Analysis of Sarah Kanes Plays - Paper Example

Antonin Artaud is hailed as the father of surreal cinema. In his plays, he often sought to involve his audience in the action taking place on stage. Through his plays, he could elicit the audiences deepest fears and desires. He experimented with different staging and sound design techniques to achieve the intended purpose of his plays (Derrida, 1978). Artaud was of the opinion that spectators often missed the emotional and lived experience of the artist. He sought to reclaim the power of the original idea in art. He was opposed to the idea of realism in film. He argued that narrative film inhibited an audiences aesthetic consciousness. Sarah Kane agreed with Artauds theory of film and often employed Artauds techniques in her plays. They both used violence in their plays as a way of connecting the audience or spectators and drawing their attention to the message that was being communicated.

Sarah Kane understood that violence was a very powerful tool and could often bring a play to life. A few people felt the violence portrayed in her plays was tasteless, but that is because a majority of them were not ready to deal with the issues which were being portrayed in her plays. She used violence in a morally-conscious way which is why she achieved success in her plays (Sierz, 2002). I believe her depiction of violence is an accurate representation of what happens in real life. We cannot ignore the fact that violence is part of life. For example, in her plays Blasted and Cleansed, the violence and cruelty portrayed is meant to make the audience come to terms with the realities of life. The audience gets to experience the art in its most impactful form.

During the beginning of the 20th century, many plays focused on dialogue and the media put out an inaccurate representation of violence. All depictions of violence had been mitigated in plays and audiences had grown indifferent to the issues that were being raised in the plays. In her play Blasted, Kane used an unconventional format to pass her message. The violence and unpredictability of her plays ensured her audience was always involved. It was nearly impossible to passively watch her plays. She ensured her audience could emotionally connect with the play. Artaud and Kane were focused on bringing a new meaning to the theatre. They believed theatre should not focus so much on written text but rather its ability to attack the senses and bring the audience closer to the artist and performance (Urban, 2001). Kane employs Artauds theory of cruelty to launch an attack on her audiences senses and ultimately makes them part of the action instead of being mere observers.

In her play 4.48 Psychosis, Kane focuses on the imagination rather than the action. The audience is forced to think about what is being enacted on stage. In her play Cleansed, she uses shorter sentences and most of the meaning in the play is to be derived from the imagery presented in the play. She herself admitted that most of the sentences in Cleansed carried a deeper meaning more than the superficial one attached. 4.48 Psychosis was more poetic than her previous plays. She employed the stream-of-consciousness technique in writing the play giving it a distinct sense of monology. The play also had a very distinct title. It is a highly specific timestamp that has been interpreted differently by different people. Some people believe it was a time when Kane would wake up to write her plays because she felt the sanest while other people are of the opinion that that is the time when she appeared most insane (Kane et al., 2001). There is even a section of people who believe that is the time when she experienced suicidal thoughts. In the play, she mentions 4.48 severally. During the first instance, she states that 4.48 is a time when depression visits (Kane, 1998).

She also goes ahead to state that it is a time when she shall hang herself/to the sound of her lovers breathing (Kane, 1998). She talks about this specific time in different contexts. She also mentions that it is a time when sanity visits and calm returns. From her descriptions, it is easy to understand that she is talking about suicide even though she describes it in different contexts. First, she talks about it scarily and then she also describes it calmly and collectively. She employs different linguistic styles in the play to send different messages. She uses features of style such as alliteration, consonance, contradiction, repetition, and rhyming to send different messages. There is also the use of onomatopoeia where she says flash flicker slash burn (Kane, 1998). There is also the use of capitalization in an instance where she says DON T LET THIS KILL ME (Kane, 1998). One of the most important aspects of the play is the fact that it depicted a patients journey through hospitalization up to a point when the patient is deemed okay and ready for discharge. The depiction of the mental healthcare system is meant to criticize and point out flaws and ineffectiveness of the system. This is illustrated by the fact that the suicidal patient in the play leaves the mental institution more determined to take her life which she does shortly after leaving the institution.

