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The Legacy of Tragedy in Sarah Kane: Approaching Posthumanist Identities

Thesis · January 2007

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 The Legacy of Tragedy in Sarah Kane:
Approaching Posthumanist Identities

Julie Waddington

Manchester Metropolitan University

Department of English

Thesis submitted for the award of

PhD in English

Date of Submission: September 2006

Thesis Supervisors: Dr. Michael Bradshaw & Dr. Simon Malpas

Director of Studies: Professor Jeffrey Wainwright
 Abstract

In this study I advance the claim that the plays of Sarah Kane can be read as a

contemporary form of tragedy. By the late twentieth century, as Terry Eagleton

argues in the most in-depth study of the genre since George Steiner’s The Death

of Tragedy, tragedy becomes an unfashionable subject and, largely due to its

preoccupation with the ‘human condition’, comes to be associated with an

uncritical classical humanist approach. Kane’s plays, I argue, challenge this view

by presenting tragic themes and exploring the question of the human in a way

which simultaneously subverts a classical humanist view of a fixed, centred and

knowable human subject. The play-by-play readings presented consider different

elements of the tragic in Kane’s work drawing on critical attempts to re-

conceptualise the idea of the tragic in the light of developments in post-structural

and post-humanist theories. Contesting the idea that Kane’s later plays signal an

increasingly introspective turn and represent little more than a theatrical

expression of the playwright’s own inner struggles, I argue that formal and

thematic developments in her work represent an attempt to highlight critical

questions concerning the essential interrelatedness of ‘self’, ‘other’ and ‘world’.

What is original and important about Kane’s work is that, during an era dominated

by critical emphasis on identity politics, it raises the question whether there may

be problems of universal and essential concern to all humans. Kane’s theatrical

exploration of the question of the human and inhuman is, I conclude, consistent

with, and reflective of, a theoretical movement toward posthumanist thinking.

This thesis will therefore contribute toward a fuller academic assessment of

Kane’s work while also contributing to the wider debate concerning the status and

relevance of tragedy in contemporary theatre and contemporary thinking.

 Acknowledgements

I would first like to express my gratitude to The Academic Division of

Manchester Metropolitan University for granting me the three-year scholarship

which has enabled me to carry out these studies. I would also like to acknowledge

the support of my supervisors who have given invaluable guidance throughout the

project. Dr. Simon Malpas provided vital encouragement and advice throughout

the first stage of the project which contributed toward the shaping and overall

trajectory of the thesis. After Dr. Malpas’s transfer to Edinburgh University my

Director of Studies, Prof. Jeffrey Wainwright, took over as main supervisor with

an enthusiasm which I am extremely gratefully for. His attention to detail and

interest in the thematic and philosophical concerns of the thesis helped me

develop ideas further and gave me the encouragement to complete the project.

My thanks also go to Prof. Berthold Schoene who has contributed by offering

valuable advice on the overall structure of the thesis. As an Associate Lecturer at

Manchester Metropolitan University I gained considerably from the opportunity

to share ideas and discuss aspects of Kane’s work with undergraduate students. I

would like to thank all the students who participated in discussions and also Dr.

Helen Nicholson and Prof. Sue Zlosnik for providing me with the opportunity to

lecture and give seminars in my field of study.

Joaquim Siles-Borràs has encouraged me through every stage of this project by

reading my work, providing invaluable criticism and, most importantly, helping

me to stay focused during the most difficult moments. For these reasons, and

many more, I dedicate this thesis to him.

 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments i

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. The Question of the Human: Bond, Brecht and Aristotle 32

Chapter 2. Blasted and the Limits of the Human 63

Chapter 3a. The Problem of Passion in Seneca and Euripides 104

Chapter 3b. The Problem of Passion in Phaedra’s Love 143

Chapter 4. The Lover’s Discourse in Cleansed:

‘Neither Victor nor Vanquished: I am tragic’ 169

Chapter 5. Crave and the Question of the Self 203

Chapter 6. The Inhuman in 4:48 Psychosis 225

Chapter 7. Posthumanist Identities in Kane 263

Bibliography 288
 Introduction

Sarah Kane’s life as a playwright began and ended in controversy. Her first play

Blasted was produced in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and was

followed by a media furore reminiscent of the response to John Osborne’s Look

Back in Anger in 1956. Graham Saunders, in the first full study of Kane’s work,

opens his book by examining the context in which Kane came to be regarded as

the angry young woman of the nineties.1 Osborne’s death in 1994, just a month

before Kane’s debut, had prompted renewed debate concerning the state of British

theatre and, Saunders suggests, the growing consensus amongst theatre critics was

that ‘the raw energy of Look Back in Anger was unlikely to happen again’. 2 Yet

just a few weeks later Kane’s debut would radically alter this view and revive

interest and hope in the future of British theatre. In his study of British theatre

during the 1990s, Aleks Sierz also establishes a link between the writing of Kane

and her contemporaries and the ‘heady days sparked off by John Osborne’s Look

Back in Anger’, suggesting that ‘new writing had rediscovered the angry,

oppositional and questioning spirit of 1956, the year of the original Angry Young

Men’.3 Although this oppositional spirit is, according to Sierz, shared by different

writers including Anthony Neilson, Mark Ravenhill, and Phyllis Nagy, he singles

out Blasted as a play which is ‘central to the story of new writing’ both in terms of

its content and form and on account of the uproar it created.4

1
The link between Kane and Osborne is made explicit in the title of Clare Bayley’s article ‘A
Very Angry Young Woman’, in Independent, 23 January 1995.
2
Graham Saunders, Love me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 2.
3
For Aleks Sierz, Kane’s plays epitomise what he describes as the new ‘In-Yer-Face theatre’ of
the 1990s, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
4
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. xii.

1
Although, retrospectively, Blasted is now regarded as a landmark in British

theatre history, Kane’s debut initially provoked harsh criticism and hostility and

her play was described unfavourably as ‘disgusting’, ‘disturbing’, ‘degrading’,

and depressing’.5 As a result, the academic considerations of Kane’s work which

have been published to date have, in different ways, set out to contest the negative

criticism with which her work was initially received in Britain and to provide a

critical context in which her plays can be better evaluated and appreciated. David

Greig’s ‘Introduction’ to the Complete Plays provides a synopsis and brief

commentary on the five plays written by Kane between 1995 and 1999: Blasted

(1995), Phaedra’s Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) and 4.48

Psychosis (2000). Although this body of work is relatively small compared to the

contributions made by other British playwrights, her plays, as Greig writes, ‘add

up to a body of work which pushed recklessly at the naturalistic boundaries of

British theatre’ and proved to have a significant impact on contemporary theatre

and theatre studies.6 The most extensive accounts of Kane’s work to date have

been provided by Graham Saunders whose study analyses what he describes as

Kane’s ‘theatre of extremes’, and by Aleks Sierz who regards Kane as

‘quintessentially in-yer-face’.7 Drawing on Howard Barker’s theoretical writings,

playwright and critic Ken Urban has also contributed to debates about Kane’s

place in British theatre by highlighting the ethical dimension of her work in his

article entitled ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’.8 What these different approaches have

in common, apart from a concern to defend the importance of Kane’s work, is that

5
An in-depth account of the media frenzy that followed Blasted is provided by Sierz, In-Yer-Face
Theatre, pp. 94-99.
6
David Greig, ‘Introduction’ to Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001), p. ix.
7
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 121.
8
In PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – PAJ 69, (Vol 23, No. 3), September 2001, pp. 36 -
46.

2
they formulate and advance new terms of reference in an attempt to account for

the extreme and shocking elements of the plays which provoked initial outrage

amongst some critics. My aim in writing this thesis is to contribute toward these

efforts to contextualise Kane’s work and to provide a means whereby the

unpalatable and difficult aspects of her plays can be considered more fully.

Instead of formulating a new term of reference to describe Kane’s work, I will,

however, turn back to an old one by advancing the claim that Kane’s plays can be

read as a contemporary form of tragedy. This view is shared, in relation to

Blasted at least, by Sean Carney who argues that the play ‘embodies a tragic

structure of feeling’.9 Extending this argument further I will present the case for

reading all Kane’s work as a contemporary form of tragedy. This reading

concentrates very much on an evaluation of the plays themselves and not on the

life and death of Sarah Kane the person. The fact that Kane committed suicide

shortly after writing her fifth play 4.48 Psychosis has meant that her plays have

sometimes been read as a reflection of the distressed or suicidal mind, as I will

discuss in chapter 5 and 6. But it is not my intention to present Kane the person

as a tragic character or to suggest that the work she produced is tragic because it

articulates her own sense of despair. Instead my aim is to contribute toward a

fuller assessment of Kane’s work while also attending to critical questions

concerning the status of tragedy in contemporary theatre.

9
Sean Carney, ‘The Tragedy of History in Sarah Kane’s Blasted’, in Theatre Survey, 46:2,
November 2005, pp. 275-296, p. 277.

3
In a recent study of the current status of tragedy, Terry Eagleton observes that

‘tragedy is an unfashionable subject these days’.10 If Kane’s work is considered

as a contemporary form of tragedy, then Eagleton’s point may help to explain the

initial confusion and hostility which surrounded the playwright’s arrival on the

British stage. David Greig argues that:

Those critics who drew attention to Blasted’s litany of broken taboos

missed the point that the play’s roots were not in the bloodbaths of
postmodern cinema but in the Shakespearean anatomies of reduced men:
Lear on the heath and Timon in his cave.11

In terms of content, it is not so much a case of the shock of the new as the shock

of the old, or of that which is no longer considered to be fashionable or relevant to

contemporary British theatre. But on the question of form Kane clearly does push

the boundaries of what can be staged in new directions. Whilst taking care to

evaluate these formal developments, I share Saunders’s view that a ‘kinship with

classical tragedy is an important strand running through Kane’s work’ and that,

consequently, any evaluation of her work requires an eye to past forms and

concerns as well as to current preoccupations.12 I intend to show that Kane

maintains not only a kinship with classical tragedy but actively continues the

legacy initiated in Ancient Greece by contributing toward the creation of a new

tragic aesthetic appropriate and relevant to the time in which she writes.

The reception of Kane’s first play is now well documented and is discussed at

length by Saunders and Sierz in their respective accounts of the playwright’s

10
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), ix.
11
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. x.
12
Graham Saunders, ‘“Out Vile Jelly”: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in
New Theatre Quarterly, 20:1, (February 2004), pp. 69-78, p76.

4
contribution to British theatre.13 While the most hostile critics rejected Blasted as

a display of gratuitous violence, other, more engaged critics detected a moral

vision in Kane’s work but regarded the lack of political focus or agenda as a

regrettable flaw.14 In retrospect, the initial hostility surrounding her work has

proved beneficial to theatre criticism by provoking debate and prompting

commentators to defend the work of the playwright in a way which serves to open

up questions not only regarding Kane’s plays, but also concerning the role of

theatre in contemporary society. The view that Kane’s work suffers from a lack

of political focus is indicative of a common assumption that the role of theatre –

and, by extension, the duty of the playwright – is to convey a clear meaning and to

advance a politically partisan agenda with the express aim of undermining and

challenging dominant ideology. This assumption had already been exposed and

disputed in the 1980s by Howard Barker whose work, like that of other

playwrights including Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond and Howard Brenton, had a

marked effect on Kane’s own writing.

In an essay significantly entitled ‘The politics beyond the politics’, Barker argues

that the didacticism underpinning British theatre must be abandoned in order to

create the kind of play which invites its audiences to think for themselves instead

of merely expecting them to digest a pre-scripted political position or message.

13
Heiner Zimmerman draws attention to the fact that Kane’s reception on the European continent -
where her work has become increasingly admired - was entirely different from the reception she
received in Britain. Zimmerman’s article examines some of the reasons for the British uproar and
considers the transgressive potential of theatre in democratic societies. Zimmerman, ‘Theatrical
Transgression in Totalitarian and Democratic Societies: Shakespeare as a Trojan Horse and the
Scandal of Sarah Kane’, in Crossing Borders: Intercultural Drama and Theatre at the turn of the
Millenium, Contemporary Drama in English 8 (Trier, 2001), p. 175.
14
This view is put forward by Vera Gottlieb whose critique of Kane will be considered below.
See Gottlieb, ‘Theatre Today – the ‘new realism’’, in Contemporary Theatre Review, February
2003, pp. 5-14.

5
And this, he argues, implies the development of a ‘tragic theatre’.15 Going against

the grain of received ideas about ‘political theatre’, Barker claims that:

[I]n a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity,

complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound
strength. The play which makes demands on its audience, both of an
emotional and interpretive nature, becomes a source of freedom,
necessarily hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the
conscience-ridden exposé, but which insists upon the inventive and
imaginative at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly
entertainment-led culture.16

On this account, the complexity and ambiguity in Kane’s work is not a sign of

political weakness or lack of commitment but indicates a ‘political posture of

profound strength’. The strength of such a posture is, for Barker, that it enables

the creation of new tensions in an age which he describes as one of ‘unitary

thought and propaganda’, in which the ideas of the ruling order are constantly

reproduced. Theatre, according to Barker, can potentially break with unitary

thought thus enabling more critical thinking to emerge. But what is significant,

politically speaking, is that the assumption that the playwright – or anyone -

possesses the moral authority with which to guide and instruct the audience is

firmly rejected. The function of the playwright, as Barker puts it, ‘is not to lead

by his [or her] superior political knowledge, but to lead into moral conflict by his

[or her] superior imagination’.17 The initial crafting of the play may be the job of

15
Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, (London: John Calder, 1989), p. 49. Barker also puts
this point across in ‘Asides for a Tragic Theatre’ (pp. 11-14) in the same collection.
16
Ibid, p. 48.
17
Ibid, pp. 48-49. On the one hand, Barker’s comments may appear to challenge the classical
humanist assumption that the artist possesses superior knowledge or moral authority: a view which
is encapsulated in F R. Leavis’s Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, an edited version and
commentary of which can be found in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, A. Easthope and K.
McGowan (eds.), (Buckingham: University Press, 1992). Yet by asserting the ‘superior
imagination’ of the playwright, Barker continues to mythologise the role of the writer and the
process of writing by implying that good writing emerges from an inherent feature of the writer
(their superior imagination) rather than as a result of hard work, endless re-writes, intertextual

6
the playwright, but the exploration of moral conflicts emerging out of the play

becomes the shared responsibility and concern of all who participate in its

production, including every audience member and every reader of the play-text.

So whilst Barker contests the idea that the playwright has a duty to convey a clear

moral message, his arguments retain a strong conviction that theatre can play a

vital role in questioning dominant political ideas and examining received

conventions and morals.

This conviction is one which underpins much of the positive evaluations that have

been made in defence of Kane’s work. Arguing that it is up to audiences to

debate the issues raised and connections made in Kane’s plays, Tom Sellar insists

that ‘we must hear and see it, opening ourselves stoically to the ugly social truths

it puts before us’.18 Sellar, like other commentators, also compares the

controversy surrounding Kane’s debut with that of John Osborne’s arrival on the

post-war British stage and to the scandal caused by Edward Bond’s Saved (1965)

in the 1960s. Like her predecessors, Kane initially provokes shock and outrage by

tapping into fears and anxieties that, as Sellar argues, ‘the larger culture would

rather deny’.19 The weight of responsibility often assumed to fall on the

playwright is shifted from writer to audience in Sellar’s suggestion that it is the

duty of the audience to face up to the horrors presented. This claim is upheld by

Saunders who concludes his examination of what he calls Kane’s ‘theatre of

extremes’, by suggesting that the plays ‘function as a stimulus by which to restore

sources, careful crafting and so on. In other words, the writer is still elevated above the status of
the ordinary person.
18
Tom Sellar, ‘Truth and Dare: Sarah Kane’s Blasted’, Theater (1996), p. 34.
19
Ibid, p. 29.

7
a sense of compassion and humanity to its audience’.20 This suggestion clearly

invests theatre - at least Kane’s - with a humanising potential by implying that the

audience has lost a sense of compassion and is lacking in humanity which the

plays can somehow restore. Like Barker’s analysis above, this view is

underpinned by a classical humanist assumption that positions the great work of

art (and, by association, the writer) over and above the rest of humanity and

assumes that art can be morally edifying and instructive. Audience members,

however, may wish to dispute the inference that they are somehow lacking in

compassion or humanity before coming into contact with the plays of Kane or

indeed any other playwright. For Bond, who provides the ‘Afterword’ for

Saunders’s book and has emerged as one of Kane’s most vociferous supporters,

playwriting such as Kane’s is vital not so much in restoring a sense of humanity

but in actively seeking to create it. Bond claims that Kane’s plays continue the

legacy initiated by the Greek tragedians by confronting ‘the ultimate in human

experience so that we can seek to understand what humans are and how they

create humanity’.21 But this does not imply a straightforward process whereby the

play functions as a kind of magnifying glass holding the human up for inspection.

Instead, as Bond expounds at length throughout his essays on theatre, plays which

confront the ultimate in human experience help to define and create what it is to

be human. The emphasis is not on the playwright providing the audience with a

ready-made definition, but on the play effectively drawing the audience into the

process of defining humanness or, as Bond puts it, taking ‘us into the act of self-

creation’.22 This, as I will argue throughout this thesis, does not simply imply a

20
Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 118.
21
Ibid, p. 190.
22
Edward Bond, ‘Letter on Brecht’, in The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State (London:
Methuen, 2000), p. 173.

8
humanistic drive to self-improvement, but involves an acknowledgement that

what it is to be human is not a given, or an essence waiting to be discovered or

restored but, rather, a question that requires constant attention.

By insisting on the positive value of Kane’s work, the commentators cited above

share Barker’s conviction that theatre can play a vital role in questioning

dominant political ideas and examining received conventions and morals. This

conviction is, however, one which is called into question during the period in

which Kane writes. Sierz argues that Kane taps into the ‘impotent rage’ felt by

those disillusioned by conventional politics. Drawing on Anthony Neilson’s

appraisal of Blasted, he argues that Kane ‘spoke for a generation which has a

dulled, numb feeling – not apathy, but a feeling that nothing you do will make any

difference’.23 Describing the political backdrop which feeds into the aesthetic

sensibilities of new writing, Ken Urban also highlights the point that ‘the youth

culture of the 90s often felt that no political alternative existed, just a monolith of

the same’.24 Urban argues that this feeling led to a change in formal direction

away from the ‘political’ play which aims to convey a clear message, and into

more experimental territory incorporating influences from different writers

including Antonin Artaud, Martin Crimp and Caryl Churchill.

This description of a generation suffering from a sense of political impotence

parallels the observations made in wider theoretical debates concerning the

conditions of postmodernity. Terry Eagleton suggests that the sense of impotence

which is characteristic of this period has significant implications in terms of

23
Ibid, p. 121.
24
Urban, ‘An ethics of catastrophe’, p. 39.

9
literary production and the reception of literary work. In a study which is

primarily concerned with the idea of the tragic in contemporary culture, Eagleton

shows how the argument that tragedy is no longer a viable or relevant literary

genre is underpinned by an assumption that no alternative to the current system is

forthcoming or possible.

We cannot call our situation tragic if it is tragic all the way through. For
classical realism, conflicts can be resolved; for modernism, there is still
redemption, but it is now barely possible; for postmodernism, there is
nothing any longer to be redeemed. Or at least, so the post-tragic case
runs, disaster is now too casual and commonplace for us to portray it in
ways which imply an alternative. How can there be tragedy when we have
forgotten that things could ever be different.25

On this account, the demise of tragedy in contemporary culture can be attributed

to the fact that real life tragedies have outdone or surpassed tragedy in the theatre.

