Researching Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane is the other play write that we are studying for our contemporary unit and we discussed her in class and I also did some research about her outside of the classroom. She was writing between 1995-1999, up until she died aged 28 in 1999. She came from the Royal Court Theatre, which pushes new writing and at the time of her debut, she was at the forefront of a very visceral and explosive type of theatre. The theatre was shocking to an audience and the language that was used was similar to Berkoff but very dis-similar in terms of the themes which for Kane were more socially orientated. When the play that we are studying, "Blasted", was first reviewed, it was particularly slated by some critics, because they claimed it to be immature writing, a series of explosive actions just to make the audience react in a certain way. Although this could be seen as a fair point, there are many things in her writing that are interesting and the fact that her plays are still being performed nearly 20 years after they were originally written says something about her writing. A reviewer coined the phrase, "In-yer-face Theatre", that has been associated with this type of theatre. It's not a style that she created and then set to follow but it's the style that many people use to describe her theatre. The majority of her plays deal with themes such as love, sexual desire, pain, torture of both the physical and psychological nature, and death. They have an almost poetic intensity and include the exploration of theatrical form and her earlier work also includes the use of extreme and violent stage action. She originally wanted to be a poet, but decided that she was unable to convey her thoughts and feelings through poetry. She once wrote that she was attracted to the stage because "theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts...I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind."
Blasted was first produced in 1995 at the Royal Court and then produced again in 2001. It was a very controversial play of its time and was fiercely attacked in the British papers. It was later seen to be making parallels between domestic violence and the war in Bosnia, and between emotional and physical violence. An assistant director of one production suggested that "the argument is made through form, through the shifts in styles throughout Blasted. That's how she constructs the argument, by taking this setting in an English Northern industrial town and suddenly transporting the action to a war zone." The critical realism that the first scene sets up is literally blasted apart in scene two. A critic once said that "for Kane, hell is not metaphysical: it is hyper-real, reality magnified."
We talked about the synopsis of the play and found that it was based around the character of Ian who is dying of lung cancer and the first scene includes him and Cate who we suspect has a mental condition due to her actions and body language that is described in the stage directions. Ian is depicted as racist, homophobic and misogynistic through his language and attitude towards others in the play, especially Cate. He abuses his position as the older man in the couple and projects his thoughts and opinions onto her. Ian becomes completely disillusioned by the horrific lengths that humans can go to in both his life as a journalist and also in real life. Ian is left blind after a visit from a soldier and he essentially becomes reliant on Cate. Cate is young and innocent in comparison to Ian. She is naive and her occasional stuttering reflect her nervous disposition which is back up when she passes out when she is overwhelmed or intimidated. Her youth makes her a representative for the more progressive views in society and she retaliates when Ian uses racial slur or anti-politically correct language. Cate seems unfazed by the horrors that are being described outside the hotel room and she is even willing to escape the hotel room and venture into the war torn outside world. Her progressive outlook makes her more socially aware than Ian and by the end of the play he is completely reliant on her and she becomes the one in the position of power.
After reading through the play we started discussing the language that's included and mainly from Ian. The language that Ian uses is quite shocking at the beginning of the play and then the audience almost become accustomed to the way that he speaks. There has been a gradual increasing of intolerance for racist language from the time in which the play was written and so the audience may not find the language as terribly shocking as we do at this day and age. It would still be language that the audience may not come across very often but it wouldn't be as shocking as in our modern society. The events that happen throughout the play seem to never end in terms of shock factor as each event seems to be the worst thing that could happen yet there are more scenes to come. It's almost exhausting to the audience in a way who are watching it for the first time as there are so many extreme event being shown onstage and it can be quite draining. At the end of the play, there is almost a breakdown in the style of the play and it is beginning to feel like the scenes are getting shorter and the events are getting harder to keep track of in a logic timeline. Part of that fracturing is due to the passage of time and in one way not much time has passed at all but its feels different because of the suggestion of the different seasons being mentioned in the stage directions.
The end section of the play where we see Ian in different positions around the room could reflect his deterioration throughout the passage of time and it is almost a review of the play in shorter scenes. When the lighting switches from blackout to full lights very quickly yet methodically, it could show the pain that Ian is in being by himself and possibly reflecting his blindness at this point in the play. It almost goes through all of the different needs of the human race and the base survival instinct of man. It looks at human nature as there is sexual drives, emotional response, regret, fear, need for food and then at the end death as thought it is a type of relief yet you keep going and when the rain pours on his face and he realises that he is still alive it's almost like he has done all of these things just to want to die. The play could be focusing on what violent conduct does to society and what war does to society. Possibly commenting on how sometimes we are set apart from that in the west and it's presentation in a very extreme way and when you come to the end of play, we see a small act of kindness from Cate and she is being a good person to this character who seems to have been engineered for the audience to dislike.
In comparison to Brecht, Sarah Kane appears to potentially want the same message to be taken from her work that the audience need to change how they act about certain issues in the world yet they both present it differently onstage. Brecht focuses on the political aspects that are behind the conversation and events wheres Kane focuses on the social effects that events can have and how we act with other in response to these major events. It has been said that Kane made no reference to the struggles that she was going through mentally and since her suicide, audience's have noticed connections between her life and her writing. When Kane was discussing Blasted in an interview, she mentioned the haunting newspaper image of a Bosnian woman hanging from a tree that emphasises the start of a civil war. Some say if it weren't for Blasted "In-Yer-Face" theatre wouldn't have had the impact that it did in the 1990s. James Macdonald, who directed an array of Kane's play says that "the media painted her as a wild axe-girl, but actually she was far more theatre-literate than most writers of her age. To shake it up a bit - with an ambition and urgency and passion that's often lacking. She wasn't just symptomatic of the 1990s - what was refreshing was that she was up to something different from most of her generation. She was writing about politics in her own way." As for Brecht, he was writing in the early 1900s and so is influences were different to Kane's, especially since Brecht was writing when the Nazis were coming into power and he was actually on a wanted list because his writing was so anti-Nazi. Clearly the two writers have different influences meaning that the styles and the topics of the play will be different but they both wanted to provoke the audience to question their lives and perhaps cause them to question their actions both past and present, whether that be socially, in terms of Kane, or politically, in Brecht's case.