Kanes other play Blasted was written solely to depict violence from two different perspectives; that of the victim and perpetrator (Kane, 1996). It is about a tabloid journalist who invites an unsuspecting girl with mental issues to his hotel room on the pretense that he only has a few days to live and is only looking for a little comfort before his death. He, however, goes ahead and sexually defiles the young girl before a soldier forces himself into the room and wreaks havoc. There is a depiction of different types of rape, first, man-on-woman then man-on-man. Kane creates Ian as the main protagonist and one who is very unsympathetic. There are various depictions of different social ills such as cannibalism and rape but what stands out the most is the depiction of horror and violence. The play ends with a lot of absurdist drama after evolving through different stages and contexts. Ian is greatly humiliated which forces the audience to empathize with him. Kane was trying to illustrate the horrors of violence to the audience. At the beginning of the play, she depicted Ian as a violent protagonist wreaking havoc on the helpless young woman before the soldier bursts in and unleashes unfathomable violence on him (Kane, 1996). She aimed to have the audience empathize with Ian and look at violence from a different perspective. It is not easy to dismiss violence when it happens to oneself.

In Blasted, there is a four instances of rape (Kane, 1996). Some people might argue that Kane went overboard with her representation of rape and violence, but I believe it was all within her realm of creativity and art. The excessive depiction of violence made the play retain its power and primacy which is what creatives such as Artaud aim for. For Artaud, a playwright should use gesture with the aim of producing a psychological effect on the audience (Jamieson, 2010). Plays that cannot elicit deep emotions are deemed as having fallen below their mandate. Playwrights such as Sarah Kane have broken the fourth wall in theatre in that they have their audience participate subconsciously in the play. While writing plays such as Blasted, Kane must have experienced a certain type of energy that she obviously wanted to transfer to the audience. She achieved it through her various depictions of violence. A majority of her audience could not forget the violence that had been depicted in her play which is what she had hoped for all along. If the message and theme of a play can easily be forgotten, the playwright would have failed.

Her other play Cleansed explored the subject of love and everything that is associated with love. There is the use of a lot of metaphors, and the audience gets to see how the different characters handle loss, need, and suffering. Kane goes beyond dramatic boundaries in this play. For example, there is Grace who goes to great lengths just to get justice for her brother who had been murdered (Kane, 2001). She puts herself in her brothers shoes and becomes him after she goes through a sex change. The play advances the notion that love is a form of torture experienced by the living. There is a depiction of extreme violence as Carl who had cheated on his lover is tortured because of it. Kane went to great lengths just to explain what people were willing to do for love in real life. Once again, in this play, her theatrical depiction of love and violence resonates with Artauds concept of theatre. Artaud focuses on recreating all forms and aspects of life on stage (Sierz, n.d). Life can be cruel which implies that the cruelty should be correctly depicted on stage to resonate with what truly happens in the real world. Kane believes that a good play should utilize images as opposed to words.

References

Derrida, J. (1978). The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation. Theater, 9(3), 6-19. doi:10.1215/00440167-9-3-6

Jamieson, L. (2010). Antonin Artaud: From theory to practice. London: Greenwich Exchange.

Kane, S. (1996). BLASTED. Theater, 27(1), 35-64. doi:10.1215/01610775-27-1-35

Kane, S. (1998). 4.48 Psychosis. Retrieved from http://rlmalvin.angelfire.com/KaneSarah448Psychosis.pdf

Kane, S. (2001). Cleansed. London: Methuen.

Kane, S., Greig, D., Kane, S., Kane, S., Kane, S., Kane, S., Kane, S. (2001). Complete plays. London: Methuen Drama.

Sierz, A. (2002). Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes by Graham Saunders, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. 198 p. 14.00. ISBN: 0-7190-5956-9. New Theatre Quarterly, 18(04). doi:10.1017/s0266464x02250502

Sierz, A. (n.d.). THE ELEMENT THAT MOST OUTRAGES: MORALITY, CENSORSHIP AND SARAH KANES BLASTED. Morality and Justice, 225-239. doi:10.1163/9789004333925_016

Urban, K. (2001). An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 23(3), 36. doi:10.2307/3246332