Real life tragedies are, in other words, so ubiquitous as to make the portrayal of

tragedy on stage redundant. The portrayal of tragedy invokes a strong sense that

things could be, or could have been, different. The tragic effect produced in

Greek tragedies is often the direct result of such an invocation and of the

knowledge that things have ended in disaster which, from the audience’s point of

view, could have been averted.26 Watching the unfolding of a classical tragedy

may produce particularly strong affective responses in the audience – usually the

evocation of pity and fear according to received views – but the experience also

stimulates the audience’s critical faculties to consider the different ways that

25
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 64.
26
This is shown by Aristotle’s exposition of hamartia as a tragic failing or mistake which I will
discuss in chapter 2. The main point to emphasise here is that Aristotle insists that the hero (or the
situation in which the hero finds himself or herself) becomes fully tragic because the audience
recognise that his downfall has come about not through any innate wickedness or vice but out of
ignorance.

10
things could have worked out.27 According to the post-tragic case that Eagleton

identifies, this critical faculty is undermined in the postmodern era in which the

idea that things could ever be different is forgotten or suppressed. Things –

including human relations, economic relations, and social conventions -come to

be regarded as natural and eternally valid rather than culturally and historically

circumscribed and open to change.

What is interesting about this analysis of the postmodern condition is that it turns

an assumption regarding tragedy on its head. One of the criticisms levelled at

tragedy – and one which may account to some extent for its demise in a period

dominated by the assumption that plays should serve a useful political purpose –

is that it promotes political quietism and merely serves to reinforce the unequal

status quo. But following the post-tragic argument, this criticism would be more

appropriately directed at dominant postmodern logic which, by forgetting that

things could be different, resigns itself to things the way they are, even to the

extent of accepting (avoidable) disasters as part and parcel of the general system.

But, as Eagleton points out, such an all-encompassing view is itself problematic

insofar as it generalises the postmodern condition and implies too much of a

radical historical break between postmodernity and previous epochs. To say that

tragedy is no longer possible because real-life tragedies have become

commonplace is to suggest that previous eras - in which tragedy as a theatrical

27
Roland Barthes draws on Greek tragedy to support his argument that the site of meaning and
unity of the text lies not with the author but with the reader. ‘Recent research’, he claims, ‘has
demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from
words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally (this perpetual
misunderstanding is exactly “the tragic”); there is, however, someone who understands each word
in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of
him [or her] – this someone being precisely the reader (or here, the listener)’, ‘The Death of the
Author’, in Image, Music, Text, (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 148.

11
form flourished - were less accustomed to real disasters: a suggestion which

Eagleton quite rightly disputes. Larry Bouchard also makes a significant

contribution to this debate by highlighting the problems inherent in using the same

terms to describe both a specific literary form and historical events which defy

interpretation because of the sheer scale of their incomprehensibility: ‘To

denominate genocide […] as “tragic” would be to impose a form on that which

has ruptured form’.28 But while there are clearly attendant problems in using the

same term to consider real-life atrocities on the one hand and a specific literary

form on the other, Eagleton points out that for ‘most people today, tragedy means

an actual occurrence, not a work of art’ and takes issue with the idea that their use

of the term is somehow ‘unintelligible or inaccurate’: an idea that, for Eagleton,

could only be conceived by a ‘cloistered academic’ or ‘the remarkably well-

educated’.29 The point, then, is not to contest everyday uses of the term, but to

develop ways of understanding the relevance of tragedy as a specific literary and

theatrical form in a contemporary context.

Eagleton’s analysis of the status and role of tragedy in contemporary culture picks

up on the debates initiated by George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy, published

in 1961, which examines the reasons for the demise of tragedy in modern theatre.

Steiner attributes tragedy’s demise to various factors including the

commercialisation of theatre from the seventeenth century onwards and the shift

28
Bouchard, ‘On Contingency and Culpability: Is the Postmodern Post-tragic?’ in Evil after
Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 30.
29
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, pp. 14-15. Eagleton’s point is, of course, self-consciously
mischievous as the book in which he writes this is clearly the work of a ‘remarkably well-
educated’ man. But his warning against elitist theorising which derides popular or everyday
language-use - particularly when it relates to real human suffering such as famine or drug overdose
to give Eagleton’s examples – is, I think, a useful reminder of the need to advance ways of
highlighting the significance of artistic tragedy without losing sight of what tragedy is, and means,
for most people.

12
in emphasis from serious drama to melodrama and spectacle. 30 In an observation

which parallels the post-tragic case discussed by Eagleton, Steiner suggests that

the increased awareness of national and international affairs facilitated by the

printing press meant that audiences began to approach theatre from a different

perspective, particularly when observing theatrical depictions of what may

previously have been considered shocking:

Short of neighbouring catastrophe, the Elizabethan and neo-classic

spectator had come to Hamlet or Phedre with a mind partially at rest, or
at least unguarded against the poetry and shock of the play. The new
‘historical’ man, on the contrary, came to the theatre with a newspaper in
his pocket. In it might be facts more desperate and sentiments more
provocative than many a dramatist would care to present.31

Although an insightful reminder that audience responses and expectations shift in

line with cultural changes, the problem with this observation is that it risks over-

stating a distinction between a clued-up ‘historical man’ and a nostalgic view of a

rather more simple and innocent pre-modern man. It does this by moving too

swiftly from a micro-level – the level of ‘neighbouring catastrophe’ that Steiner

indicates in the opening words of this citation – to a macro-level, even though the

catastrophes depicted in classical tragedy tend to happen at a micro, often familial,

level.32 A more convincing explanation for the demise of tragedy as a literary and

dramatic form relates, as Steiner argues at length, to the growth in rationalism

from the Enlightenment onwards: ‘Tragic drama tells us that the spheres of

30
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 111.
31
Ibid, p. 117.
32
The fact that classical tragedies explore the crises at the heart of royal families does not mean
that their crises are assumed to be any more significant or catastrophic than those affecting non-
royalty. The significance of their royal status, as Walter Benjamin points out, relates more to
historical conditions than to any attempt to uphold a notion of nobility. In other words, the focus
on royal families is driven by a desire to achieve maximum dramatic effect: the fact that royal
characters have further to fall than the average human being means that the resulting peripeteia
will be all the more effective. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans by. John
Osborne, (London: N.L.B., 1977), p. 110.

13
reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or

technical resources will enlarge their relevance’.33

It is this reminder of the limits of human agency and progress that jars against the

‘enlightened’ spirit, and which continues to resonate as a plausible reason for the

unpopularity of the tragic in contemporary culture. In the context of the mid-

twentieth century Steiner argued that tragedy was equally incompatible with

world-views associated with Christianity on the one hand and Marxism on the

other, on the grounds that ‘despair is a mortal sin against Marxism no less than

against Christ’.34 The despair foregrounded in tragedy is incompatible with, or

contrary to, both a Christian belief in redemption and final certitude, and a

Marxist commitment to the idea of social transformation. Accordingly, tragedy

falls out of favour in the modern period because it undermines the optimism,

certainty and confidence essential to such disparate world-views. Although the

sense of certainty underpinning such views is, arguably, disrupted by the end of

the twentieth century, Eagleton points out that tragedy still fails to make any

significant come back. Bringing the debates up to date, he goes on to suggest that

the terms which have come to be associated with the genre – including noble

ideals, sacrifice, heroism, and the divine – have become not only unfashionable

but highly suspect to the postmodern ear wary of their dubiously highbrow

overtones.35 But, insisting that suspicion need not equate to outright dismissal,

Eagleton maintains that as a specific literary genre which generates particular

affective responses, tragedy remains not only relevant but potentially

33
Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, p. 8.
34
Ibid, p. 342.
35
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 65-67 and 274-275.

14
subversive.36 As indicated in the citation given above, this is because it provides a

means of keeping alive the critical faculty which seeks alternatives and is

motivated by a commitment to the idea that things could be different.

In his review of Sweet Violence, Howard Brenton suggests that ‘Eagleton has

raised a banner for a terrifying but beautiful new seriousness in the arts, directly

drawn from our contemporary world’.37 Brenton draws out the significance of

Eagleton’s arguments in relation to the role of drama in contemporary culture and

suggests that ‘only one recent stage play is anywhere near Eagleton’s tragic

theory: Sarah Kane’s Blasted’.38 Although Eagleton does not engage in a

discussion of Kane’s work, he does make a passing reference to Blasted listing the

play alongside Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) as an example of a modern play

which could be considered a tragedy, but whose status as such is contestable since

it does not conform to the criteria by which critics tend to measure a work as

tragic or not.39 One reason for regarding Beckett as post-, or even anti-, tragic is

that his highly self-conscious exploration of the ‘human condition’ and depiction

of the ordinariness of human existence appears to be out of sync with the serious

tones associated with the genre. Tragedy, Eagleton claims, ‘is too highbrow,

portentous a term for the deflation and debunkery of Beckett’s work’.40 But

regardless of whether Beckett’s plays are considered tragic or not, his work

36
This is argued most forcefully in the final chapter of Sweet Violence where Eagleton argues that
given the current inequalities of global capitalism ‘the left needs a discourse rather more searching
than pluralism or pragmatism’, p. 296. Tragedy, he indicates, can help to widen the horizon of
contemporary thinking thereby enabling a more effective and radical response to such inequalities.
37
Howard Brenton, ‘Freedom in Chaos’, Guardian, Culture, 21 September 2002. In ‘raising this
banner’ Eagleton continues Steiner’s efforts which, despite the title of his book, highlight the
potential of tragedy and put forward a case for its re-birth. Concluding his account, Steiner
contends that ‘tragic drama might come back to life’, p. 351.
38
Brenton, ‘Freedom in Chaos’, p. 15
39
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 2
40
Eagleton, Ibid, p. 66.

15
represents a significant landmark in the development of contemporary tragedy by

insisting on the exploration of themes traditionally associated with the genre –

particularly the human condition - but presenting them in a new form and in a way

which disavows the advancement of any positive value claims concerning human

existence. Beckett, Eagleton argues, ‘retains the scale of the classical humanist

vision while resolutely emptying it of its affirmative content’.41 To refuse any

positive value claims or ultimate meaning is not, however, equal to saying

nothing. On the contrary, and as Simon Critchley insists, ‘the inability to mean

something in Beckett does not mean that we stop speaking, but rather that we are

unable to stop’.42 This inability to stop talking and attempting to mean is

articulated in Kane’s first play Blasted as I will discuss in chapter 2.

Beckett’s influence on Kane remains a point of contention among critics. In

Saunders’s analysis of her plays, the thematic and stylistic influences of Beckett,

amongst other playwrights, are shown to contribute towards the richness and

innovativeness of Kane’s work.43 By contrast, Vera Gottlieb regards Beckett’s

influence on Kane and other playwrights of her generation as regrettable. In a

recent article that revisits a debate on the role of theatre under Margaret

Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, Gottlieb argues that Blasted offers ‘an

agonized perception of contemporary realities, images with meaning, real moral

outrage and the courage to face those realities’.44 While valorising the moral and

41
Ibid.
42
Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 152.
43
Saunders looks at the various influences that inform Kane’s work in his play-by-play analysis.
He also pays tribute to the playwright’s openness on the subject by writing that ‘Kane displayed a
refreshing candour in revealing and discussing these influences and the effects they produced on
her own writing’, Love me or kill me, p. 54.
44
Gottlieb, ‘Theatre Today’, p. 9.

16
courageous weight of Kane’s play, Gottlieb does, however, go on to bemoan the

lack of political focus in her work and that of her contemporaries attributing this

lack in part to Beckett’s influence:

The inheritance we have bestowed on the younger generation is a world

of horror, but without any ‘tools’, theoretical or practical, to analyse and
demonstrate the kind of ‘cause and effect’ one finds in Brecht […] The
canvas is bleak and terrifying, but many plays have the abstraction or
absence of context of a Beckett play.45

On this account, Kane’s generation may be able to perceive the horrors in the

world but they are incapable of providing an adequate analysis of how these

horrors came about or how they might be resolved. The familiar opposition

drawn up here characteristically positions Brecht as the politically motivated

practitioner capable of providing the kind of analysis extolled by Gottlieb whilst,

in direct contrast, Beckett is evoked as the exemplar of the apolitical. What

Gottlieb objects to in Beckett’s work is the abstraction or absence of context

which she interprets as a sign of weakness or political indifference. Beckett’s

influence on Kane and her contemporaries is thus seen as regrettable insofar as it

allegedly promotes a sense of political impotence and fails to offer up a clear

focus which may indicate the possibility of change.

Theodor Adorno also discerns a radical tendency toward abstraction in the work

of Beckett but, unlike Gottlieb, he valorises this element of the playwright’s work

and sees in it a potential for exposing societal untruths.46 One of the critical

45
Ibid.
46
Discussing the effect of Beckett’s plays, Adorno claims that ‘they arouse the anxiety that
existentialism only talks about’, Theodor, W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ in Notes to Literature, Vol
2, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 90. This is because they dismantle the
illusions upon which society is based. Adorno’s most extended engagement with Beckett’s work

17
questions running through his work concerns the relation between the work of art

and the world. The view that works of art can be used as an instrument or tool

with which to critique the empirical world is shown to be problematic in that, by

locating the work of art in an economy of practice and production, the work loses

its autonomous character. Importantly, this loss of autonomy is not resisted on the

grounds of any autotelic belief in ‘art for art’s sake’, but is intrinsically related to

the question of art’s relation to the world. By making reference to the

autonomous character of art, Adorno is not implying that art, and by implication

the artist, occupies a detached position from which it passes judgement and

conveys a truth that is only accessible from such a privileged vantage point.47 Art,

Adorno insists, can never be entirely separate from the world in which it is

produced: ‘it is always also reality (a moment of) and gestures toward that reality

even whilst turning away from that reality’.48 But, crucially, it is at the moment of

turning away from the world or negating it that art can provide intimations of

what-could-be as opposed to what-already-is: a potential that is, as Eagleton

argues, vital in an era in which the idea that things could be different is being

gradually eroded. The negative strain which Gottlieb interprets as regrettable in

Beckett’s work is thus found to be politically constructive in Adorno’s analysis.

By exposing contradictions in society yet refusing to conform to the formal

conventions which expect a message or meaning to emerge from the work,

can be found in ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ in Notes to Literature Vol. 1, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991). In this article, Adorno distances himself not only from Lukács
who dismissed Beckett’s work as decadent, but also from Sartre who interpreted Beckett’s work as
a kind of manifesto for subjectivity with the emphasis on the subject’s capacity to construct new
meanings. Instead Adorno suggests that ‘Endgame is the epilogue to subjectivity and that instead
of promoting the subject’s autonomy the play reveals instead this autonomy to be illusory’,
‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, p. 259. Adorno’s reading of Beckett has influenced my own
approach to Kane’s plays which, as I try to show throughout this thesis, continue in Beckett’s
footsteps by revealing the illusory nature of the subject’s claim to autonomy.
47
A view which is associated with the kind of classical humanist perspective associated with the
views expounded by F. R. Leavis discussed above: see page 6 footnote 17.
48
Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 92.

18
Beckett advances the kind of vision which Adorno sees as appropriate to the

present and which Simon Jarvis describes as a kind of ‘utopian negativity’.49 This

term, as Jarvis goes on to emphasise, indicates that art ‘cannot provide a blueprint

for what the good life would be like, but only examines what our damaged life is

like’.50 This kind of approach refuses the didacticism of previous theatrical

modes – an approach which carries with it the danger of becoming authoritarian

and oppressive - and instead aims only to affect a shift in attitude which, if

nothing else, contains a commitment to the idea that things could be different.

It is arguably because such an emphatic strain of negativity runs through Beckett’s

work that the debate continues, on Eagleton’s analysis at least, on the question of

whether his work can be read as a contemporary form of tragedy. To some extent

this debate is restricted by dominant assumptions regarding tragedy and by a lack

of critical engagement with the genre recently highlighted by Eagleton’s study.

My intention throughout this thesis will be to widen current debate concerning the

role of tragedy in contemporary theatre and thinking. I aim to do this by

exploring some of the ways in which the tragic has been re-conceptualised in

recent analyses and by incorporating these into my reading of Kane’s plays.

Throughout the chapters I aim to present new readings of the plays while also
49
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 9.
50
The theme of utopia is discussed by Dan Rebellato in ‘‘And I Will Reach Out My Hand With A
Kind Of Infinite Slowness And Say The Perfect Thing’: The Utopian Theatre of Suspect Culture’,
Contemporary Theatre Review, February 2003, pp. 61-80, where he presents a case for reading
Adorno’s philosophical writings in conjunction with developments in contemporary drama.
Establishing a link between Adorno’s view that art cannot concretise utopia, and playwright David
Greig’s claim that the possibility of change lies at the heart of political theatre, Rebellato insists
that ‘the emphasis is precisely on possibility more than change as such’, p. 76. Contributing to the
debate initiated by Gottlieb’s article of 1988 concerning what constitutes political (or
revolutionary) theatre, Rebellato argues that changes in the political landscape have necessitated
changes in critical approaches aimed at effecting political change: ‘with the triumphant resurgence
of turbocapitalism and the ideologues of global capital proclaiming “the end of history as such”
and dismissing all opponents of the system as “crackpot messiahs”, it is hard not to agree with
Fredric Jameson’s contention that “Adorno’s Marxism, which was no great help in the previous
periods, may turn out to be just what we need today”’, p. 64.

19
highlighting the legacy of tragedy in Kane’s work. I use the term legacy here both

to stress the continuation of a tradition which has its roots in the origins of drama

in Ancient Greece and also to highlight the significant influence that Kane’s work

will have on future developments in theatre. As well as contributing toward a

fuller academic assessment of Kane’s work, the attention given to her

development of a new tragic aesthetic will highlight the possibilities for

developing tragic theatre further.

This study also contributes toward the interdisciplinary effort to link

experimentation in theatre with developments in critical theory by showing how

Kane’s work relates to current theorising on the question of posthumanism.51 The

readings presented here aim to advance critical thinking concerning this emergent

question by arguing that Kane’s plays represent an attempt to approach and

explore the question of posthumanist identities. Kane’s plays – in keeping with

the genre of tragedy – are underpinned by a concern to address the problems

facing all humans. At the same time, however, her work displays an acute

attention to the dangers and flaws of a classical humanist approach which, by

making claims on behalf of all humanity, denies and negates the specific, cultural

circumstances which contribute toward the formation of identities and any

conception of what it is to be human. Although her development of a new tragic

aesthetic places the question of the human at its core, it does this in a way which

refuses to advance any positive value claims or to present the idea of an essential

51
Critical literature on this subject is still limited with Neil Badmington’s collection of articles
representing one of the first attempts to bring together different approaches and debates on the
subject. Badmington, (ed.), Posthumanism, (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000).

20
human. Rather, through both formal and thematic developments across the plays,

it promotes constant thinking about what it is, and what it means, to be human.

