Freie Universität Berlin
Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften
Institut für Englische Philologie

Schriftliche Hausarbeit
zur Erlangung des Grades Magistra Artium
im Fach Englische Literaturwissenschaft

Violence in Contemporary British Drama - Sarah Kane’s play "Cleansed"

Lea Jasmin Gutscher

Table of contents

1 Introduction ... 3

2 The theatrical background ... 6

3 Sarah Kane’s dramatic art ... 9

3.1 Kane’s writing: similarities and points of difference in her plays ... 9
3.2 The interaction between realism and surrealism ... 12
3.3 The art of reduction ... 14

4 A critical analysis of Cleansed ... 18

4.1 Form and content of the play ... 18
4.2 Themes ... 23
    4.2.1 Love ... 24
    4.2.2 Identity ... 32
        4.2.2.1 Sexual identity ... 40
        4.2.2.2 The incongruity of body and soul ... 41
    4.2.3 Language ... 43
        4.2.3.1 The word “lovely” ... 43
        4.2.3.2 The struggle with language ... 47
        4.2.3.3 The powerlessness of language ... 50
4.3 Imagery and symbolism ... 53
    4.3.1 The element of flowers ... 55
    4.3.2 The element of light ... 57
    4.3.3 The image of blindness ... 61

5 The use and function of violence ... 63

5.1 Influences on Kane and her treatment of violence ... 63
5.2 Physical violence ... 69
    5.2.1 Self-mutilation and suicide as extreme forms of physical violence ... 75
5.3 Verbal violence ... 79
    5.3.1 Words as weapons ... 81

6 The spectator’s role ... 89

7 Conclusion ... 94

8 Bibliography ... 98

9 Appendix: summary of the thesis in German ... 104

1 Introduction

When Sarah Kane, born in 1971 in Essex, England, committed suicide at the age of 28 in February 1999, she left five plays and the script for a ten minute screenplay. Kane had dedicated much of her short life to the understanding, exploration and (re)invention of drama. While still at school she started writing and acting, activities which she continued at university, where she further experimented with theatre and where she also took up directing.¹ After leaving the University of Bristol with a First Class Honours Degree in drama studies, she enrolled at Birmingham University and crowned her education with a Master’s degree in playwriting.² After several minor dramatic experiments, staged as student productions in unofficial venues, her first full-length play, Blasted, premièred at the Royal Court Theatre in London in January 1995.³ The play immediately became notorious for its depiction of all kinds of physical and verbal violence for which it was fiercely attacked by both public opinion and reviewers.⁴ The fact that the plays which followed contained many unspeakable scenes of sheer cruelty, earned her the reputation as the enfant terrible of contemporary British drama.⁵ During her brief career Sarah Kane created a body of work that brought her both success and notoriety. Her controversial theatre divided critics and audiences from the beginning. While some attacked her persistently, others recognised her as a new voice, and after she explored and discovered different linguistic and theatrical devices, critical approval followed.⁶ Among those who defended her work, acknowledging her merits and her potential, were Harold Pinter and Edward Bond,⁷ two playwrights to whom I shall return throughout my study since there are interesting parallels between their work and the one of Sarah Kane, which they both influenced.
Kane’s plays emerged in a short span of time between 1993 and 1999. In addition to Blasted, they include Phaedra’s Love (1996),⁸ Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis, which was written in 1998/99 and first published and produced posthumously in 2000. She also wrote the script for a short film for television, entitled Skin, which was written in 1995 and produced by British Screen/Channel 4 in 1997. Her work was immediately translated into the most important international languages. She undoubtedly made a strong impact on contemporary British theatre and influenced the writing of many authors, but her unique plays are pieces of art which stand on their own.
I have already mentioned the critical and public uproar that greeted Kane’s work throughout the years due to its disturbingly explicit violence and scenes which, through their intensity, stamp themselves upon our minds. Violence in drama is an interesting yet complex concept, the various forms and functions of which have been widely discussed for as long as it has appeared. It can be found in both Ancient and Renaissance theatre as well as in modern, post-modern and contemporary drama. Although it was used as a device in the theatre of each epoch, it is striking that violence features largely in contemporary drama, and especially in the work of young playwrights who started emerging at the end of the twentieth century.
Being interested in and fascinated by the writing of Sarah Kane and having seen all of her dramatic pieces performed on stage, I ask the question that presses itself upon most readers or spectators of her plays: what purpose does the excessive use of violence serve? Is it employed for its shock value, or is it integral to the plot such as setting or imagery? In order to make sense of her otherwise crude and bleak plays, I thought about interpreting certain acts in a figurative sense. This assumption is supported by Kane herself, who, on several occasions, intimated using violence as a metaphor, thus suggesting the possibility of finding the meaning of extremely intense and cruel scenes behind the act, not within it. Bearing this idea in mind, I will examine the nature of violence in her writing, its manifold forms and the different levels on which it operates. By analysing significant passages of her drama which are relevant to the subject, it will be the task of this study to get to the bottom of Kane’s use of violence and to investigate if and to what extent the various illustrations of brutality can be interpreted as metaphoric. Despite the fact that each of Kane’s five plays abounds in violent scenes of different sorts, I shall mainly concentrate on Cleansed, her third full-length play to be staged, which I consider the nucleus of her writing, from both a stylistic and a thematic point of view. However, I will show parallels and point out elements of recurrence in all of her work.
In the following chapter I will shortly point out the theatrical background in which Kane’s drama emerged. A brief outline of the theatre in the 1990s will be given, also considering the so-called “in-yer-face” theatre to which the decade gave rise and whose most noticeable feature is the explicit representation of violence and sex. Chapter Three surveys typical characteristics of Sarah Kane’s dramatic art. Central to this investigation of her styles and features will be the subtle interplay of realism and surrealism in her work, as well as the author’s increasing abandonment of formal considerations and her Beckettian reduction from physicalisation to text. Chapter Four offers a critical analysis of Cleansed and will, after a more general overview concerning its formal and thematic nature, profoundly investigate the play’s themes, imagery and symbolism, which are the major devices by which the play is realised and its message conveyed. The main themes in the play are love, identity and language, while its symbolism is predominantly characterised by the appearance of the flowers and the use of light. In this chapter I will also consider the problems which performing the play poses and which generally arise when producing a Kane play. Chapter Five is dedicated to Kane’s fascination with violence. Analysing its use and function, I will concentrate on physical violence and violence that is motivated by language. Chapter Six will look at the function of the spectator who is assigned a variety of roles in Kane’s work: not only is he or she the one who makes the play work by translating into reality what is happening on stage, but the audience also has to live through the same experiences as the characters. They are both victims and accomplices. In Chapter Seven I will give a brief summary of the main points of my study and, in the hope of having found an answer to the questions I have posed, draw a final conclusion.
Instead of drawing on any scholarly apparatus or discussing Sarah Kane’s work in terms of one of the various theoretical (dramatic) frameworks, I will rather try not to push her writing in a certain direction nor reduce it by assigning it to a certain movement. By means of a close and accurate reading of her texts, my study attempts to approach the work of the late, young writer which, until today, has remained little- or even misunderstood.

