather than analyzing the scenic representation of violence, it is a reflection on the notion of “animation”, which belongs to the theater of puppets, to show the specific procedures of the puppets figures in this creations, making of the war the place for a dialectic between the “discouraged” humanity and the persistence of a “soul” in the same life of the objects and the matter.

Keywords: puppet, object, matter, theater, war, animation, discouraged



AS FORMAS CORPORAIS DO AMOR EM TEMPOS VIOLENTOS: considerações sobre os escritos de Sarah Kane

Resumo

O corpo no território artístico foi usado, não só como um meio de expressão de emoções, mas também como o elemento central do discurso artístico. No exibicionismo contemporâneo esse discurso torna-se latente; o artista do mundo contemporâneo inquire e faz pesquisa, questionando em profundidade a função de um corpo na cena, que não só cumpre a função de transmitir o texto ao espectador mas também ressemantiza o trabalho se tornando outro elemento da encenação.

Dada esta premissa o foco da minha apresentação será o trabalho da dramaturga Inglesa Sarah Kane, porque em seus textos o corpo é o responsável de ressemantizar e materializar as convulsões do amor contemporâneo.

Palavras-chave: amor, corpo, Sarah Kane, teatro contemporâneo inglés.



CORPORALITÉS DE L’AMOUR EN TEMPS DE VIOLENCE: considérations autour des écrits de Sarah Kane

Résumé

Dans le champ artistique, le corps a été utilisé non seulement comme moyen d’expression d’émotions mais aussi comme l’élément central du discours artistique. Dans les théâtralités contemporaines, ce discours devient latent ; l’artiste du monde contemporain explore et recherche, interrogeant en profondeur la fonction d’un corps en scène qui ne remplit plus seulement la fonction de transmettre un texte au spectateur, mais resémantise l’œuvre en se transformant en un élément supplémentaire de la mise en scène.

Partant de cette hypothèse, cet article se centre sur l’œuvre de la dramaturge anglaise Sarah Kane, parce que, dans son théâtre, c’est au corps qu’incombe la responsabilité de resémantiser et de matérialiser les convulsions de l’amour contemporain.

Mots-clés: amour, corps, Sarah Kane, théâtre contemporain anglais.

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.

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/

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 » .

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.

Beckett e Kane são duas referências literárias associadas à temática literária do Absurdo, focando a sua exploração nos sentimentos de angústia e desespero, normalmente associados a questões do foro psicológico.
Tendo por base o Teatro do Absurdo, bem como a procura incessante de uma identidade pessoal, este ensaio pretende comparar a peça de teatro Waiting for Godot (1953), de Samuel Beckett com Blasted (1995), de Sarah Kane, demonstrando a evolução do Teatro do Absurdo dos anos ’90. Esta mesma evolução, articulada com uma busca de identidade pessoal - por vezes perturbada, envolta em crises existenciais - é particularmente evidente na peça de Kane, considerada por críticos como repugnante e obscena pela forma como a dramaturga transpõe a problemática da procura de uma identidade pessoal.

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.

Sarah Kane’s oeuvre enables us to see how the body, which was initially foregrounded in her work, gradually disappears. The body that was once abused, exposed, mistreated in Blasted, to the extent that it was unbearable in performance, is reduced to a voice, in 4.48 Psychosis, whose language defies the laws of grammar and which seems to circulate like a bodiless soul. This article seeks to interpret the gradual disappearance of the body on stage as a questioning of the clinical construction of the subject, and an attempt at representing it as a subject of language, against cognitive psychology. The aim is to show how madness evolves from a theoretical construction in which it is a deviation from normalcy to a discourse that construes it as a response to the real, as defined by J. Lacan.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

The paper explains how ‘dys-appearance’ (Leder 1990) as a mode of embodiment
identifies with doubleness and alterity in mixed-media theatre. In Petros
Sevastikoglou’s production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (Empros Theatre,
Athens 2003), the dynamic co-existence of selfhood and otherness is expressed
through the process of ‘reversibility’; in a sense both physical and technological
entities are divided and then reunited building up a cohesive mixed-media event.
Self as one side of the Other and technological body as the other facet of the
physical compose a ‘chiasmic’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964) experience on stage.

An audio recording of this paper can be downloaded at Chirbit by cutting and pasting the following link into your browser.
- http://chirb.it/LqfGyK

"The paper draws on dramaturgical enquiry into Sarah Kane's 1998 play Cleansed, carried out in a university studio space and a public gallery setting. The enquiry applied the philosophies of Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, positing Cleansed as a theatrical meditation on gender - one that requires actors to develop an ethics for the performing of sex, desire and violence. The research found that Irigaray's and Butler's ideas can be usefully applied to explore and contest binary constructions of gender, and provide vital philosophical frameworks for staging sexuate difference and transgender becoming in Kane's text. Cleansed centres its trajectory on an investigation of clothing and bodies which implicates and indicates the gender binary as a site of contestation, violence, desire, making, unmaking, resistance and mucosity. It encodes significant lesbian aesthetics of butch-femme play and languour in its performance structure. Its focus on sexuate difference, 'one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue of our age' (Irigaray), and its movement between genders is supported with dramatisations of touch and breath at key gestic moments. The paper discusses how actors chose to stage these moments, analysing the choices made with reference to The Forgetting of Air, Sexes and Genealogies, The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, and This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray). It discusses the nature of speech and desire - particularly female and lesbian desire - and the denial or erasure of this, with reference to Antigone's Claim (Butler). It reflects on the aesthetics of female and queer authorship at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, and the traces of this historical moment in Cleansed. Finally, it contextualises Kane's representations of gender violence with reference to Frames of War (Butler) and notes how philosophical discussions of time and irreducible difference can assist inter-generational dialogue in the rehearsal room."

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 article shows how postdramatic works for the theatre invite us into conceptual regions wherein the distinction between the diegetic and the mimetic modes is effectively blurred. Not only does this interfusion of mimesis and diegesis make the boundaries between the ‘fictitious’ theatrical reality and the non-theatrical somewhat permeable, but it also invites us to re-conceptualize mimesis as an act of production within a work. This auto-generative mimesis accounts for a self-propelled, non-purposive, and fluxional becoming that allows a given arrangement within a play to ever constitute itself anew. In order to arrive at a definition of mimesis as a dynamic constitutive motion from within a work, I look at the generative ontology of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his concept of ‘expression’. This type of mimesis becomes capable of showing how plays are involved in self-constitutive processes that recompose their fabric from within. In being such, mimesis assumes the role of a generative force in the composition of literary worlds in drama.

How do we as writers resist the dominance of narratives dictated primarily by a market mentality and/or assumed homogeneity? In this paper, Nina Rapi, will explore how certain theatre practitioners, e.g. Howard Barker, Debbie Tucker Green, Sarah Kane, have resisted dominant narratives and created oppositional aesthetics, through stylistic/thematic choices and/or foregrounding cultural identity. N.R. will also refer to her own work.

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 » .