In order to approach Kane’s plays while also attending to questions concerning

the contemporary relevance of tragedy, I will first discuss why tragedy has come

to be regarded with suspicion in the twentieth century. In chapter 1 I will argue

that the question of tragedy is inextricably linked to the question of the human, or

to how the human is conceptualised and presented. Largely influenced by

received readings of Bertolt Brecht, tragedy has come to be associated with an

uncritical classical humanist approach which takes the human as a given and

reinforces the politically conservative idea of a natural order of things in which

everyone and everything has a designated place. Contrasting this view with

Bond’s call for a reappraisal of tragedy, I will argue that tragedy does not posit a

pre-conceived view of the human but, instead, opens up the very question of what

it is to be human: the emphasis being precisely on opening up questions, not

delivering answers or solutions. Drawing on Nietzsche’s analysis of Attic

tragedy, I will highlight the point that it is precisely the genre’s capacity for

confronting the most fundamental questions and problems of human existence that

is valorised in his appreciation. It is because of this capacity that Bond calls not

only for a revaluation of Attic tragedy but also for a new kind of theatre which

will embody the confrontational spirit of Greek tragedies while also being

relevant to modern day audiences: a kind of theatre which, he argues, can be

found in Kane’s plays.

21
In the subsequent chapters I will present a reading of each one of Kane’s plays

foregrounding the different ways in which the tragic is explored and highlighted.

Blasted’s place as a landmark in British theatre history has already been secured.

What I aim to do in chapter 2 is to locate it within the wider critical context of the

period arguing, in particular, that the play challenges reading strategies which

were becoming increasingly dominant by the late 1990s. Kane’s attempt to move

beyond contemporaneous preoccupations with identity politics and to address

questions concerning all human beings represents a shift in focus from culturally

specific concerns of the time to questions relating to human existence in a wider

sense. By reading Blasted as a contemporary form of tragedy I try to draw out

and explore some of the questions opened up by the play and to challenge the

view that Kane’s evasiveness on specific political issues represents a retrogressive

or politically disabling step for British drama. I look at the various ways in which

the play draws attention to the act of representation and, in doing so, shows how

identity is represented and constructed, and how perceptions of acts are shaped by

the way in which they are represented. Drawing on the work of Derrida and

Artaud, and Derrida on Artaud, I suggest that Blasted exposes the illusion of

human autonomy by showing the limits of representation.52 In making this

suggestion I emphasise Derrida’s point that to think the limits, or closure, of

representation is simultaneously to think the tragic.53 But, again, I argue that this

use of the term is not intended to convey negativity or pessimism but to articulate

necessity. Derrida’s reading of Artaud can help to provide an alternative way of

conceiving fate and thinking the tragic from a contemporary viewpoint and in a

52
The key texts referred to are: Antonin Artaud, ‘No More Masterpieces’, in The Theatre and its
Double, trans. by Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970) and Jacques Derrida, ‘The
Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan
Bass (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001).
53
Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, p. 316.

22
way which may help to illuminate and consider the effect of Blasted. I will also

compare Steiner’s theory that the growth in rationalism and secularism signals the

death of tragedy with Eagleton’s more recent suggestion that the lack of post-

modern tragedy can be attributed to the fact that post-modern culture erases any

conception of anything beyond itself. Drawing on Derrida’s understanding of

différance as that which cannot be fully conceptualised or articulated I shall argue

that Blasted confronts the ineffable thereby re-instigating, or maintaining, a

conception of that which is outside or beyond the culture in which it is performed.

Chapters 3a, 3b and 4 will address the thematic concern with love which runs

through Kane’s work and is also a major concern in classical tragedy. In order to

emphasise the significance of Phaedra’s Love – both in terms of its topicality and

in terms of its contribution to the perennial debate concerning the passions – I will

start by looking back at the classical versions which inspired Kane’s play.

Chapter 3a will provide a comparative reading of Seneca’s The Phaedra and

Euripides’ Hippolytus highlighting the way in which both playwrights explore the

problem of passion. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s work on philosophy and

tragedy, I will examine the ways in which the problem of passion is related to the

question of human agency. Key to this discussion will be Nussbaum’s emphasis

on the Greek term tuché which expresses an element of human existence that

remains beyond human control. The desire to suppress the passions, which is

explored differently in both plays, is shown to be coterminous with an attempt to

eradicate tuché from human life. Such an attempt is, I argue, presented as

commendable in Seneca’s version in stark contrast to Euripides’ play which

23
shows, instead, that such a desire is in itself tragic and can only have tragic

consequences.

While acknowledging the fact that Kane claimed not to have read Euripides’

Hippolytus until after writing Phaedra’s Love, my reading of the play in chapter

3b will suggest that there is a strong link between the two plays insofar as they

both foreground and affirm the passions. My reading highlights the point that it is

through Phaedra’s love that Hippolytus emerges from his former depression and

finds meaning in existence. While this interpretation matches Kane’s description

of the play as one about love, faith and depression, I argue that the full

significance of the play can be best appreciated by taking into account the earlier

versions and by considering the debates about love which underpin them. In a

sense, then, I contest Kane’s view that the play can stand alone and does not

require the audience to have any knowledge of previous versions. In my view this

claim plays into the hands of critics who accuse Kane’s play (and her work in

general) of presenting a sentimental view whereby love is simplistically advanced

as a form of salvation. The full potential of Kane’s exploration of this theme can

only be drawn out, I suggest, by engaging in the kind of inter-textual and inter-

epochal approach to reading which is characteristic of the playwright’s approach

to writing. On the subject of reading, it is worth noting at this point that I

emphasise in chapter 3b that my arguments relate primarily to the play-text.

Although I make the observation that in performance the play does present

problems, particularly in terms of how to stage certain scenes without reducing

pathos to bathos, an examination of these problems in any depth would be beyond

the scope of this thesis. My main aim in the chapter will be to illustrate that as a

24
textual adaptation, Phaedra’s Love makes a significant contribution to the tragic

tradition that merits consideration alongside the classics.

Cleansed, I argue in chapter 4, continues to explore the theme of love but this

time in a way which, unbound by any requirement to adapt a classic as in the

previous case, is more formally innovative. As in the previous chapter, I stress

the importance of intertextuality in Kane’s writing, this time looking at the way in

which she draws on a wide range of sources - most notably Roland Barthes,

Georg Büchner, Shakespeare and August Strindberg - in the composition of her

own work. The chapter will take account of reviews and commentaries on

Cleansed, paying particularly attention to the way in which they highlight the

influence of Barthes’s ‘controversial’ comments in A Lover’s Discourse.54 By

evaluating Barthes’s writing alongside the play, I will argue that Kane is not

simply courting controversy but exploring further the critical debate about love

which she had already engaged in through her previous work. I will also show

that, in addition to thematic content, Barthes’s book provides a source of formal

inspiration which, alongside the influences Kane takes from other playwrights,

contributes towards the innovative structure of Cleansed. The formal structure is

essential to the play’s articulation and affirmation of the tragic nature of love. My

main argument in the chapter is that Kane’s play combines a poststructural

sensitivity towards questions of subjectivity whilst retaining a strong notion of

value: a notion which, in the poststructural climate, is destabilised or undermined

on the grounds that all values are relative and contingent. Challenging the over-

emphasis on relativity and perspectivism, Kane’s affirmation of love as a value

54
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books,
1990).

25
contributes towards efforts made to evaluate Nietzsche’s call for a transvaluation

of all values. Rather than taking this as a dismissal of all values as merely

relative, or as a call to constantly re-evaluate them and not take them for granted, I

argue that Kane’s work incorporates Nietzsche’s approach by interrogating and

disavowing the oppositional structures which underpin Western thinking.

Describing the lover’s state as tragic is not, then, to wallow in pathos, but to

emphasise the point that the intensity of feeling articulated in Cleansed can reveal

a stance characterised by a simultaneous affirmation of what would usually be

considered oppositional or contradictory states. As the sub-title of the chapter

indicates using Barthes’s description, the lover in Kane’s play is figured neither as

‘victor nor vanquished’ but as tragic.

In the next two chapters I will challenge the reductive view whereby Kane’s later

work is interpreted as a mere reflection of its author’s distressed and suicidal

mind. In chapter 5 I argue that Crave presents a carefully crafted attempt to

articulate and explore questions of the self and the problem of being human. Far

from signalling an introspective turn away from the world, I will argue that the

play represents a developed attempt to highlight the problematic relation between

‘self’, ‘other’ and ‘world’. The introspective nature of the play signals an attempt

to move away from the conventions of realism and to articulate the complex realm

of subjectivity and intersubjectivity rather than to merely express the thoughts of

an empirical ‘I’ or of ‘Sarah Kane’. I will stress that Kane’s originality lies in her

capacity to confront and articulate problems which are culturally and historically

specific while also attending to issues which are arguably of universal and

essential concern to all humans or to ‘the human condition’. In this sense Kane’s

26
work goes against the grain of critical thinking at the end of the twentieth century

according to which appeals or references to the universal had become highly

suspect. The fact that it does this represents an important challenge to critical

thinking by reintroducing the question whether, under some circumstances, it may

be valid, and indeed necessary, to consider issues of universal and essential

concern in a way which does not deny the cultural and historical specificity of

other issues. I will show how the play highlights the essential interrelatedness of

‘self’, ‘other’ and ‘world’ but simultaneously emphasises the feeling of solitude

and estrangement experienced by the ‘self’. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s

attempt to rethink the idea of community in Being Singular Plural,55 I will discuss

the relevance of Crave’s theatrical exploration of issues of selfhood in relation to

contemporaneous politics and crises. Throughout the chapter I will pay equal

attention to the formal developments advanced and the thematic concerns

explored arguing that the achievement of the play lies in the way in which Kane

manages to bring form and content together in the development of a new tragic

aesthetic.

After discussing Kane’s interest in the human condition I will extend the

discussion in chapter 6 by introducing the question of the inhuman in 4.48

Psychosis. Continuing the argument that Kane’s work relates to the wider world

rather than to her own inner struggles, I will show how the play expresses the

struggle to maintain sanity and the will to live despite the apparent

meaninglessness of life and against the historical backdrop of a century in which

the value of human life has been eroded by the sheer scale of human suffering.
55
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).

27
To see this problem as one experienced on an individual level by a troubled

playwright is to entirely miss the points the play is making and, worse, to suppress

them further. As well as looking at some of the literary sources that inform 4.48

Psychosis, I will also discuss Kane’s use of texts from psychologists as they are, I

think, crucial to the play’s development. The play does not just articulate the

process of psychotic breakdown but also highlights the way in which dominant

attitudes and the inadequacies of the medical profession contribute toward this

breakdown. In order to explore this theme further I will read the play in

conjunction with the work of C.G. Jung whose work exposes the inadequacies and

limitations of psychology. Although writing from, and for, entirely different

fields, I suggest that both writers reveal an ambivalence in their approaches to the

unconscious and it is this ambivalence that I attempt to draw out and analyse in

this chapter. Emphasising the significance of the formal composition of the play,

I suggest that it would be more appropriate to consider Kane’s departure from

realism not just as a reflection of a disturbed or abnormal psyche but as an attempt

to better articulate all psychic life. The point I make is related to the arguments

put forward in chapter 4 regarding the refusal of oppositional thinking. Drawing

on Jung’s insights into psychopathology I will argue that Kane’s play can

contribute toward a better understanding of psychosis by refusing to posit, or

reinforce, an opposition between the categories of the psychotic and the non-

psychotic, or the sane and insane, and by showing instead the psychotic condition

as an intensification of psychic activity or increase in unconscious activity.

Accordingly, the unconscious is conceived on this account as relating to both the

personal and collective. From this perspective, listening to the manifestations of

the ‘psychotic’ mind is not just an exercise in individual psychiatry, but provides

28
an indicator of what is collectively repressed by society. What Kane’s play does

is to uncover the inhuman barbarism that is collectively repressed by the society

in which she writes. The inhuman is conceived here according to two different

definitions found in Nietzsche’s work: one describing a mode of behaviour

towards other (supposedly inferior) human beings, and the other pointing to a

level of existence which is non-human or fateful in the sense of being bound by

chance and necessity and not governed by any purpose or meaning. Both of these

conceptions of the inhuman are explored and articulated in 4.48 Psychosis. The

importance of this exploration is that it combines an acknowledgement of chance

and necessity at a fundamental level of human existence with a sense of urgency

concerning the need to address ethical questions. Kane’s last play is by no means

a solipsistic turning away from the world but represents the playwright’s most

developed attempt to articulate the interrelatedness of self and world and to

explore the struggle that characterises this relationship.

The final chapter of the thesis looks at Kane’s concern with the human/inhuman

theme further arguing that her work encapsulates the tension between a humanist

and anti-humanist approach to identity and, in doing so, can be linked to current

theorising on posthumanism. The term is not conceived as something that comes

after humanism but, instead, signals more of a crisis in humanism itself. Taking

in thematic and formal developments across all the plays, I attempt to look at

ways in which debates fundamental to posthumanism are theatrically explored by

Kane. One of the key debates that will be considered is the question of the split

between consciousness and being which Kane returns to throughout her plays.

29
Drawing on Jonathan Dollimore’s arguments in Radical Tragedy,56 I will consider

the differences between idealist conceptions of subjectivity – in which the essence

of the subject is located in the mind/consciousness – and materialist conceptions

which place more emphasis on social and environmental factors in the

constitution of the subject. Showing how aspects of Kane’s first plays challenge

idealist conceptions of the subject by overturning the mind/body split and by

undermining the notion of the fixed, stable subject, I will then go on to argue that

her later plays also address the problems of merely substituting an idealist

approach for a materialist one. Ultimately, I will argue that Kane’s work shows

the split to be irresolvable and highlights the tragic nature of this split by showing

how, on the one hand, it is necessary for the very instigation of conscious life

while, on the other, it generates a feeling of constant self-estrangement. The

importance of Kane’s work, as I argue throughout the thesis, is that it

acknowledges and affirms the tragic elements of human existence, thereby

refusing and challenging the oppositional logic which would aim to suppress or

resolve what is considered to be unpalatable or unacceptable. I shall link Kane’s

refusal of binary thinking with Donna Haraway’s efforts to blur the oppositional

structures of thought upon which Western thinking is based. Haraway’s Cyborg

Manifesto is often cited as a seminal text in the conceptualisation of

posthumanism and sometimes given to represent a mere celebratory or affirmative

response to technological developments in society. Taking issue with this view, I

emphasise the way in which Haraway harnesses the confusion generated by the

figure of the cyborg in order to break with the oppositional logic which underpins

and limits Western thinking. Kane’s tragic theatre effects a similar rupture by

56
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 3rd edn., (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

30
focusing on the figure of the human in a way which avoids reinstating the idea of

an essential human and presents, instead, the question of the human and inhuman

as one which requires constant attention.

31
 Chapter 1

The Question of the Human: Bond, Brecht and Aristotle

The status of tragedy, and the very idea of the tragic in twentieth-century drama,

has been overshadowed by Bertolt Brecht’s rejection of Aristotelian drama. This

rejection goes some way towards shaping the assumption that tragedy presents a

conservative view of the human as an unalterable part of a fixed, universal order.

In the ‘Introduction’ to what is subtitled ‘A new translation’ of Aristotle’s Poetics,

Kenneth McLeish highlights the importance of universal order in Aristotelian

thinking. According to McLeish’s account, everything in the universe – including

the human - has its place in a hierarchical order of things:

Universal order depends, in part, on everyone and everything in creation

maintaining its hierarchical position – if gods descend to the level of
mortals, for example, or mortals aspire to the condition of gods, order is
replaced by chaos. Universal order is like an embroidered cloth in which
each stitch has its place; if one stitch is dropped or the cloth is torn, the
whole is damaged and must be repaired.57

What tragedy does, according to McLeish’s introduction, is to show what happens

when the ‘cloth is torn’ or when universal order descends into chaos. And if order

is valued above chaos, then the value of tragedy is that it allows for the eventual

restoration of order. By focusing on the trials and tribulations which lead to the

restoration of universal order, tragedy, in McLeish’s account, ‘encourages us to

reflect on their [the characters] and our relationship with the harmony of the

universe’.58 Although, according to this interpretation, tragedy promotes

57
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Kenneth McLeish, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998), xi.
58
Ibid, p. xii.

32
reflection, it is of a kind that is inherently conservative in that its goal is to

reinforce the current status quo.

Although ‘everyone and everything in creation’ is presented as part of the fabric

of a universal whole, the suggestion that tragedy ‘encourages us to reflect on their

and our relationship with the harmony of the universe’ infers a split between the

universe on one side and the ‘us’, or those who reflect on the pre-given universe,

on the other. The maintenance of such a split world-view reinforces the

assumption that a natural, pre-ordained universal order of things pre-exists

consciousness and is ‘there’ waiting to be discovered. Following this assumption,

the human being merely takes its place within this pre-given world and – if

harmony is to be maintained – accepts his/her ranking in the hierarchical system.

Hierarchical positions which are culturally and historically motivated are thus

naturalized and presented as essential to the maintenance of order. If this

interpretation of Aristotle’s evaluation of tragedy is representative of received

views within contemporary drama criticism then it is easy to see how Brecht’s

dismissal of Aristotelian theatre has taken hold. Brecht’s Marxist aesthetic can be

forwarded as all the more progressive if set against the backdrop of the politically

conservative and retrogressive model which is presented as ‘Aristotelian’.

Brecht’s influential essay of 1930, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’,

offers the most explicit delineation of the differences between the new, epic

theatre advanced by the playwright and dramatic or Aristotelian theatre.59

59
Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ in Brecht on Theatre, trans.
by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 33-42. Brecht on Theatre, pp. 69-
77, p. 70.

33
Although Brecht specifies that his contrast between epic and dramatic theatre is

intended to show shifts in accent rather than an absolute antithesis between the

two, the reception of his work in Britain has tended to emphasise the distinction to

such a point that epic and Aristotelian theatre have come to be regarded as each

other’s polar opposite. In an analysis which attempts to reconsider Brecht in light

of poststructuralist thought, Elizabeth Wright challenges dominant British

readings of Brecht which emphasise such oppositions arguing instead for his plays

and theoretical writings to be read, taught and staged ‘as a constant source of

discontinuous insight’ rather than as a whole unified theory unilaterally opposed

to, and in conflict with, its theatrical predecessors.60 While agreeing with Wright,

the aim of the present chapter is not to contribute towards the extensive debate

concerning the reception of Brecht. Instead, my aim is to show how

‘misunderstanding Brecht’, as Wright puts it, does not just limit or foreclose

discussion about the complexities in Brecht’s work, but that by constantly

reproducing the ‘epic versus dramatic’ or ‘Brecht versus Aristotle’ model it

simultaneously signals a misunderstanding of Aristotle and a closing down of

questions concerning tragedy. The main aim of this chapter is, then, to consider

some of the assumptions that have accrued in relation to Brecht’s theoretical

writings with a view to re-opening key questions not only in relation to Aristotle’s

writings, but, more significantly, with regard to thinking tragedy in a post-

humanist context. After examining some of Brecht’s key writings I will look at

the way in which playwright Edward Bond intervenes in the Brecht versus

Aristotle debate and calls for an urgent reappraisal of tragedy.

60
Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 21.

34
In ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ Brecht outlines the key differences

between the epic theatre and dramatic or Aristotelian theatre. The key opposition

that I want to draw attention to in this chapter concerns the question of the human.