[...]

1 See Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 91-2.
2 See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 91-2; see also Graham Saunders, “Love me or kill me”: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 39. The University of Birmingham’s postgraduate course in playwriting studies was founded by dramatist David Edgar in 1989; see David Edgar (ed.), State of Play. Issue 1: Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. vii, 34.
3 See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 91-3; see also Dan Rebellato, “Sarah Kane: an Appreciation,” New Theatre Quarterly, 59 (1999), p. 280.
4 Cf. Sarah Kane who considered the uproar as being launched exclusively by the press: “I think it’s important not to confuse press with audience. There was media outrage, but it was never a public outcry.” Kane, quoted in Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason. Women Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 130.
5 See Aleks Sierz, “Beyond Timidity? The State of British New Writing,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 81 (2005), p. 55.
6 See David Greig, “Introduction,” in Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. x.
7 See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 96-7; see also Saunders, “Love me or kill me,” pp. xi, 24-5 and Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, Changing Stages. A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 375. Pinter was full of praise for Kane’s debut Blasted; see David Sexton, “Life in the old dog yet,” The Daily Telegraph, 16 March 1995, p. 12; see also Simon Hattenstone, “A sad hurrah,” The Guardian Weekend, 1 July 2000, p. 31. Bond positively comments on Kane’s first four plays in his letter to the young playwright; see Edward Bond, “Letter to Sarah Kane, 15 September 1997,” in Edward Bond, Letters 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 167-9. He also speaks highly of Blasted and Cleansed in his letter to the writer Michael Mangan; see Edward Bond, “Letter to Michael Mangan, 12 April 1997,” in Bond, Letters 1, p. 139. After the young playwright’s death Bond wrote a passionate appreciation of Kane in which he compares her to those dramatists whose work “changes the human reality.” Edward Bond, “Sarah Kane and theatre,” in Saunders, “Love me or kill me,” pp. 189-91.
8 The years given behind all plays mentioned in this study refer to the first publication, not the first production of the work.