Blasted was first produced in 1995 at the Royal Court and then produced again in 2001. It was a very controversial play of its time and was fiercely attacked in the British papers. It was later seen to be making parallels between domestic violence and the war in Bosnia, and between emotional and physical violence. An assistant director of one production suggested that "the argument is made through form, through the shifts in styles throughout Blasted. That's how she constructs the argument, by taking this setting in an English Northern industrial town and suddenly transporting the action to a war zone." The critical realism that the first scene sets up is literally blasted apart in scene two. A critic once said that "for Kane, hell is not metaphysical: it is hyper-real, reality magnified."
We talked about the synopsis of the play and found that it was based around the character of Ian who is dying of lung cancer and the first scene includes him and Cate who we suspect has a mental condition due to her actions and body language that is described in the stage directions. Ian is depicted as racist, homophobic and misogynistic through his language and attitude towards others in the play, especially Cate. He abuses his position as the older man in the couple and projects his thoughts and opinions onto her. Ian becomes completely disillusioned by the horrific lengths that humans can go to in both his life as a journalist and also in real life. Ian is left blind after a visit from a soldier and he essentially becomes reliant on Cate. Cate is young and innocent in comparison to Ian. She is naive and her occasional stuttering reflect her nervous disposition which is back up when she passes out when she is overwhelmed or intimidated. Her youth makes her a representative for the more progressive views in society and she retaliates when Ian uses racial slur or anti-politically correct language. Cate seems unfazed by the horrors that are being described outside the hotel room and she is even willing to escape the hotel room and venture into the war torn outside world. Her progressive outlook makes her more socially aware than Ian and by the end of the play he is completely reliant on her and she becomes the one in the position of power.
After reading through the play we started discussing the language that's included and mainly from Ian. The language that Ian uses is quite shocking at the beginning of the play and then the audience almost become accustomed to the way that he speaks. There has been a gradual increasing of intolerance for racist language from the time in which the play was written and so the audience may not find the language as terribly shocking as we do at this day and age. It would still be language that the audience may not come across very often but it wouldn't be as shocking as in our modern society. The events that happen throughout the play seem to never end in terms of shock factor as each event seems to be the worst thing that could happen yet there are more scenes to come. It's almost exhausting to the audience in a way who are watching it for the first time as there are so many extreme event being shown onstage and it can be quite draining. At the end of the play, there is almost a breakdown in the style of the play and it is beginning to feel like the scenes are getting shorter and the events are getting harder to keep track of in a logic timeline. Part of that fracturing is due to the passage of time and in one way not much time has passed at all but its feels different because of the suggestion of the different seasons being mentioned in the stage directions.
The end section of the play where we see Ian in different positions around the room could reflect his deterioration throughout the passage of time and it is almost a review of the play in shorter scenes. When the lighting switches from blackout to full lights very quickly yet methodically, it could show the pain that Ian is in being by himself and possibly reflecting his blindness at this point in the play. It almost goes through all of the different needs of the human race and the base survival instinct of man. It looks at human nature as there is sexual drives, emotional response, regret, fear, need for food and then at the end death as thought it is a type of relief yet you keep going and when the rain pours on his face and he realises that he is still alive it's almost like he has done all of these things just to want to die. The play could be focusing on what violent conduct does to society and what war does to society. Possibly commenting on how sometimes we are set apart from that in the west and it's presentation in a very extreme way and when you come to the end of play, we see a small act of kindness from Cate and she is being a good person to this character who seems to have been engineered for the audience to dislike.
In comparison to Brecht, Sarah Kane appears to potentially want the same message to be taken from her work that the audience need to change how they act about certain issues in the world yet they both present it differently onstage. Brecht focuses on the political aspects that are behind the conversation and events wheres Kane focuses on the social effects that events can have and how we act with other in response to these major events. It has been said that Kane made no reference to the struggles that she was going through mentally and since her suicide, audience's have noticed connections between her life and her writing. When Kane was discussing Blasted in an interview, she mentioned the haunting newspaper image of a Bosnian woman hanging from a tree that emphasises the start of a civil war. Some say if it weren't for Blasted "In-Yer-Face" theatre wouldn't have had the impact that it did in the 1990s. James Macdonald, who directed an array of Kane's play says that "the media painted her as a wild axe-girl, but actually she was far more theatre-literate than most writers of her age. To shake it up a bit - with an ambition and urgency and passion that's often lacking. She wasn't just symptomatic of the 1990s - what was refreshing was that she was up to something different from most of her generation. She was writing about politics in her own way." As for Brecht, he was writing in the early 1900s and so is influences were different to Kane's, especially since Brecht was writing when the Nazis were coming into power and he was actually on a wanted list because his writing was so anti-Nazi. Clearly the two writers have different influences meaning that the styles and the topics of the play will be different but they both wanted to provoke the audience to question their lives and perhaps cause them to question their actions both past and present, whether that be socially, in terms of Kane, or politically, in Brecht's case.
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