In dramatic theatre, according to Brecht’s model, ‘the human being is taken for

granted’.61 ‘Man’ is given, in other words, as a fixed point, and, as such, is shown

to be unalterable. Epic theatre, in contrast, would take the human being as the

very object of inquiry. ‘Man’, on this account, would be shown ‘as a process’ and

as ‘alterable and able to alter’. This opposition is, I will argue, questionable and

reveals more about Brecht’s political motivations and influences than about

Aristotelian theatre. Marx’s influence on Brecht is widely documented and can be

clearly discerned in the ontological argument that Brecht introduces into his

model. Epic theatre, he suggests, overturns the assumption underpinning dramatic

theatre that ‘thought determines being’ in order to show that it is in fact ‘social

being [that] determines thought’.62 This argument reproduces the critical point

advanced in the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy where Marx states that

‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the

contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’.63 In other words

the existence and social standing of any man or woman is not determined purely

by their own thought or intention. Instead, the circumstances into which one is

born or in which one finds oneself at any time determine, to a large extent, the

way one thinks and perceives the world. Consciousness, or thought, for Brecht,

cannot be extracted or abstracted from material conditions but must be regarded as

a product or consequence of the material and historical conditions in which it

61
‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, p. 37.
62
Ibid
63
Karl Marx, ‘Preface to A Critique of Political Economy’ in The Thought of Karl Marx, ed. by
David McLellan, (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 162-4, p. 164.

35
emerges. Similarly, being, or life, is not determined by consciousness but, on the

contrary, it is the lived experience, or social being, that determines thought.64 By

aiming to illustrate this in the theatre, Brecht’s model represents an attempt to

produce a Marxist aesthetic with explicitly political aims. In the same way that

Marx’s objective was not merely to analyze the world but to change it, Brecht’s

intention was, as he stated explicitly in 1933, ‘to teach the spectator a quite

definite practical attitude, directed towards changing the world’.65 Brecht thus

aimed to promote a practical and engaged attitude in the theatre which would then

filter outside the theatre and into the wider society. In order to develop such a

practical attitude epic theatre would take the human being as its object of inquiry.

In contrast to Aristotelian theatre which, according to Brecht, shows that ‘Man is

like this’, epic theatre would, in contrast, aim to raise questions such as ‘why is

Man like this?’.66

64
In contemporary critical theory Marx’s model is often contrasted with
Descartes’s famous statement that ‘I think, therefore I am’ which has been taken
to mean that consciousness comes before being, or that life or being is dependent
on consciousness: a view which would clearly be at odds with Marx’s materialist
conception of subjectivity. In chapter 7 I will consider Descartes’s influence on
the development of theoretical approaches to modern subjectivity further and
highlight the point that the philosopher’s work is often given to represent the
inauguration of classical humanism. Although Descartes often stands accused of
instituting the violent split between mind and body - which is considered to be a
key flaw of humanism - his writing contains an acute awareness of the problems
inherent in thinking the human and it is this awareness that I shall try to draw out
in the final chapter.
65
‘Indirect Impact of the Epic Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre, pp. 57-62, p. 57.
66
Brecht capitalises ‘Man’ on several occasions in his writing. At one point he
emphasises the intention of this further by following ‘Man’ with the words ‘with a
capital M’ in parenthesis, ‘Indirect Impact, p. 60. The playwright’s intention in
drawing attention to the term is to highlight the way in which dramatic theatre
takes man as an unalterable given. Characters, on this account, come to stand in
for ‘everyman’ and appeal to a universal or eternally valid criterion of what it is to
be human, extracted, that is, from cultural and historical factors. However a
further problem arises with the translation of Brecht’s ‘Mensch’ - which in
German denotes human being as well as man - into the English ‘Man’. Although

36
Influenced not only by Marx, but also by advances in the field of science, Brecht

insists that theatre must adapt to the new age. Turning away from theatre by

dismissing past theatrical traditions as outmoded, the playwright looks, instead, to

the realm of science as a model of objectivity and rationality. Theatre must, he

claims, become scientific - by which he means objective and rational - in order to

be relevant and critical within this new age of scientific developments. Brecht

begins to develop this theory in ‘A Dialogue about Acting’, written in 1929,

where he makes his first explicit reference to what he calls an ‘audience of the

scientific age’.

Are we to see science in the theatre then?

No. Theatre.
I see: scientific man is to have his theatre like everybody else.
Yes. Only the theatre has already got scientific man for its audience,
even if it doesn’t do anything to acknowledge the fact. For this audience
hangs its brains up in the cloakroom along with its coat.67

Although he had already spoken of raising theatre to a level of science in Das

Theatre in 1928, it is in this ‘Dialogue’ that Brecht begins to advance his claim

that a rejection of Aristotelian drama is necessary in order to create a theatre

suitable for an audience of the scientific age. Brecht makes it clear, however, that

science and theatre are separate and distinct spheres. He is not, then, advocating

the promulgation of science in the theatre but seeking to provide a theatre

appropriate for the present-day audience. ‘Theatre has already got scientific man

the English term is sometimes used to denote human being this is problematic
insofar as it includes, and therefore subsumes, the silent woman.
67
‘A Dialogue about Acting’, in Brecht on Theatre, pp. 26-29, p. 26.

37
for its audience’, he insists, but does not acknowledge or adapt to this.68 Brecht

thus perceives a failure both on the side of the theatre which does not adapt in

form to the new age, and on the side of the theatre audience whose expectations of

theatre are presented as archaic and incongruous with contemporary thinking.

The ‘Enlightened Man’ of the early twentieth century may, in general, be

governed by rationality and reason, but, according to Brecht’s critique, he deposits

his reason along with his coat upon entering the theatre. The key problem the

playwright discerns is that rather than appealing to the audience’s capacity to

reason, theatre appeals to the emotions thereby inducing a hypnotic state in both

actors and audience. Brecht’s critique of early twentieth-century theatre is, in a

sense, a recapitulation of the views already advanced by August Strindberg in the

late nineteenth century. In his ‘Preface’ to Miss Julie (1888) Strindberg suggests

that:

The theatre has always been a primary school for the young, the semi-
educated, and women, all of whom retain the humble faculty of being able
to deceive themselves and let themselves be deceived - in other words, to
accept the illusion, and react to the suggestion, of the author.69

Strindberg would anticipate Brecht’s appeal to scientific objectivity by claiming

that ‘nowadays the primitive process of intuition is giving way to reflection,

investigation and analysis, and I feel that the theatre, like religion, is on the way to

being discarded as a dying form’.70 Although differing significantly in their

approaches to theatre as well as in other respects, both playwrights concur in their

68
Ibid.
69
Strindberg, August, ‘Preface’ to Miss Julie in Plays One, trans. by Michael Meyer, (London:
Methuen, 1964), p. 91.
70
Ibid.

38
appeal to the objectivity of science and in their claim that theatre has tended to

appeal to inferior, or primitive, faculties.

Although the emergence of this critique of theatre is heavily influenced by

scientific and other developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, it is by no means a view which emerges for the first time in this period

which Brecht calls the scientific age. Such a view had already been advanced,

albeit in an entirely different context, in Ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western

theatre. The tenth book of Plato’s Republic famously calls for the banishment of

the tragedians from the polis on the grounds that such tragic poetry stimulates

inferior faculties and diminishes the capacity to reason:

And so we may now with justice refuse to allow him [the poet] entrance to
a city which is to be well governed, because he arouses and fosters and
strengthens this part of the soul [not the best] and destroys the reasoning
part.71

What Plato’s dialogue emphasises is the disparity between what is found

pleasurable in the theatre, or on listening to a tragic poem, and what is considered

to be acceptable practice outside the theatre. Why is it, the philosopher asks, that

the spectator derives pleasure from witnessing an excessive display of grief or

suffering when such a display would be considered inappropriate in public life?

And is it right, he asks, to praise the poet for eliciting such a response? ‘Is it right

to look at a man being what we ourselves should not wish to be without shame,

and so far from feeling disgust, to enjoy and praise the performance?’72 Plato

goes on to deploy a similar strategy to that used by Strindberg by associating

71
Plato, The Republic, trans. by A. D. Lindsay, (London: J.M. Dent& Sons, 1935), par. 605.
72
Ibid.

39
primitive and underdeveloped faculties with woman. The excessive display of

emotions in the theatre is, in The Republic, associated with ‘playing a woman’s’

part, whilst the opposite kind of behaviour (characterized by ‘quiet endurance’)

outside the theatre is presented as ‘playing a man’s part’.73 Plato’s evaluation of

theatrical performances produces a delineation of gender roles that have

subsequently been re-produced to such an extent that they appear to be natural

rather than culturally constructed. However, Plato’s text – insofar as it

emphasises the performative nature of identity – can help to expose the

constructed nature of gendered roles together with the assumptions that underpin

these roles. Woman, within this analysis, is constructed as the inferior sex who is

driven by her emotions and has limited capacity to reason. The ideal man, in

contrast, holds his emotions in check and relies on his capacity to reason. Aside

from constructing a stereotyped division between the sexes, this model also

produces a problematic split between reason on the one hand and the emotions on

the other. The assumption that reason and emotion are entirely separate and even

antithetical to each other underlies much theorising about the nature and effect of

theatre.

Insofar as Plato’s dialogue starts out by calling for the expulsion of the poets, it

would be fair to deduce that the philosopher finds the pleasure derived from tragic

poetry antithetical to the development of reason. However, it is worth

remembering that The Republic is constructed in the form of a dialogue and that

the questions which are raised are intended to promote reflection rather than

conclusive answers. After presenting the case against tragic poetry the following

73
Ibid.

40
statement is made: ‘If the pleasure-producing poetry and imitation has any

arguments to show that she is in her right place in a well-governed city, we shall

be very glad to receive her back again’.74 Despite dominant readings which tend

to emphasise The Republic’s unequivocal banishment of the tragedians, this

paragraph illustrates how Plato’s dialogue represents an attempt to develop a

theory of aesthetics which might also consider the role of the tragic in human

society. Rather than close the book on tragic poetry, Plato invites further

consideration of its role:

We might also allow her champions, who are not poets, but lovers of
poetry, to publish a prose defence on her behalf, showing that she is not
only pleasant but also useful for political constitutions and for human life,
and we shall listen with friendly feelings. For it will be to our profit if she
is made out to be not only pleasant, but useful.75

Like Brecht, Plato was keen to locate the use-value of theatre in relation to the

wider society in which it existed. Theatre, for both the philosopher and the

playwright, is judged not just in terms of the pleasure derived from it but

according to how useful it is in terms of benefiting human life and society. The

point advanced in Plato’s Republic, that it will be profitable if tragic poetry is

found to be useful as well as pleasant, thus finds its twentieth-century counterpart

in Brecht’s arguments, particularly those presented in ‘Theatre for Pleasure or

Theatre for Instruction’ where the playwright insists on the interplay of both

pleasure and learning.76 Theatre, for both Plato and Brecht, requires its own prose

defence or theoretical model in order to make manifest its significance and role in

human culture.

74
Ibid, par. 607.
75
Ibid.
76
In Brecht on Theatre, pp. 69-77.

41
Aristotle’s On Poetics is generally understood to be a defence of tragedy against

Plato’s banishment of the tragedians from the ideal city. As shown above,

however, such a clear opposition between the two philosophers is open to

question. What Aristotle does is to continue the interrogation into the nature and

effect of tragic poetry initiated by Plato. In twentieth-century drama, however, the

work of Aristotle tends to be viewed through the lens of Brecht’s dramaturgy

where ‘Aristotelian’ becomes a catch-all for everything that the modern, epic

theatre sets itself against. Brecht’s main point of contention is that Aristotelian

drama draws the spectator into the theatre experience by manipulating the

emotions, thereby inducing a state of unreflective passivity. The political

implications of encouraging such a passive attitude are drawn out in Brecht’s ‘The

German Drama: Pre-Hitler’ written in 1936 for the Left Review. Brecht claims

here that once in the theatre the audience of the Aristotelian play ‘is not a number

of individuals but a collective individual, a mob, which must be and can be

reached only through its emotions; that it has the mental immaturity and the high

emotional suggestibility of a mob’.77 Writing in Germany during the critical

period of the 1930s, Brecht establishes a connection between the promotion of

passivity in the theatre audience and complicity in political totalitarianism. By

promoting an attitude of passivity, Aristotelian theatre, according to Brecht,

undermines any possibility of political revolt. It does this, following Brecht’s

argument, by advancing the politically conservative view that the human being is

part of a fixed universal order of things and that the acceptance of hierarchical

systems is a necessary means of ensuring the maintenance of order and harmony.

77
In Brecht on Theatre, pp. 77-81, p. 79.

42
The development of epic theatre, with alienation or A-effects at its core, was thus

positioned in direct opposition to Aristotelian drama with the intention of

promoting political activism.78 Unlike Aristotelian theatre which (at least in the

case of tragedy) evoked the emotions of pity and fear, epic theatre would, in the

main, refrain from drawing on the emotions of the audience. In contrast it would

promote a detached viewing position intended to foster a critical attitude in the

audience as opposed to the ‘subjective attitude of becoming completely entangled

in what is going on’.79 But Brecht’s aim was not to eradicate empathy altogether

as he pointed out in response to the misinterpretation of his approach:

[I]t is a frequently recurring mistake to suppose that this – epic – kind of

production simply does without all emotional effects: actually, emotions
are only clarified in it, steering clear of subconscious origins and carrying
nobody away.80

Nevertheless, and despite Brecht’s attempts to rectify recurrent misunderstandings

of his writings, the reception of his work in Britain has tended to promote the

view that epic theatre ‘does without all emotional effects’ by constantly

reinforcing the opposition between epic theatre - presented as objective and

critical - and Aristotelian drama - presented as subjective and reliant on the

78
The abbreviated form of ‘alienation effect’ is used here although it must be
noted that this term is itself a matter of dispute within Brecht studies.
Verfremdungseffekt is also translated as ‘estrangement’ which, according to some
critics, avoids the socio-economic associations of the term ‘alienation’ and offers
a more accurate translation of the German term which means ‘the effect of making
strange’. Because of the problems translating the term accurately it is sometimes
referred to in English as the V-effect. A-effect is used here and throughout this
chapter in order to be consistent with Edward Bond’s use of the term which I will
discuss below.
79
‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, p. 78.
80
‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre, pp. 84-90, p. 88.

43
emotions. Epic theatre, following such a view, is accorded a politically

transformative quality that Aristotelian drama is denied. Tragedy, being the

dominant model defined by Aristotle, thus comes to be regarded as a conservative

mode of theatre which promotes political quietism and resignationism by

(supposedly) depicting the human as an unalterable part of a fixed, universal

order. From this perspective, the deployment of empathy contributes towards the

reinforcement, or naturalisation, of social inequalities by undermining the

audience’s capacity for critical thinking.

Edward Bond intervenes in this debate in order to challenge some of the

presuppositions that have accrued since Brecht’s theories of epic theatre were first

advanced. In his ‘Notes on Coffee’, Bond argues that ‘to say that empathy is all is

foolish, but it is as foolish to say that we need no empathy. The soldiers shot the

Jews at Babi Yar - the Nazis gassed the Jews at Auschwitz - because they had no

empathy with them’.81 Bond makes the claim here that the atrocities committed

by one group of human beings against another were made possible because the

perpetrators felt no empathy for their victims. Bond’s remarks thus bring a debate

which began in the first half of the twentieth century into the contemporary

context of the late twentieth century and establish a vital link between this debate

and the atrocities which marked the century in which it emerged. Turning

Brecht’s theory on its head, Bond suggests that the problems lie not in an excess

of empathy but in its lack. The eradication of empathy is not considered to be the

road to emancipation but to barbarity: ‘Auschwitz’ he claims ‘is the Theatre of the

81
Bond, ‘Notes on Coffee’ in The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State, p. 169.

44
A-Effect - so are the Gulag and Babi Yar’.82 Bond is not, however, merely

advocating a return to the emotions. Unchecked emotions can, he insists, produce

as barbaric consequences as a total lack of empathy. In ‘The Reason for Theatre’

he evokes the spectre of genocide once again, suggesting that ‘to use emotion in

the place of reason instead of using reason (the meaning of the situation) to create

emotion - such things have less to do with art than the honest band at

Auschwitz’.83 By describing the band at Auschwitz - whose music drowned out

the screaming of the dying - as ‘honest’, Bond calls into question the presumed

link between art and humanism or, in other words, the assumption that art is, by

its very nature, a civilizing and life-enhancing force.84 Whilst any form of art,

including theatre, may promote reflection and critical thought there is absolutely

no guarantee that it will. Neither is there any guarantee that a lover of fine arts

may not also be the perpetrator of the most inhumane acts.

82
Ibid.
83
In The Hidden Plot, pp. 113-161, p. 146.
84
Jonathan Dollimore’s essay ‘Art in Time of War’ considers this question not
only after Auschwitz, but also in the contemporary context of thinking and
theorising after September 11th 2001 and in view of the so-called ‘war on terror’
which is perpetrated and justified in the name of ‘civilization’ or with the aim of
defending the ‘civilized’ from the ‘barbaric’. In order to draw attention to the
problems of equating a love of art with the humane, Dollimore contrasts the views
of two writers from significantly different historical moments. The first view,
which represents a still confident humanism, is Herman Hesse’s who, in 1917,
advised a government minister that if he read the great authors and listened to the
greatest composers he would become a more humane leader. Dollimore contrasts
and problematises this position by invoking George Steiner’s words written in the
1960s, and thus with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘“we know now that a man can
read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go
to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them
without understanding, or that his ear is gross, is cant’”, in The New Aestheticism,
ed. by John Joughin and Simon Malpas, (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003), pp 36-50, p. 40. Dollimore’s account puts into question one of the
guiding beliefs of liberal humanism that the cultivation of art and literature will
necessarily lead to an enhancement of human life and to the propagation of
humane values.

45
Although Bond’s insights may destabilise the liberal humanist belief in the

civilizing nature of art, he remains deeply concerned with the question of the

human and with the role of art in promoting ‘humanness’. Calling for a

revaluation of empathy, he returns to the critical debate between reason and the

emotions. In a critique of Brecht’s reason-based approach he argues that ‘theatre

can make no direct appeal to reason - that would be like asking the mad to

understand they are mad, as useful as asking the eyes to listen’.85 Direct appeals

to reason are, Bond argues, ineffective. Instead, Bond seeks to reintroduce

empathy into the theatre and to appeal indirectly – and sometimes by way of the

emotions – to the audience’s reason. Whereas Brecht locates the source of

humanness in reason - which he associates with scientific objectivity - Bond

argues that it is the imagination which defines what it is to be human.86 This,

Bond claims, marks the difference between his own approach and Brecht’s.

Whereas Brecht, according to Bond, takes reason as a starting point or given,

Bond has a different view: ‘I describe and establish the nature of reason

differently. This means saying what a human being is. And this – and its

consequences – are the whole of my difference with Brecht’.87 On this account,

Brecht’s view of the human is underpinned by a Cartesian approach to

subjectivity which assumes that the essence of humanity is located in the capacity

to reason and that it is this very capacity that forms a common link between all

humans. Despite Brecht’s efforts to develop a Marxist aesthetic with the intention

of challenging societal structures, Bond’s argument would suggest that these

85
‘The Reason for Theatre’, p. 144.
86
In his ‘Letter on Brecht’, Bond attempts to explicate the key differences
between himself and Brecht: the main thrust of this difference centres around the
playwrights’ different approaches to the question of what it is to be human, in The
Hidden Plot, pp. 171-174, p. 171.
87
Ibid.

46
efforts are weakened by the underlying philosophy which – by appealing to a

common link in the form of reason – assumes that reason is pre-given rather than

formed as a result of the subject’s social context and background. Such a

humanist view thereby fails to take full account of the significance of social

context and promotes, instead, the idea that despite their differences all humans

are essentially the same. Interestingly, the flaw that Bond identifies in Brecht’s

approach centres around the same problem that Brecht discerned and attempted to

challenge in Aristotelian theatre: the problem of how to stage the human being

without taking the human as a given, thereby reinforcing the politically

conservative view that ‘Man’ is unalterable.

In an attempt to move beyond this position Bond argues that it is ‘imagination and

not reason [that] makes us human’.88 By this he is suggesting that it is through

using the capacity to imagine that the human creates: ‘Imagination creates reality -

that is the source of our humanness and our human problem’.89 On the one hand,

then, the act of creating realities, meanings and value-systems defines what it is to

be human and to live in human society. If this is the source of humanness,

however, it is also, at the same time, the source of the problem of being human.

Problems arise when the realities and meanings created are naturalized to such an

extent that they take on the form of doctrine or commonsense, thereby

transforming contingent meanings and values - which are historically and

culturally constituted - into eternal and unquestionable truths. Drama, which,

Bond argues, embodies ‘the logic of play’, provides a means of holding such

88
‘The Reason for Theatre’, p. 113.
89
Ibid, p. 124.

47
‘truths’ up for scrutiny.90 Despite the terminology, this logic does not signal a

playful turn away from the ‘real’ world into a postmodern world of fantasy and

relativity where anything and everything goes. Rather the term ‘play’ signals the

free movement of thought which is otherwise imprisoned by the logic of ‘unjust

society’ and coerced into reproducing and repeating the very logic of the society

which imprisons it.91 Drama, in other words, provides a site where the

imagination can be stimulated to question personal, social, and political

assumptions and to constantly revaluate what it is to be human. ‘Imagination is

needed to ask why’, Bond argues.92 It is this capacity to ask why, to ask for

meaning and to question doctrine, that defines humanity for Bond and leads him

to insist that it is ‘imagination and not reason that makes us human’.93

On the other hand, however, to say that imagination is the source of humanness is

not simply to equate the imagination with all that is humane and good. Bond

insists that ‘imagination also expresses triviality, destructiveness, genocide, serial

killing, torture, cowardice, treachery, pettiness’.94 By highlighting this point

Bond shares the cautionary approach forwarded by Dollimore and calls into

question the liberal humanist belief in the civilizing and life-enhancing value of

art. But what he does claim is that it is only by way of imagination that an

empathetic response to the other becomes possible. This is possible, he argues,

because the imagination seeks to understand ‘the materiality of others, their being,

90
Ibid, p. 144.
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid, p. 113.
93
Ibid.
94
Ibid p. 146.

48
presence, in the material world’.95 But even though the imagination may seek to

understand this it may also fail and remain imprisoned within dominant ideology.

When this is the case, the imprisoned imagination fails to recognise the

materiality of others and sees, instead, only the ‘imagined’ other. The term

‘imagined’ in this sense does not signal the free play of imagination but, instead,

refers to the ‘other’ which is constructed according to dominant ideological

norms. The ‘imagined’ other would thus conform to dominant identity categories

such as gender, ethnicity, and sexuality: in other words would be ‘imagined’

according to the clichés and stereotypes that form the basis of ideological

identification. Whilst, historically speaking, the affirmation of identity may have

been considered to result in an empowering of the individual - particularly with

regard to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity for example - Bond’s comments serve as

a reminder that there may be destructive as well as constructive consequences of

any attempt to affirm identity. The construction of identity can have disastrous

consequences as Adorno points out: ‘Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of

pure identity as death’.96 This does not, however, only confirm that the specific

case of the Nazi pursuit of racial purity - which depended on the elimination of

95
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 169. Bond’s use of the term ‘materiality’ may be
problematic in that it already suggests an empirical subject who is always already
constituted within ideological boundaries and categories. What Bond means by
the term is indicated by his own qualification of the term as ‘their being there,
presence, in the material world’. Bond seems to be emphasising a fundamental
notion of the human being in a basic existential sense - simply being there in the
world - prior to the ascription of any identity categories. This idea of simply
‘being there in the world’ can, perhaps, be understood to be in accordance with
Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein which signals an attempt to avoid the
problems inherent in the use of the term ‘human being’ which is itself constructed
in language and ideology. However problematic Bond’s use of ‘materiality’
might be philosophically, it is a term which Bond uses in order to stress the
physical, bodily sense of this ‘being there’ and therefore to emphasise the physical
pain and abuse that bodies have been subjected to historically.
96
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton, (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 362.

49
the ‘non-pure’ - was barbaric. Adorno’s insight goes further than this in that it

stresses that any pursuit of pure identity - whether it explicitly calls for an

elimination of others or not - signals an attempt to banish or suppress ‘non-

identity’. Eagleton’s discussion of the demonic, which interprets the Nazis’ desire

for racial purity as an attempt to negate non-being, helps to elucidate this point

further:

The group which threatens to negate their being must be annihilated

because they signify the irruption of chaos and non-sense into their own
world. They are a sign of the hollowness at the heart of one’s own
identity. Annihilating the other thus becomes the only way of convincing
yourself that you exist. It allows you to forge an illusory identity from the
act of fending off non-being.97

According to such a reading, the annihilation of the other is brought about by the

search for ‘pure’ identity, as it is the very act of eliminating that which is ‘other’

which serves to reinforce and bolster an (illusory) identity. Non-identity, non-

being, or what Eagleton calls ‘the hollowness at the heart of one’s own identity’,

is thus warded off by the pursuit of ’pure’ identity.98

‘How’, then, Bond asks, ‘could the Nazi recognise the material - not the imagined

- Jew?’99 How could the Nazi, committed to the quest for racial purity and

inculcated with the values and beliefs of this quest, see beyond the ideologically

constructed category of Jew and recognise the material, physical presence of

another individual, human being? After all, as Adorno insists, ‘in the

concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen’.100

In order to recognise the materiality of the other one must first, Bond argues,

97
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 256.
98
Ibid.
99
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 169.
100
Negative Dialectics, p. 362.

50
recognise it in oneself: ‘you may recognise others only when you can recognise

yourself’.101 He goes on to suggest that it is through drama that ‘we may meet

and recognise ourselves’. At first sight Bond’s suggestion may imply that a pre-

existing self lies dormant waiting to be found or recognised through self-

reflection. It may also seem that such a claim re-produces the humanistic

assumption in the civilizing and life-enhancing nature of art which Bond

otherwise exposes and calls into question. From such a perspective Bond would

seem to be investing drama with a humanising quality and suggesting that if the

Nazi was exposed to more of it he would be rendered incapable of exterminating

others. However, such a view would seem to be at odds with Bond’s awareness -

as highlighted in his reference to the ‘honest band at Auschwitz’ - that a

straightforward link between art and the humane is no longer tenable.

What, then, does Bond mean when he suggests that ‘you may recognise others

only when you recognise yourself?’ And to what extent does drama enable such a

recognition? Bond’s claim may call to mind the Delphic Motto ‘Know thyself’

which is often regarded as a piece of Greek wisdom promoting the pursuit of self-

knowledge. In The Birth of Tragedy, however, Nietzsche reminds the reader that

the motto inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was

followed by a second imperative ‘Not too much’.102 In contrast to the more

positivistic or affirmative approaches to identity, this foregrounding of the double

imperative emphasises that the very affirmation or pursuit of identity may produce

disturbing and unsettling findings: a point made manifest on the stage by the

101
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 169.
102
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. by Ronald
Speirs, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 27.

51
tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles through such characters as

Oedipus, Prometheus, and Pentheus.103 Nietzsche recalls the tale of King Midas’s

capture of the wise daemon Silenus, companion of Dionysus. Forced by the king

into answering what is the best thing for human beings, Silenus finally responds:

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you

force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for
you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to
have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing
for you is: to die soon.104

King Midas’s pursuit of knowledge and insight into the human condition results in

a startling and unsettling revelation. His search for the ultimate key to human

flourishing is based on the assumption that he - and the human being in general -

is the controller of his own destiny and has the power to shape and improve this

destiny. Silenus’s words blow this assumption apart by revealing the transitory

and accidental nature of human existence and by describing human beings as

‘children of chance and tribulation’. For the wise daemon, the human being is a

mere victim of chance, born to endure the tribulations of life. And the tragedy,

according to Silenus, is that the human being has absolutely no choice in this

matter, yet is still deluded into believing that s/he is the master of his/her own

destiny. By revealing that the best thing for the human being is outside the sphere

103
While not wishing to conflate these characters and the plays under one
reading, I do want to emphasise a recurrent theme of identity and individuation
which, although explored in different ways, underpins the plots of Oedipus the
King, Prometheus Bound and The Bacchae. The irony of Oedipus’s unstinting
pursuit of truth is that he remains ignorant of the most fundamental aspects of his
own identity; Prometheus is punished precisely for not knowing the bounds of his
own limits; and Pentheus’s failure to respect Dionysus - motivated by his loathing
of group ecstasy and condemnation of the loss of individuality brought about in
the Dionysiac rites - results in his being torn apart by his own mother.
104
The Birth of Tragedy, p. 23.

52
of human control, Silenus exposes the limitations of human agency. At the same

time, however, the story also highlights the way in which the human being

struggles with such limits and is impelled to enquire into the nature of the self and

the human.

For Nietzsche, the achievement of Attic tragedy lies in its capacity to reveal the

horrific wisdom of Silenus whilst making this knowledge endurable and even

pleasurable: ‘What mattered above all was to transform those repulsive thoughts

about the terrible and absurd aspects of existence into representations with which

it was possible to live’.105 Tragic art would thus enable a transformation whereby

the mood of negation and anxiety brought about by the confrontation with the

most horrifying aspects of human existence would be assuaged. Instead of

dwelling on the negative insights, the composition of tragic art would instigate the

very questions that help to define what it is to be human. It is for this reason that

Bond turns to Greek tragedy - and later Jacobean theatre - as a model for effective

theatre: not by virtue of the narratives that were presented but because of their

ability to raise certain questions. ‘Drama’, Bond argues, ‘is not a revelation of

truth, it reveals a question: “Why?” Not why do these characters act as they do,

but why do you act as you do – are your acts innocent – do they seek justice –

who are you?’106 With this in mind, Bond’s claim that ‘you may recognise others

only when you recognise yourself’ can be understood in a different light.

‘Recognising yourself’, from this perspective, means recognising that the self is

not a pre-given waiting to be found; yet, at the same time, the search for a self is

105
The Dionysiac World View in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, p. 130.
106
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 168.

53
constitutive of what it is to be human: ‘we have no self, we seek a self’.107 What

drama can do is to show this act of self-enquiry whilst also highlighting the

transient, illusory and even insignificant nature of the self. Instead of fending off

this non-being, or, as Eagleton puts it, ‘the hollowness at the heart of one’s own

identity’, in an attempt to affirm a notion of ‘pure’ identity, such a recognition

may allow non-identity, non-being to have its place alongside being. Rather than

understanding Bond’s suggestion that ‘you may recognise others only when you

can recognise yourself’ as a simplistic call for increased self-awareness, which

would in turn enable an increased awareness of others, it can be understood,

instead, as an attempt to re-cognise the very idea of identity. Rather than

appealing to a positivistic notion of identity which privileges presence and being

above all else, such a re-cognition would also take cognizance of non-presence,

non-being, nothingness. The identity of both self and other would thus be

recognised as temporal, and in constant flux, rather than fixed and unchangeable.

To some extent, then, it is only by recognising one’s own ‘imagined’ self as an

illusory construct that one can also see beyond the ideologically constructed

identity categories such as ‘Jew’ and recognise, instead, the materiality of another

human being.

For Bond, drama enables such a recognition when it confronts and explores

extremes or, as he puts it, the questions that define what it is to be human. It does

this not just by staging and performing questions of identity but - and in a way

which recalls Nietzsche’s appreciation of Attic tragedy - by making the

recognition bearable:

107
‘The Reason for Theatre’, p. 121.

54
 We are imprisoned in the imagination. Yet it is the source of our
humanness - and to create our humanness we must be free. So we must
secure an exit from our imagination: we do this by putting it on stage. We
cannot endure this for long. In our present wounded state it is exhausting
to be human. But we may endure it long enough to appear to ourself [sic]
in the gap. That is why we need tragedy.108

Overturning the Brechtian - or received Brechtian - assumption that tragedy is

inherently conservative or hegemonically safe, Bond argues that tragedy offers a

vital means of subverting dominant ideology by offering a temporary exit from its

logic. That which is suppressed by dominant ideology - non-being, non-identity,

nothingness - can be temporarily confronted and brought to consciousness. It is

by way of such confrontations that the human image can be created: that ‘we may

appear to ourself in the gap’.109 Bond’s claim, however, may seem to reproduce

the notion of a split Cartesian subject by suggesting that there is a separation

between enquirer, or onlooker, and the ‘we’ who appears in the gap. The

implication of such a split would be that the ‘we’ who appears is indeed already

‘there’ waiting to be discovered and to appear to the enquirer. And such a claim

would, in turn, support the view that tragedy takes the human as an unalterable

given. But, and crucially, what appears is not already there waiting to be shown

or uncovered, but emerges, or is created, in the very process of looking and asking

what it is to be human. The answer to this is not pre-given but is constantly

created and revaluated through the very act of posing the question. And this is

why, Bond insists, ‘we need tragedy’, because it helps define and create what it is

to be human: ‘We must create a new theatre. It will be unlike the theatres of the

Greeks and Jacobeans but it will serve the same purpose: to create the human

108
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 169.
109
Ibid.

55
image’.110 Issuing a challenge to his predecessors who invested more faith in

scientific objectivity than in theatre, or who wanted theatre to become as reason-

based as science, Bond insists that ‘we must learn to trust theatre again’.111

Bond’s intervention in the contemporary debate between epic theatre and

Aristotelian drama challenges the received view of tragedy as a conservative or

retrogressive model for theatre that came to dominate twentieth-century British

criticism. In particular, his claim that “Brecht’s Aristotelian account of tragedy

ought to be a scandal” calls for a reassessment of some of the assumptions upon

which Brecht’s rejection of Aristotelian drama was founded.112 Yet Bond himself

fails to go beyond the received and often reductive readings of Aristotle’s The

Poetics by suggesting that ‘Aristotle’s catharsis is the purging of pity and fear

after the act, [whereas] Brecht’s alienation effect is the - prescriptive - purging of

pity and fear before the act’.113 This analysis is based upon an understanding of

the term catharsis as purging - in Aristotle’s case the purging comes at the end of

the tragedy whereas in Brecht’s theatre the purging would be effected in advance

by eliminating the emotions from the play. Although the term ‘catharsis’ has been

intensely debated, recent interpretations in drama criticism tend to equate it, like

Bond, with a purging of the emotions. In the most recent English translation this

interpretation becomes, in a sense, ‘official’ by substituting the word purgation for

110
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 170. By claiming that ‘we need tragedy’, Bond follows
other critics who have argued in favour of tragedy. It is worth highlighting,
however, that Bond is not simply reiterating the humanist belief presented by
some critics in the morally edifying quality of tragedy. He is not, then, suggesting
that tragedy can teach moral lessons or that it can somehow teach us how to be
‘better’ human beings. What he is suggesting is that tragedy offers a means of
disclosing and keeping alive the very question of the human which is otherwise
suppressed and forgotten in contemporary culture.
111
Ibid.
112
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 169.
113
Ibid.

56
catharsis.114 In a sense this dominant translation supports Brecht’s mistrust and

rejection of Aristotelian theatre on the grounds that the purging that is effected -

whether understood as moral purification or even elimination - represents an

attempt to arouse and manipulate the emotions of the audience. The purging, in

other words, is directed towards the innate emotions of the audience.

If, however, we pursue a different interpretation of Aristotle’s definition then a

different reading emerges. Martha Nussbaum examines the different ways in

which catharsis has been interpreted and, turning back to Plato’s epistemological

vocabulary, stresses that Aristotle’s use of the term would have a strong

connection with learning or clarification.115 Rather than considering the term

literally as a physical cleansing directed at the audience, it would be more

accurate in this context to think of it in terms of an epistemological and cognitive

‘clearing up’: ‘a clarification (or illumination) concerning experiences of the

pitiable or fearful kind’.116 Unlike recent translations which support the former

view by insisting on the term purgation, the English translation of 1909 - referred

to as the standard translation by early to mid-twentieth-century scholars - reads

more on the lines of Nussbaum’s interpretation. According to this translation

incidents which arouse pity and fear are shown ‘wherewith to accomplish its

catharsis of such emotions’.117 On this account, the catharsis is not directed

114
Under the subtitle ‘The Constituent Elements of Tragedy (6), which provides Aristotle’s most
explicit definition of what constitutes a tragedy, the effect on the emotions is highlighted as
follows: ‘By evoking pity and terror it brings about the purgation (catharsis) of those emotions’
Poetics, trans. by Kenneth McLeish, p. 9.
115
Nussbaum, ‘Luck and the Tragic Emotions’ in The Fragility of Goodness:
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 378-394.
116
Ibid, p. 391.
117
‘On Poetics’, trans. by Ingram Bywater in Rhetoric and On Poetics, (Washington: Washington
University Libraries, 1981), p. 210.

57
towards the audience as more recent readings would suggest. Instead, what is

purged, in the sense of being clarified or illuminated, is the significance or

meaning of the emotions of pity and fear. This reading emphasises the cognitive

quality of the emotions, which are taken to be a composite of a feeling and a

belief judgement rather than as innate or self-evident.118 This is emphasised in

section 13 of Poetics in which Aristotle gives an outline of how the hero of a

tragedy should be depicted in order to maximize the tragic effect:

There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-
eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon
him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement […] the
change in the hero’s fortunes must be not from misery to happiness, but on
the contrary from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in
depravity, but in some great error on his part.119

The misfortune of the hero must, Aristotle argues, be shown to be undeserved.

Whether the tragic events are brought about by some fatal error of judgement on

the part of the hero – hamartia - or by external forces, the important point here is

that pity or fear is occasioned by the situation. Pity depends, in other words, on a

belief judgement: on the belief, for example, that misfortune was undeserved.

Take away the belief and you take away the emotion.

In ‘Conversation about Being Forced into Empathy’, Brecht argued that one must

know why the hero is suffering in order to feel empathy.120 What he deplores is,

as the title suggests, being forced into empathy. This is, however, precisely the

point made by Aristotle if we go along with the translation of catharsis sketched

118
This interpretation of catharsis will be illustrated more fully in my reading of Euripides’
Hippolytus given in the next chapter.
119
Ibid, p. 218.
120
In Brecht on Theatre, pp. 270-271, p. 271.

58
out above. What is emphasised by Brecht and Aristotle is that emotions are not

innate or natural but have a cognitive quality. Bond also argues that it is reason,

or, as he states, ‘the meaning of the situation’ that creates the emotion.121 Drama,

according to these thinkers, is not just the exercising, or even exorcising, of the

emotions but is a cognitive practice with, in some instances, the aim of clarifying

the significance or meaning of certain emotions. What is significant about drama

is that it can present the most difficult situations involving complex webs of

emotions without simplifying either the situations or the emotions involved.

Drama cannot clarify complex emotions but it can illuminate the very point that

certain situations and emotions are complex and cannot be simplified or reduced

within a systematic logic. This point is made most effectively, according to Bond,

when drama confronts extreme situations, ‘because there the questions that define

us are found’.122

Turning back to Plato’s dialogue, the arguments presented here do respond to the

challenge issued by the philosopher to show that tragic poetry, or theatre, ‘is not

only pleasant but useful for political constitutions and for human life’.123

Nietzsche’s evaluation of attic theatre showed how a confrontation with the most

horrific aspects of the human condition could be transformed and turned into a

pleasurable experience. What Bond’s re-appraisal of tragedy attempts to show is

that tragic theatre is ‘useful’ insofar as it keeps alive questions that are key to

human life. Drama which deals with extreme situations, Bond claims, ‘confronts

the ultimate in human experience so that we can seek to understand what humans

121
‘The Reason for Theatre, p. 146.
122
‘Notes on Coffee’, p. 170.
123
The Republic, par. 607.

59
are and how they create humanity’.124 Theatre of this kind engages the audience

in a constant attempt to understand complex situations and to consider what it is to

be human. It is for this reason that Bond calls not just for a revaluation of Attic

theatre but also for a new kind of drama which will embody the confrontational

spirit of Greek tragedy and be relevant to modern-day audiences who are,

according to the playwright, bombarded with the trivialities of mass media:

We are in an age of science but our lives are saturated by the reductive,
violent, sentimental, meaningless drama of the media. The media are self-
important enough to want to deal with important problems, but they make
them worse by trivialising them.125

Bond does not deny that important problems are raised by the media but what he

does draw attention to is the way in which these problems are trivialised and

ultimately divested of all meaning. It is against this backdrop that he calls for the

development of a new theatre which confronts the ultimate in human experience.

For Bond, the complex and sometimes brutal theatre of Kane reveals an attempt to

create such a new theatrical experience which has as its goal the aim of re-creating

the human image and re-investing the human with meaning. For this reason Bond

describes Kane as ‘the most gifted dramatist of her generation’ whose work must

be fully evaluated.126

Bond’s view does, however, contrast sharply with that of other critics who have

been less enthusiastic about Kane’s work. Gottlieb, as discussed briefly in the

‘Introduction’, establishes a connection between Kane’s work and that of Samuel

124
Bond, ‘Afterword: Sarah Kane and theatre’, in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 190.
125
Ibid, p. 191.
126
Bond, ‘Letter on Brecht’, p. 174.

60
Beckett in order to make the claim that Beckett’s influence on Kane and her

contemporaries has been a negative one. A clear opposition is posited between

what Gottlieb sees as the politically engaged work of Brecht and the politically

disengaged or indifferent work of Beckett. This opposition is, however, founded

on a reductive reading of the formal qualities of Beckett’s work which fails to

engage with the politically challenging potential of the playwright’s work. On

this account, Brecht’s work is assumed to be pedagogically sound - in the sense

that political lessons are taught and hopefully learnt by the audience - whereas

Beckett’s work offers no such comfort and is thus assumed to be politically

ineffective. Beckett’s influence on Kane’s generation of playwrights is therefore

seen as regrettable and worrying in that it does not provide a clear political

message or agenda. Commenting specifically on Kane’s work, Gottlieb valorises

the way in which it confronts ‘contemporary realities’ but regrets the lack of any

political focus: ‘What is missing, however, in comparison with Kushner’s play, or

Bond’s or Pinter’s Mountain Language, for example or Timberlake

Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988), is a political focus’.127 The

playwrights that Gottlieb singles out here are, she suggests, continuing in the

tradition of Brecht by writing with a clear, political focus and with a clear

intention to transmit a particular message to the audience. The political focus of

Our Country’s Good, for example, is straightforward: although the play presents a

critique of power-relations and, in particular, of Britain’s colonial past, it does,

nevertheless, promote an optimistic view by arguing for the redemptive and

transformative power of theatre. It is no coincidence, then, that Gottlieb singles

out this play as an example of ‘good’ politically-focused work: not only is it

127
Gottlieb, ‘Theatre Today – the ‘new realism’, p. 9.

61
politically engaged but it also provides a compelling case for the transformative

power of ‘political theatre’.

No such assurances are provided in the theatre of Kane. Her work remains

‘disturbing’, as initial critical responses claimed, and politically ambivalent. It

does not follow, however, that her work therefore represents a retrogressive step

and signals a solipsistic turn away from politics and the world into the self.128

Dominic Dromgoole, who worked with Kane at the Bush theatre suggests, that ‘if

she leans towards the dark and the cruel, that is a perfectly honourable thing to do.

Our cultural opposition to it is only the result of our terror of tragedy. We lean

too much towards good news for Sarah’.129 Rather than dismissing the apparent

political ambivalence in her plays, and her use of brutal and shocking scenes, as

evidence of a politically disengaged generation or, as is sometimes suggested, a

product of a disturbed mind, these aspects can be viewed as part of a strategy

aimed at stimulating radically innovative thinking. With this in mind I will show

in the following chapters how Kane’s theatre continues the legacy initiated by the

Greek tragedians by putting the questions that define what it is to be human back

on stage.

128
This view is put forward by Phyllis Nagy in her conversation with Graham Saunders in which
she suggests that ‘Sarah chose, in her later work, an immersion in self’, Love more or kill me, p.
158. It is also implied in the ‘Introduction’ to Kane’s plays by David Greig who states that ‘4.48
Psychosis sees the ultimate narrowing of Kane’s focus in her work. The struggle of the self to
remain intact has moved from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual and
finally into the theatre of psychosis: the mind itself’, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. I will develop this
argument in more detail in chapter 6.
129
Dromgoole, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting, Section on Kane, (London:
Methuen, 2000), p. 162.

62
 Chapter 2

Blasted and the limits of the human

Kane’s first play Blasted was produced in January 1995 by the Royal Court

Theatre Upstairs. The synopsis of the play given on the back-cover of Frontline

Intelligence 2 describes it as ‘a gut-wrenching vision of war in contemporary

Europe, focusing on three people sheltering in an hotel under fire’.130 The clarity

of this synopsis – which indicates a clear setting, plot and character line-up - does

not prepare the reader for the formal challenges that Blasted presents and

suggests, instead, a naturalistic account of the struggles of three people which

belies the complexities of the play. The play opens with the two protagonists,

Cate and Ian, entering a hotel room in a way which, as Greig indicates in his

‘Introduction’, ‘suggests the kind of chamber piece about relationships with which

the British theatre-goer is so familiar’.131 This appearance of familiarity is,

however, immediately eroded as the play begins to unfold revealing a world of

violence and human misery. Ian’s taunting of Cate throughout scene one, and his

abusive remarks about others which reveal a startling level of bigotry, point to an

underlying current of violence which is made increasingly manifest as the play

progresses. The naturalistic style adopted throughout the opening scene continues

into scene two in which the stage directions and dialogue indicate that Ian has

raped Cate. Yet by the end of this scene, and with the arrival of the Soldier, the

form begins to disintegrate and the socio-realism of the first half is eventually

ruptured entirely by the blast that blows the hotel room apart. In the following

harrowing scenes, which become increasingly surreal and expressionistic in style,

130
Kane, Blasted in Frontline Intelligence 2: New Plays for the Nineties, (London: Methuen,
1994).
131
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. ix.

63
Ian is raped by the Soldier, who subsequently kills himself, Ian tries but fails to

commit suicide and the play comes to a torturous end with Cate and Ian back

together again surviving in the pitiful landscape that remains.

Both Greig and Saunders find comparisons between Blasted and Beckett’s plays

and provide analyses which suggest that the play can be considered as an

exploration of the human condition. ‘Ian and Cate’s relationship of mutual co-

dependency’, Saunders argues, is comparable to the pairing of Vladimir and

Estragon in Waiting for Godot.132 The co-dependency identified here is

interpreted as a source of human strength by Greig who suggests that ‘the final

images are not unlike those moments in Beckett where the human impulse to

connect is found surviving in the most bleak and crushing places’.133 In this

chapter I will provide a reading of Blasted which aims to contribute to the positive

evaluations provided by Greig and Saunders by arguing that Kane’s first play

represents an innovative and challenging attempt to explore the question and the

limits of the human. By emphasising the limits of language and the closure of

representation, Blasted, I will argue, expresses the tragic fate of representation.

Towards the end of Blasted, any hope of renewal, re-birth, or redemption which

might be hinted at through Cate’s discovery of the baby, appears to be

undermined by the sudden death of the infant. Significantly, the death takes place

when Ian is attempting to take his own life by shooting himself in the mouth. It is

at the moment when Ian ‘throws the gun away in despair’ that Cate realises the

132
Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 55.
133
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. x.

64
child in her arms has died (5:57).134 In response to Cate’s announcement ‘It’s

dead’, Ian, desperate about his own failed attempts to end his own life, calls the

baby a ‘lucky bastard’ (ibid). Ian’s response recalls the tragic wisdom that

Nietzsche refers to in The Birth of Tragedy. The most profitable thing for a

human being, according to the tale recounted by Nietzsche, is beyond the reach of

the human, and that is ‘not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However,

the second best thing for you is: to die soon’.135 Ian’s response suggests that the

baby has achieved the second best thing that can befall a human being according

to the Greek tale and, in doing so, has avoided the trials and tribulations that are

an inevitable and inescapable element of being human. But the tragic wisdom

which is revealed here is followed by an outburst of hysteria which brings the

scene to an end:

Cate (Bursts out laughing, unnaturally, hysterically, uncontrollably.

She laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.)
Blackout.
The sound of heavy winter rain.
( 5:57)

Although this moment comes late in the play, it announces a concern which

underlies the entire play and which centres on the limits of human agency and the

question of how to respond to these limits in any way other than the hysteria

demonstrated by Cate’s reaction. It is with this moment as a starting point that I

will attempt to show how Blasted expresses the tragedy of human autonomy. In

doing this I will also challenge the view that Kane’s work is politically ineffective

or evasive by demonstrating how her writing maintains a strong conception of

134
All references to the plays will be taken from Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen,
2001) and will give scene number followed by page number(s).
135
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 23. See the discussion of this on pages 49-50 of chapter 1.

65
what could be beyond or outside culture. Whilst not prescribing or detailing

specific social changes, this approach, as I will go on to discuss, helps to sustain

the possibility of conceiving culture differently.

As is now well documented, Kane’s first piece of theatre was received with some

hostility by most theatre critics who dismissed Blasted as gratuitously violent.136

The more engaged commentators saw a moral vision in her work but,

nevertheless, regarded the lack of political focus or agenda as a regrettable

flaw.137 Kane’s refusal to convey a clear political message and to present, instead,

situations and characters ambivalently, contributed towards the hostility with

which her work was received. The clearest example of Kane’s ambivalent

approach can be seen in the depiction of Ian who is presented as both a grotesque

perpetrator of violence on the one hand and helpless victim on the other. What I

will argue is that the ambivalence in her work signals an attempt to generate

thinking about critical issues and to open up questions which the playwright

identified as important, yet lacking, from contemporary thought. Her attempt also

seeks to call into question the critical context in which Kane found herself writing

during the 1990s. The kind of reading strategies which were becoming

increasingly dominant during the period are put to the test in Blasted and,

arguably, exposed as insufficient. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural

Theory, published in the same year that saw the first staging of Blasted, offers the

student a guide to different strands of critical theory which emerged throughout

the 1970s and 1980s, including ‘Feminist Criticism’, ‘Postcolonial Criticism’,

136
For a full discussion of Kane’s reception in Britain see Saunders, Love me or kill me and Sierz,
In-Yer-Face Theatre.
137
See Introduction for a fuller account of this, particularly pages 12-13 regarding Vera Gottlieb’s
evaluation.

66
‘Lesbian/Gay Criticism’ and ‘Marxist Criticism’.138 Despite their differences,

these different approaches are presented as offering politically progressive reading

strategies in contrast to previous approaches to literary studies which, as Barry

indicates, are negatively referred to during this period as examples of ‘liberal

humanism’:

The term ‘liberal humanism’ became current in the 1970s, as a shorthand

(and mainly hostile) way of referring to the kind of criticism which held
sway before theory. The word ‘liberal’ in this formulation roughly means
not politically radical, and hence generally evasive and non-committal on
political issues. ‘Humanism’ implies something similar; it suggests a range
of negative attributes, such as ‘non-Marxist and ‘non-feminist’, and ‘non-
theoretical.139

Following this account, Kane’s approach – insofar as it is generally evasive and

non-committal on political issues – could be regarded as a throw-back to the

liberal humanist tendencies that were seen as out-dated and politically

retrogressive by the 1990s. Yet, possibly because of the innovative and

challenging nature of her work, this criticism was not levelled in the playwright’s

direction even though her work was criticised for lacking a clear political focus.140

What I want to suggest is that Kane’s use of ambivalence signals an attempt to

disrupt dominant reading strategies, thereby challenging the reader and audience

to think beyond received paradigms and to look beyond categories such as gender,

race, class and sexuality which, by the time Kane was writing, had become a

yardstick by which literary works were measured and critiqued.

138
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995).
139
Ibid, p. 3.
140
The question of Kane’s ‘humanism’ will be discussed at greater length in the final chapter of
this thesis.

67
Although Kane questioned dominant reading strategies, it does not follow that she

was dismissive of advances made in critical theory in terms of exposing and

interrogating assumptions and prejudices with regard to questions of human

subjectivity. She remained concerned, however, that some issues were being

overlooked as a result of the focus on identity politics: ‘An over-emphasis on

sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion from our main problem.

Class, race and gender divisions are symptomatic of societies based on violence or

the threat of violence, not the cause’.141 The importance of Kane’s claim is that it

suggests that the contemporary preoccupation with identity politics diverts

attention from a more critical problem that lies under the surface of society. In

taking this view, Kane goes against the grain of postmodern thinking which,

according to Eagleton, takes the view that ‘culture goes all the way down’ and

thereby erodes any conceptual distinction between culture and what is not given in

culture:

Perhaps one reason why there is no postmodern tragedy to speak of is that

postmodernism, in its belief that culture goes all the way down, has
repressed this difficult duality. It is true that there is no value or meaning
without culture; but culture depends for its existence on material forces
which have no meaning or value in themselves.142

Tragedy, according to Eagleton, can only be viable and meaningful when there is

a conception of something outside culture. Such a conception is, on this account,

negated by postmodernism which attends only to cultural phenomena and

represses any intimation of what may be beyond it. The result of this postmodern

turn is that whilst cultural values and meanings are intensely debated and

141
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 134.
142
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 287.

68
contested, little or no attention is paid to the material forces that underpin culture

and have no essential meaning or value. Eagleton argues that the strength of

classical tragedies lies in their attention to both levels of existence and in their

ability to foreground and dramatize the difficult tension that arises from this

duality:

Tragedies like those of Oedipus and Lear thus retain a trace of the archaic
as a kind of drag or ballast within the historical, a reminder that whatever
our civilized achievements we remain an arbitrary outcropping of Nature,
monstrous or amphibious animals who straddle two domains and will
never be quite at home in either.143

While classical tragedies may deal with situations that are considered to be

‘tragic’ in the sense of being sad or regrettable, their achievement lies more in

their ability to expose the fundamentally tragic nature of the human who exists

between culture and nature, life and death; arbitrarily, and for no apparent reason.

‘Tragedy’, George Steiner argues, thus ‘springs from outrage’ and ‘protests at the

conditions of life’ itself at its most fundamental level.144 Kane’s attempt to write

about critical questions facing all human beings represents a shift in focus from

the culturally and historically specific concerns of the time to questions relating to

human existence in a wider sense. Although her work is concerned with specific

and identifiable problems in the empirical world, it is not exclusively about these

problems but represents, at the same time, a protest at the conditions of life itself.

This shift in focus has proved to be highly contentious and has led some critics to

accuse Kane of being politically vague or non-committal. What I aim to do in my

reading of Blasted is to suggest that Kane’s shift in focus requires an equal shift in

143
Ibid.
144
Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, p. 161.

69
focus on the part of the reader/audience and attention to different questions than

the ones that were prevalent at the time the play was written. By reading Blasted

as a contemporary form of tragedy I will try to draw out and explore some of the

questions that the play opens up and to challenge the view that Kane’s

evasiveness on political issues represents a retrogressive or politically disabling

step for British drama.

Kane’s first play produces a clear distinction between a manifest or surface level

of culture and a deeper or hidden level of existence. Ian’s opening line – ‘I’ve

shat in better places than this’ - immediately shatters the illusion presented by the

stage scenery (1:3). Although the stage directions specify ‘a very expensive hotel

room in Leeds’, they also qualify this by remarking that this is ‘the kind that is so

expensive it could be anywhere in the world’ thereby emphasizing the

homogenizing effect of capital and the capitalist system (1:2). From the outset of

the play an uncomfortable distinction is drawn suggesting that the hotel room

symbolising the surface or manifest level of capitalist society hides a deeper level

which is rooted in disgust and violence. This is the level which, as Kane claims,

is largely neglected by contemporary criticism. Before rendering this level more

visible, the play first draws attention to identity politics in a way which is so self-

consciously aware as to preclude or undermine a reading which might set out to

emphasise such issues. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry

are manifested to such an explicit degree that the critical endeavour to uncover

such issues is rendered redundant. Lines like the second one of the play in which

Ian tells Cate to ‘tip that wog when he brings up the sandwiches’ leave little room

for uncovering the racial politics in the play (1:3). Ian’s tirade against, amongst

70
others, ‘wogs’, ‘retards’, and ‘lesbos’ is made so manifestly obvious as to produce

almost a parody of bigotry.

Kane’s use of parody is not just restricted to, or directed against, the bigot. In the

dialogue between Ian and Cate it is not just the former who is parodied but also

the inadequacy of Cate’s responses. Although Cate reacts to Ian’s prejudicial

remarks, she does so in a way which is shown to be merely reactive; without

much thought, and in conformity with what she believes to be general consensus.

The following exchange epitomizes the inadequacy of Cate’s responses:

Ian Hate this city. Stinks. Wogs and Pakis taking over.
Cate You shouldn’t call them that.
Ian Why not?
Cate It’s not very nice.
(1:5)

Her tautological response may just as well be reduced to a self-evident ‘because’

insofar as it gives no explanation or reason to challenge Ian but simply goes along

with received opinions on what is and is not ‘nice’. Cate’s conformity to the rules

and regulations of society is indicated in her use of the auxiliary verb ‘shouldn’t’

to express a sense of duty or obligation that Ian clearly fails to follow. Shortly

after the exchange cited above comes another example which further illustrates

Cate’s attention to politically correct or incorrect language. This time the subject

of discussion is her brother:

Ian Retard, isn’t he?

Cate No, he’s got learning difficulties.
Ian Aye, spaz.
(1:5)

71
By drawing attention to language use, the play discloses a key insight about

identity: that it is in language itself that identities are constructed and negotiated.

With this in mind, Ian’s confident rejoinder ‘aye, spaz’ is more than a mere

display of his continued ignorance or bigotry. His assertion of ‘aye’ in response

to Cate’s ‘No’ reveals that they are both talking about the same thing but in

different linguistic registers. Although Cate’s use of more sensitive language is

intended to minimize prejudice and discrimination, the identity category of which

they are both speaking remains unchallenged. So although there may be some

negotiation over correct terms of reference, the category which differentiates

Cate’s brother is maintained. Throughout Cate and Ian’s dialogue in this scene

there is an emphasis on the fact that identity categories are not givens but

constructed and hence contestable. What the dialogue reveals is that the

preoccupation with language use – however well-intentioned – can be complicit

with the oppression that it aims to reduce by failing to interrogate the very

categories that are being used to differentiate and divide human beings; whether

they relate to race, class, ability or whatever else.

Blasted does not convey a political message or stage a clear attack on the kind of

bigotry displayed by Ian. What it does do, however, is to show how attempts to

challenge prejudice and oppression are limited insofar as they remain trapped

within the same terms of reference which are the basis of oppression in the first

place. Kane argues that ‘class, race and gender divisions are symptomatic of

societies based on violence’.145 In Blasted, the playwright reveals the process

whereby divisions that have already been culturally constructed are reproduced

145
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 134.

72
and reinforced in language. These divisions are not, as Kane insists, the cause of

violence, but are themselves the result of societies based on violence. Kane may

be suggesting here that all human beings are essentially violent and that through

society they learn to conceal or repress this violence. A pattern emerges in Blasted

in which rape is referred to and played out in an increasingly violent manner.

Ian’s abuse of Cate is not shown on stage but suggested through the dialogue and

stage directions which indicate the after-effects of a violent struggle. The next

example is far more explicit with the soldier’s rape of Ian being enacted on stage.

The distinction between perpetrator and victim is blurred and confused in this

scene; not just because Ian, previously the perpetrator, has now become the

victim, but because the soldier’s actions are shown to be a consequence of the

grief and outrage he feels over the rape and murder of his girlfriend. The pattern

being played out in Blasted reveals a gradual escalation of violence whereby the

systematic abuse of communities during times of war is shown to be part of an

endless cycle of violence which starts as a struggle between two people (Ian and

Cate) and culminates in the atrocities described by the soldier. Although Kane’s

first play was heavily criticised for its violent content, most of the acts that are

referred to actually occur off stage: the rape of Cate is not shown and neither are

the most harrowing accounts of torture and war-crimes which the soldier narrates

to Ian.146 In this sense, Kane’s debut already shares common ground with the

146
Kane was heavily critised for her portrayal of violence in the play which includes vivid
accounts of torture and murder which the soldier describes to Ian. Although these accounts are
indeed grotesque, they are far from gratuitous and signal instead a capacity on the part of the
writer to confront the horrific reality of events that were occurring at the time the play was written.
A monologue entitled ‘My vagina was my village’ in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1998),
presents an account of rape and torture from the perspective of a victim which, in its detailed
descriptions, resembles the account of Kane’s Soldier. Although Ensler’s monologue – first
performed three years after Blasted – is a piece of writing constructed for performance, it was
based on interviews with Bosnian refugees as indicated in the explanation which introduces the
monologue and which provides statistical data quantifying the extent of the horrors which Ensler
and Kane attempt to expose: ‘Twenty to seventy-thousand women were raped in the middle of

73
classical tradition which would provide the basis of her next play Phaedra’s Love,

by attending to what happens off stage as well as on it.147 Responding to the

negative criticism of her work, Kane was shocked that more attention had been

given to the violence in her play than to the actual violence that was occurring at

the time the play was performed.

The week the play opened there was an earthquake in Japan in which
thousands of people died, and in this country a fifteen-year-old girl had
been raped and murdered in a wood, but Blasted got more coverage in
some newspapers than either of these events. And I’m not talking about
tabloids.148

Ironically, Kane’s dismay that Blasted received too much attention is coupled

with a sense of frustration regarding the lack of attention that was paid to the

points raised in the play regarding disproportional media representations.

Looking at Kane’s exploration of this theme in the play will help to elucidate

further the playwright’s claim that society is based on violence.

Ian’s profession in the play is highly significant in that, as a journalist, he has a

certain degree of power and control over which stories are told or not told, and

with regard to how language is used to reinforce certain attitudes and belief-

systems in society. Dialogue is interrupted in scene one in order to draw attention

to Ian’s newspaper report which is dictated over the phone. This formal move

Europe as a systematic tactic of war. It was shocking to see how little was done to stop it’, Ensler,
The Vagina Monologues, ‘The Official Script for the V-Day 2006 Worldwide and College
Campaigns’, (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. 2006), p. 31.
147
I make this claim whilst being aware that before writing Phaedra’s Love, Kane showed an
aversion to the classics precisely because things did not happen on stage. Discussing how her
choice of Seneca’s Phaedra came about, she explains that ‘it was the Gate which suggested
something Greek or Roman, and I thought, “Oh, I’ve always hated those plays. Everything
happens off-stage, and what’s the point?” But I decided to read one of them and see what I’d get’,
interview with Nils Tabert cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 72.
148
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 130.

74
from dialogue to dictation is important in that it serves to draw attention to the

fact that Ian does not simply convey the accounts of an event but produces a story

which is mediated through, and shaped by, his use of language. Throughout the

dictation Ian intersperses his sentences with punctuation commands which disrupt

the flow of the report for the audience and draw attention to the way in which the

report is constructed. Whilst the description of the murder victim may suggest an

attempt to personalise the story, the need to keep the report short and concise

means that the person that was Samantha Scrace is represented briefly and

reductively as ‘a beautiful redhead with dreams of becoming a model comma’

(1:12). Earlier in the report she is introduced as a ‘bubbly-nineteen-year old from

Leeds’ – a description that could just as easily be used to anchor a page-three shot

in the same newspaper (ibid). What may at first appear to be an attempt to

personalise the story by giving an account of the victim is shown to work in

reverse: the ‘personal’ touch of the report serves to depersonalise the victim by

appropriating her death in order to produce a short, sensational report for the

newspaper. By describing her in the same terms as a page-three pin-up, the report

fetishizes her death, thereby degrading the victim and diminishing the significance

of the crime. What is of primary importance in the construction of the report is

not the relaying of factual information but the telling of a story which relies

heavily on stereotypical representations taken from other stories. The murderer is

sensationalised and given prominence in the report through the use of capital

letters: ‘Caps up, ashes at the site showed the maniac had stayed to cook a meal,

caps down point new par’ (1:12), while the alleged ‘quote’ taken from the

victim’s mother reads more like a repetition of other quotes taken from similar

stories:

75
 Samantha’s heartbroken mum said yesterday colon quoting, we pray the
police will come up with something dash, anything comma, soon point
still quoting. The sooner this lunatic is brought to justice the better point
end quote new par.
(1:13)

The repeated references to ‘quoting’ call the very act of quoting into question and

indicate that what has been written here does not reflect what Samantha’s mother

actually said (if she said anything), but that, instead, the account fits neatly into

the report and helps to round up the story. The fact that the report is shaped by

attention to space and word-count - as well as Ian’s bigotry - is highlighted when

he ends the dictation and slips immediately into banter with the colleague on the

phone. It seems that the colleague is suggesting a story on someone Ian refers to

as a ‘Scouse tart’ who ‘spread her legs’ for him (1:13). After listening and

laughing to whatever his colleague has to say, Ian concludes that the report is ‘not

worth the space’ (ibid). This again draws attention to the gate-keeping process

whereby decisions are taken as to what is and is not newsworthy. This section of

the play also gives a precise example of how divisions between groups of people,

and stereotypical attitudes towards these groups – for instance women - are

culturally constructed and reinforced in language and in the stories that are

circulating within society.

Returning to Kane’s argument that ‘class, race and gender divisions are

symptomatic of societies based on violence’, I indicated above that Kane may be

implying that all human beings are essentially violent and learn to conceal or

repress this through socialisation. Kane’s portrayal of the soldier, however,

undermines such a view and shows, instead, how the violent actions of one

76
individual are intrinsically linked to wider, societal problems. In a controversial

move, Kane contextualises the rape of Ian by staging it after the soldier has

explained how his girlfriend was raped and killed. The soldier – ‘crying his heart

out’ throughout the rape – is thus portrayed as both perpetrator and victim (3:49).

Importantly, his action is not shown to be the result of an essentially violent

nature but as a consequence of circumstance. During his interrogation of Ian, the

soldier makes the unsettling point that, given the circumstances, any individual

might be capable of such violence. What the play does, then, is to problematise

the question of violence and to challenge a view which would set clear

oppositions between victim and perpetrator or innocent and guilty.149 The play

also undermines the suggestion that the individual is somehow tamed by civilised

society by showing the basis of such a suggestion – the division between

individual and society – to be flawed. Any strict conceptual division between the

two is undermined by revealing how the individuals in the play are not self-

sufficient, stand-alone characters, but evolve in relation to other individuals and

within certain societal conditions. But this still leaves unanswered the question of

violence, or more importantly, the question of where the ‘violence at the base of

society’ stems from. If the play undermines the idea of the traditional Cartesian

subject, then it follows that the human being cannot be taken as the single locus of

violence. This is not to say that individuals cannot be held responsible for acts of

violence that they commit, but that the violence that Kane refers to is not to be

found by looking solely at the human subject.

149
The blurring of the boundaries between victim and perpetrator is discussed by Peter Buse who
reads Kane’s Blasted alongside trauma theory. ‘Trauma’, Buse explains, ‘is not just a crisis in the
memory of the traumatized subject but a crisis in representation and narration’, Buse, Drama +
Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 182. In brief, the crisis can be
summed up by asking how it is possible to represent or narrate traumatic events without reducing
them and without giving in to the temptation to ‘resolve’ them in the very process of representing
and narrating.

77
I have already illustrated how Blasted draws attention to the significant role

played by language: first in the dialogue between Cate and Ian which shows how

identity categories are constructed and negotiated in language; and second in the

dictation section which demonstrates how language is deployed in the telling of

stories which reinforce certain attitudes and belief-systems. Although language is

spoken by the characters in the play, it is evident that they do not entirely control

or ‘own’ the language they speak.150 This is demonstrated by the way in which

words are often the basis of debate – as in Cate and Ian’s dialogue - and in the

repetition of words and language formulations which are sometimes used

interchangeably by different characters.151 Instead the terms that they use are part

of a shared language which is constantly evolving and mutating. As emphasised

by Saussure, ‘language is not controlled directly by the mind of speakers’ but is

limited and shaped by linguistic habits and regulations which evolve over time

and are shared by a community of speakers.152 Derrida takes Saussure’s linguistic

theories further and in a direction which is particularly relevant to the points

raised in this chapter. What Saussure’s theories remind us, according to Derrida,

is that:

‘Language [which only consists of differences] is not a function of the

speaking subject.’ This implies that the subject (in its identity with itself,
or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its self-
consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language,
becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform – even in

150
This is illustrated particularly well in the example given earlier in which Cate and Ian’s
arguments centre around language-use and raise the question of which terms are politically correct
or incorrect at any given time in history/culture.
151
This analysis, and the significance of Kane’s use of repetition in the play, will be sketched out
in more detail below after a brief exposition of some key theoretical points regarding language.
152
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, (Glasgow:
Fontana/Collins, 1974), p. 228.

78
 so-called ‘creation’, or in so-called ‘transgression’ – to the system of the
rules of language as a system of differences.153

On this account, language is presented not as a straightforward function of the

speaking subject but, on the contrary, the subject itself is revealed to be a function

of language. The subject can only become a speaking subject – one that is

identifiable to itself and to others as one – by acquiring and conforming to the

norms of the system of language that it is born into. Over time, the speaking

subject can of course contest particular aspects of this language system and

attempt transgressions from conventional norms or try to create new or alternative

forms. Language is not static but is constantly evolving in line with cultural

attitudes and changing conventions as illustrated in scene one of the play with

regard to the language used to describe different groups of people. Nevertheless,

the important point raised here is that the subject must conform to the underlying

system of the rules of language and that any moderations can only come about

given the consensus of a community of speakers and, importantly, at the level of

language use, leaving the underlying system of rules unaffected. It is by looking

at this underlying system in more depth that the violence underpinning society can

be uncovered.

For Saussure, what is unalterable and inescapable with regard to language is that it

remains a system of differences: ‘a system of interdependent terms in which the

value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others’.154

Within the system of differences that constitutes a language, each term will be

endowed with both a signification and a value which are entirely relational to
153
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’ trans. by Alan Bass, in Margins of Philosophy, (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982), p. 15.
154
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 114.

79
everything else around them. The signification of a term such as ‘woman’, for

example, is assigned a significance and a cultural value in relation to what it is not

- ‘man’: the presence of the latter term must, however, be invoked to provide the

former term with a point of reference from which significance and value can be

attributed. ‘Woman’, in summary, can only be understood (in terms of cultural

meaning and value) in relation to ‘man’ and in the context of the wider structures

of meaning at play at any point in history. Saussure’s insight would play a key

role in the development of the kinds of reading strategies which gained ground in

the period leading up to Kane’s debut – including feminist, postcolonial, and

lesbian/gay criticism – by revealing the arbitrary and relational nature of the sign.

With the insights of Saussurian linguistics, these different critical approaches

could better expose the violent power relations underpinning society by drawing

attention to the way in which language constructs identity categories based on

relational differences which tend to privilege one term over and above another.

What appears to link these different approaches is a conviction, or hope, that by

interrogating language use and uncovering latent prejudices or transgressive

possibilities in texts, mind-sets can be altered, thereby challenging existing power

relations and ending the marginalisation of certain groups in society.

Given such an explicit orientation to socio-political ends, it is often assumed

within this period that the work of criticism, or the act of writing, carries with it a

social responsibility or duty on the part of the writer: an assumption which, apart

from anything else, implies that the writer has the autonomy with which to carry

out their ‘duty’. This assumption is manifested in Langridge and Stephenson’s

interview with Kane where they ask: ‘What do you feel your greatest

80
responsibility is as a writer, and as a woman writer?’.155 Kane responded that she

had no responsibility as a woman writer because she did not believe there was

such a thing (ibid). Although, and as Aston and Reinelt point out, refusing the

title of ‘woman writer’ during the 1970s and 1980s ‘usually bespoke a tendency

towards conservatism or at the very least an unwillingness to be aligned with the

political project of feminism’, this refusal signalled something altogether different

by the late 1990s when the very title had itself come under greater scrutiny.156

Despite Aston and Reinelt’s retrospective insight into the question, the

assumption that Kane would readily accept the title of woman-writer is revealed

in Langridge and Stephenson’s interview. Kane goes against the grain of

dominant concerns and assumptions of the time by refusing to align herself with

any social group and by appealing instead to the difficult notion of truth: a notion

which is difficult to sustain once the arbitrary and relational nature of all signs has

been advanced.

My only responsibility as a writer is to the truth, however unpleasant the

truth may be. I have no responsibility as a woman writer because I don’t
believe there’s such a thing. When people talk about me as a writer, that’s
what I am, and that’s how I want my work to be judged – on its quality,
not on the basis of my age, gender, class, sexuality or race. I don’t want to
be a representative of any biological or social group of which I happen to
be a member.157

Kane’ refusal to write from a clearly discernible standpoint manifests itself in her

work which remains ambiguous and, as illustrated earlier, blurs the boundaries

between strict oppositions such as dominant and subordinate, victim and

perpetrator. What I want to suggest here, is that her work represents an attempt

155
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 134.
156
Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women
Playwrights, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 215.
157
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 134-135.

81
not to expose or shift power relations, but to expose the foundations on which

they are built. These foundations are located in the underlying system of the rules

of language which, as a writer, Kane must conform to, even, using Derrida’s

terms, ‘in so-called “creation”, or in so-called “transgression”’: he cannot, in other

words, simply step outside this system.158 This point helps to challenge the

assumption that the writer, or anyone, has the autonomy with which to critique

from an external, objective viewpoint, using impartial language which does not

already carry connotations, assumptions and prejudices.

As a playwright, the rules that Kane contends with are not just of a linguistic kind

but also relate to the conventions and expectations of contemporary theatre.

Throughout her work Kane would endeavour to challenge these conventions

through formal experimentation. Her first attempt to transgress formal

conventions has perhaps been over-looked or over-simplified as, on the one hand,

a mere shock tactic, or, on the other hand, and as Sierz suggests, as a necessary

device to pull an otherwise disjointed piece of work together: ‘Kane’s experiment

in form was not a coolly pre-meditated idea. It was forced on her by the need to

turn two different plays into one’.159 Initially the play was about a power struggle

between two people in a hotel room but, influenced by news of what was

occurring in Srebrenica at the time, Kane developed the original idea and took in

an unexpected direction. However, the suggestion that Kane simply, and without

pre-meditation, grasps at the idea of blasting the set apart in order to forge a

bridge between her initial ideas and later developments in the writing stage

undermines Kane’s achievement in writing Blasted. The explanation that she

158
Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 118.
159
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 102.

82
needed ‘to turn two different plays into one’ misleadingly portrays the process of

writing as a straightforward trajectory on which an initial idea is transformed into

a finished piece which, if successful, fully expresses the initial idea. On such an

account, Kane’s detour from her initial idea is given to represent something of a

distraction from writing the play that should have been written. But it is precisely

by taking cognizance of events unfolding at the time of writing, and by attempting

to incorporate them – or at least to articulate a response to them – that Kane

produces a powerful play which confronts questions of violence at a fundamental

level of society. The blast at the end of scene two is a significant device which

signals more than a mere challenge to naturalistic stage conventions and which

merits more critical attention than it has received.160

Dialogue is interrupted at the end of scene two by the explosion that occurs

shortly after the arrival of the soldier. This in itself is significant in that the piece

is composed of much more than dialogue and can arguably be read as a critique of

dialogue, or as a critique of the limitations of dialogue. At the end of scene two ‘a

blinding light’ is followed by ‘a huge explosion’ (2:39). After the ensuing

blackout, and in keeping with the rest of the play, the scene then closes with the

sound of rain which announces the end of another season.161 The silence that

160
Saunders attends to the controversy surrounding the dramatic structure of Blasted and, in
particular, the use of the blast, pointing out that although the main reason for it was to express the
chaotic structure of war, there was another more mischievous purpose at work. Saunders goes on
to cite Kane enthusing about blowing the stage set up: ‘I loved the idea of it as well, that you have
a nice little box set in the studio theatre somewhere and you blow it up’, Love me or kill me, p. 41.
By focusing on the playwright’s motivations, Saunders, like Sierz, detracts attention from what
remains a key dramatic device and fails to examine fully the effect of such a device in the overall
structure of the play.
161
Although, as Sierz argues, ‘Blasted works well onstage because of the vividness of its images’,
he goes on to indicate that some scenes remain ‘a challenge to both directors and audiences’, In-
Yer-Face Theatre, p. 99. Some of Kane’s theatrical imagery does remain problematic and difficult
to translate from text to stage. The highly symbolic rain which ends each scene and announces the
changing seasons is a point in question and it is difficult to see how ‘summer rain’ can be

83
accompanies this transition from one scene to the next, and from one season to the

next, also creates anticipation in terms of what might follow this explosion. The

blast – described as it is in terms which are analogous to creation theories –

represents a point of origin or the possibility of creation from destruction. As

scene three begins, dust from the explosion is still falling on the two characters

who remain inert until Ian breaks the silence. The first word uttered after the blast

comes from Ian who asks for his mother revealing, for the first time in the play, an

uncharacteristically vulnerable side which foreshadows events to follow.

Considering what precedes this utterance, and given that no other reference is

made to Ian’s mother throughout the play, this utterance could also be interpreted

as Ian’s first tentative step (back) into language, with ‘mum’ being his first

articulated sound. The blast, from this perspective, represents an opportunity to

strip language back to its origins and to start again. Ian’s confusion at this point is

expressed in his response to the soldier’s questions. Discovering Ian’s gun, the

soldier has just asked Ian which side he is on:

Ian Don’t know what the sides are here.

Don’t know where …
(He trails off confused, and looks at the Soldier.)
Think I might be drunk.
Soldier No. It’s real.
(3:40)

Ian’s descent into confusion provides a theatrical illustration of a point

highlighted by poststructuralists: that the removal of all fixed reference points

results in a decentred universe without certainties or orientation points.162 Unsure

adequately and subtly represented and contrasted with ‘spring rain’ without comprising the flow of
the play by the intrusion of obvious sound-effects.
162
Madan Sarup suggests that ‘one of the main features of post-structuralist theory is the
deconstruction of the self […] There is an abandonment of all reference to a centre, to a fixed

84
of where he is and without any knowledge of the respective positions that he may

or may not belong to, Ian concludes that he may be under the influence of drink.

Whilst clearly confused, Ian seems to be self-aware enough to recognise this

confusion. In other words, although he may not know what the sides are or where

he is, he does appear to know that there are, or that there ‘should be’, sides and

that these represent a crucial orientation point that he is now lacking. So even

though the specific details escape him, he still appears to retain an awareness of

the formal structure of language as a system of differences in which any sign must

invoke two sides - its own presence and non-presence, as in the example of

woman given earlier - in order to acquire meaning and value. Although meanings

and values, insofar as they are arbitrary and mutable, can and do change over

time, the underlying structure of language as a system of differences remains

constant. On the one hand, this fundamental structure of language serves a

constructive purpose insofar as it enables meanings to be forged and values to be

constituted. It is on the basis of this fundamental structure that human culture -

including its systems of thought; its ways of identifying, ordering and categorising

- is constructed. But whilst the structure of language enables the development of

society, it simultaneously announces the destructive character of society in that it

allows for the construction of the violent hierarchies that lead to oppression and

abuse of those groups who are subordinated according to such hierarchies. At the

beginning of the exchange between Ian and the soldier, Ian is disorientated,

unable to respond because he does not share the soldier’s frame of reference. A

dialogue gradually emerges between the two characters which echoes the first

exchange between Cate and Ian in scene one. The anxiety over national identity

subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, to an absolute founding and controlling first

principle’, Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, p. 53.

85
that was played out in scene one is now repeated, this time with Ian being placed

in the position of foreigner or, in Ian’s own words, ‘import’ (3:41).163 Ian’s

denigration of other nationalities at the outset of the play is now repeated by the

soldier who undermines Ian’s attempt to assert his own national identity by asking

‘What’s fucking Welsh, never heard of it’. The use of repetition across these two

scenes effectively illustrates how hierarchical positions are circumstantial and

open to change, with the dominant Ian of scene one becoming the subordinate

character of scene three.

The parallel structure of scenes one and three not only helps to show the arbitrary

and mutable nature of hierarchical positions but also evokes a sense of anxiety

with regard to the very act of naming or identifying. Cate’s line: ‘You shouldn’t

call them that’ (1:4) - spoken in response to Ian’s abusive description of ethnic

minority groups – is echoed in the following exchange between Ian and the

soldier:

Soldier Learn some manners, Ian.

Ian Don’t call me that.
Soldier What shall I call you?
Ian Nothing.
Silence.
The Soldier looks at Ian for a very long time, saying nothing.
Ian is uncomfortable.
Eventually.
Ian What?
Soldier Nothing
Silence
Ian is uneasy again.
Ian My name’s Ian.
(3:41-42)
163
To avoid repetition all further quotations given here from scene three refer the reader to pages
41-42 of the play.

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Recalling the words spoken by Cate in scene one, Ian becomes defensive telling

the Soldier: ‘Don’t call me that’. Unlike Ian in the opening scene, the soldier has

not used a pejorative term but has merely spoken his name. Ian’s uneasiness at

this point indicates that the act of naming is not straightforward or innocent and is,

instead, fraught with problems. Now that Ian finds himself on the wrong side of a

power struggle, being named means being located within a system of differences

in which he is rendered subordinate. Ian’s appeal to be called ‘nothing’ thus

represents an attempt to escape the process whereby what he previously held to be

his own identity is under threat. The silence that follows Ian’s appeal is therefore

highly significant as it stages a representation of the ‘nothing’ that Ian seeks. The

silence, in other words, disrupts the flow of language and offers a temporary

respite from the power struggle taking place. On stage, however, the ‘silence’

refers only to the momentary suspension of dialogue: gestures, movements and

other visual signifiers remain in play. The soldier’s gaze on Ian is the most

significant point in question throughout the break in dialogue. Unable to tolerate

the discomfort generated by the silence and the soldier’s stare, Ian eventually re-

instigates the play of language by asking ‘what’. Drawing the discomfort out

further, the Soldier answers ‘nothing’ until, after another silence, and with visible

trepidation, Ian finally conforms to the rules of the language spoken by the Soldier

by affirming: ‘My name’s Ian’. Ian’s struggle to resist the imposition of language

is defeated by his own inability to remain silent. The uneasiness he feels on

taking up his position and affirming his identity is revealed to be intuitive: as a

result of this affirmation Ian becomes an object of desire for the Soldier whose

next line – ‘I/ Am/ Dying to make love/ Ian’ (3:42) - foreshadows the violent rape

scene which follows.

87
A clear difference between scenes one and three is that what is explicitly enacted

on stage after the blast is only alluded to before it. The bouquet of flowers that

Ian offers Cate at the end of scene one is shown ripped apart and scattered around

the room at the beginning of scene two suggesting that a violent struggle has taken

place overnight. Watching Ian contend with an attack of coughing and intense

pain, Cate waits for him to look at her and then accuses him with one word: ‘cunt’

(2:25). Cate’s uncharacteristic use of what she would usually consider to be bad

language confirms what is already suggested by the stage scenery. References to

what happened between them are then made sporadically throughout the dialogue

between the two of them and later in the exchange between Ian and the soldier.

The second rape appears to be given more prominence or significance insofar as it

is described in detail and enacted on stage, thus creating a stronger visual impact

both during performance or on reading the play. One way of interpreting this

would be to suggest that the second half of the play is an intensification of the first

half. Another way, however, would be to consider this strategy as a way of

drawing attention to the act of representation itself. By contrasting a rape which

is not seen with one that so explicitly is, Kane shows how the perception of an act

is shaped by the way it is represented.164

164
This point calls to mind Edward Bond’s Saved which proved to be a profound source of
inspiration for Kane as she indicated to fellow playwright Mark Ravenhill when she claimed that
‘you can learn everything you need to know about the craft of play-writing from Saved’,
Ravenhill, ‘Obituary’ Independent, 23 February 1999. First produced in 1965, Saved created a
media uproar because of its depiction of immoral characters and in response to scene six of the
play which shows a baby being stoned to death in its pram. What was missed by the reactionary
criticism was the way in which the play raised crucial questions about violence and the morality of
seeing. Although violence against the baby culminates in the stoning, the fact that it has been born
into misery and neglect is highlighted first in scene four where the audience learns for the first
time of the existence of the baby when it starts crying off-stage. The stage directions indicate that
‘it goes on crying without a break until the end of the scene’, Bond, Saved, (London: Methuen
Modern Plays, 2000) p. 36. The audience of the play are thus put in the uncomfortable position of
watching the characters on stage watching television and ignoring the crying baby. This strategy

88
This line of interpretation is supported further by the fact that both scenes draw

attention to the way in which media representations are instrumental in

constructing news stories, shaping perceptions and promoting or discouraging

responses to the stories presented. The dictation in scene one shows the news in

construction and also draws attention to the gate-keeping process whereby

decisions are taken as to what is and is not given media coverage. Scene three

returns to the issue, this time giving a voice to the stories that are not covered

through the Soldier. Whilst he may prove to be physically dominant in this scene,

the soldier fails to persuade Ian to use his position as a journalist to expose the

war crimes that are described to him in detail. Ian responds to the Soldier’s plea

by arguing that ‘This isn’t a story / anyone wants to hear’ (3:48). Taking up one

of the newspapers that were thrown down in scene one, Ian reads out one of the

articles at random which, in its use of titillating sexual references, draws clear

parallels with his own report of scene one. The fact that Ian fails to take such

writing seriously is shown in the way he ‘tosses the paper away’ and emphatically

dismisses its contents as just ‘stories’ (ibid). Ian refuses to take responsibility or

acknowledge his role in the construction of these stories and, when confronted by

the Soldier who demands that he tells his story – ‘Tell them you saw me. / Tell

them … you saw me’ (ibid) – claims that it’s not his job. His punishment is not

only to be raped, but also, in a gesture which is highly significant, to have his eyes

gouged out and then eaten by the soldier. His unwillingness to use his capacity to

see – understood in its wider sense of becoming aware, recognising, or

understanding – is punished by the removal of his sight. Far from being

enables Bond to draw attention to the very act of watching. Watching television becomes a
metaphor for a wider concern regarding the politics and ethics of watching which, in Saved, is
associated with passivity and complicity in violence.

89
gratuitous, this scene is highly relevant and reminiscent of classical tragedies such

as Oedipus the King and King Lear.165 Sean Carney argues that ‘the violence in

Blasted is profoundly aestheticized and essential to the play’s significations,

which are centred around the political function of dramatic tragedy in the

contemporary moment’.166 Carney’s article makes a strong case for reading

Blasted as a contemporary form of tragedy and, in line with the arguments I put

forward in this thesis, describes Kane’s staging of negativity as ‘humanizing’.167

For George Steiner, classical tragedies like Oedipus and King Lear are far

removed from the ‘near-tragedies’ of the modern period insofar as the latter are

influenced and shaped by the belief in the powers of progression which pervades

this period. Translated into theatre, this belief signals the ultimate overcoming of

tragedy in that tragic events may be shown, but only so that they can be overcome

thereby reinforcing the belief in progress. What may be disturbing for the

audience of Blasted is that this familiar structure is abandoned and rather than

moving from punishment to redemption, or at least to the possibility of

redemption, the play remains trapped within an endless cycle of violence and

struggle with no apparent means of escape. Ian’s suffering does not end with the

soldier but goes on until the end of the play where not even the closure associated

165
Graham Saunders makes an interesting connection between the negative reception of Blasted
and the response, by some critics, to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Samuel Johnson, he indicates,
‘believed that the onstage blinding of Gloucester was a gratuitous act, unconnected with the main
thrust of the play’, ‘“Out Vile Jelly”: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear, New
Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 20, February 2004, pp. 69-78, p. 78. Whilst, in response to Kane’s debut,
critics did make connections between King Lear and Blasted, they did so, as Saunders argues, in a
way which was ‘meant to be taken sarcastically’, (p. 70). Saunders’s article effectively challenges
this initial sarcasm by drawing out the thematic and dramatic similarities in the plays and arguing
that ‘it is her incorporation of classical dramatic form into a modern setting that marks her out
from her contemporaries’, p. 77.
166
Carney, ‘The Tragedy of History in Sarah Kane’s Blasted’, Theatre Survey, 46:2, (November
2005), pp. 275-296, p. 276.
167
‘Tragedy’, Carney claims, ‘is the staging of the futile gesture, the inevitable failure, the attempt
to enact the impossible, which Kane may want us to see as finally humanizing’, Ibid, p. 293.

90
with death can put an end to it. Ian’s relief at being finally released through dying

gives way to despair when he realises moments later that he has not died, or

worse, that he is unable to die. Resuming the dialogue that is abandoned during

the build up to his ‘death’, Ian is condemned to re-enter the play of language and

to take his part in the indefinite struggle being played out. The audience is thus

denied any sense of closure at the end of Blasted and, instead, is offered only the

prospect of an endless repetition of the same patterns and the same motifs that

have pervaded the whole play. The gin that Cate and Ian consume in the closing

moments, the sausage they eat, and the rain that falls relentlessly on them, call to

mind earlier moments in the play and reinforce its circular structure.168 Despite

all that has happened, the two characters seem to be joined together out of

necessity and co-dependency – as illustrated through their sharing of the final

meal of gin, sausage and bread - in a way which, as Saunders points out, has much

in common with the characters from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), whose

failure to go their separate ways is arguably a result of a realisation that they each

rely on the other to confirm their own identity.169

Although closed in its own circular structure, the play does point outside itself by

alluding to other plays and by making reference to events taking place at the time

of writing. However, rather than breaking with the closed structure of the play,

these references serve to highlight even further a point that Blasted articulates

168
The rain in Blasted may have been inspired by the closing song delivered by the Clown in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night which, as I will discuss in chapter 4, Kane drew in on writing
Cleansed. The Clown’s song consists of five verses which, apart from the last verse, contain the
same second line ‘With hey, ho, the wind and the rain’ and the same last line ‘For the rain it
raineth every day’, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, The Arden Edition of the Works of William
Shakespeare, eds. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, (London: Methuen, 2003), V. i. 388. I would
like to express my gratitude to Jeff Wainwright for pointing this similarity out.
169
See Saunders chapter on Blasted where he looks at the parallels between Kane’s play and
Beckett’s and provides more examples of how Ian and Cate’s relationship echoes those played out
in Waiting for Godot, Love me or kill me, pp. 55-56.

91
both in its form and content: that representation remains trapped within its own

circular play of signs and reference points. In this sense, Blasted can be

understood according to Artaud’s definition of ‘the theatre of cruelty’. Artaud

anticipates the misrepresentation or misappropriation of his terminology when he

writes that:

With this mania we all have today for belittling everything, as soon as I
said ‘cruelty’ everyone took it to mean ‘blood’. But a ‘theatre of cruelty’
means theatre that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all […]. We are
not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. And above all else, theatre
is made to teach us this.170

Theatre’s purpose, according to Artaud, is to reveal the illusion of autonomous

subjectivity by illuminating the point that the human is not a free agent but is

bound by limitations and vulnerable to factors – such as death - which remain

outside human control. Theatre which accomplishes such a task is ‘cruel’, for

Artaud, not in a gratuitous or sadistic sense, but because it illuminates the most

cruel and difficult aspects of existence.171 Blasted is cruel, according to this

definition, because it exposes the illusion of human autonomy by announcing or

expressing the very limits of representation.

Derrida emphasises the significance of Artaud’s insights in ‘The theatre of cruelty

and the closure of representation’ where he writes: ‘The theatre of cruelty is not a

representation. It is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable. Life

170
Antonin Artaud, ‘No More Masterpieces’, p. 60.
171
Artaud clarifies this point further in a letter to a friend where he tries to justify his choice of
title. ‘This cruelty is not sadistic or bloody, at least not exclusively so. I do not systematically
cultivate horror. The word cruelty must be taken in its broadest sense, not in the physical,
predatory sense ascribed to it […] Indeed, philosophically speaking, what is cruelty? From a
mental viewpoint, cruelty means strictness, diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and
absolute determination’, Antonin Artaud, ‘Letters of Cruelty’ in The Theatre and its Double, p. 79.

92
is the nonrepresentable origin of representation’.172 Derrida argues that the non-

representability of life, or the limit of representation, is dissimulated in theatre

which maintains the illusion that life itself can be represented on stage. This

dissimulation is repeated each time an actor steps on stage and represents,

‘becomes’, or takes the part of a character whose presence and identity are

accepted by the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief. The theatre of cruelty, by

contrast, would challenge this illusion by showing the extent to which life is

unrepresentable. Although it is, according to Derrida, ‘unrepresentable’, life

remains, nevertheless, the origin of representation. But it is an origin which has

always already been penetrated or contaminated by the act of representation: life

as presence or self-presence ‘has always already begun to represent itself, has

always already been penetrated’ in order to be present to itself.173 Any clear

distinction between life and representation – whereby the latter allegedly

describes the former – is thus shown to be illusory. Instead life can only be

present to itself as life once representation has already begun. Neither life nor

representation precedes the other but both are shown to be inextricably linked

together: without representation life cannot be present to itself, and without life -

as a non-representable origin – representation could not begin. Derrida conceives

this double structure dialectically as:

[T]he indefinite movement of finitude, of the unity of life and death, of

difference, of original repetition, that is, of the origin of tragedy as the
absence of a simple origin. In this sense, dialectics is tragedy, the only
possible affirmation to be made against the philosophical or Christian idea
of pure origin […] What is tragic is not the impossibility but the necessity
of repetition.174

172
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, p. 294.
173
Ibid, p. 314.
174
Ibid, p. 313.

93
On this account, the absence of a simple origin is conceived as tragic because it

deprives life of any grounding or source of meaning. Yet, at the same time, the

absence of a simple origin also gives rise to the indefinite movement of finitude,

to the play of difference, or to what Artaud calls ‘original repetition’: a

contradiction in terms which expresses the fundamentally double structure of

dialectics as the indefinite playing out of repetitions without origin. It is because

of the inexorability of this movement, which is repeated indefinitely, for no

discernible reason and with no apparent purpose, that Derrida describes dialectics

as tragedy. And what is tragic ‘is not the impossibility but the necessity of

repetition’.175 Clarifying this further, Derrida looks at the circular limit within

which the repetition of difference is infinitely played out. Representation, he

argues, has no end or beginning because it has always already begun. Yet, despite

its absence, the end, or closure, of representation can still be conceived of, and it

is in thinking this closure that Derrida locates the tragic: ‘To think the closure of

representation is to think the tragic: not as the representation of fate, but as the

fate of representation. Its gratuitous and baseless necessity.’176 Derrida uses the

term tragic here in a way that challenges received views which conceive tragedy

as a theatrical exposition or representation of fate. Fate, in this sense, is regarded

as a kind of divine principle governing and pre-determining what happens. Not

surprisingly, and as Steiner points out, such a view is regarded as anathema in the

modern period as it undermines the possibility for human agency and suggests

that history is pre-determined by external forces.177 The fact that tragedy is

associated so closely with fate may account, to a significant extent, for its demise

175
Ibid, p. 313.
176
Ibid, p. 316.
177
See Introduction for a discussion of Steiner’s explanation for the demise of tragedy in the
modern period.

94
during this period. Derrida’s reading of Artaud provides an alternative way of

conceiving fate and thinking the tragic which can also help to illuminate and

consider the effect of Blasted.

‘To think the closure of representation is to think the tragic’, according to

Derrida.178 Closure, he goes on to define, is the circular limit within which

representation occurs and in which repetition of difference is infinitely played out.

Blasted announces the closure, or the very limits, of representation by constantly

foregrounding the very process of representation; by emphasising the force of

repetition which is fundamental to representation through the repetition of

structures, motifs and patterns of speech and behaviour and by reinforcing a sense

of entrapment through the disavowal of death in the final scene which produces

the discomforting sensation that there is no escape from the circular structure

which is the play. In announcing the closure of representation, Blasted thinks the

tragic and prompts the audience to confront it. This is the tragic conceived as ‘the

fate of representation’ whose fate is to be compelled to repeat itself indefinitely

and without any discernible reason or purpose. It is because of its ‘gratuitous and

baseless necessity’ that Derrida regards the fate of representation as tragic.

Because of the connotations and the historical baggage surrounding the term, it is

difficult to emphasise the point that the tragic, conceived in this way, does not

equate with pessimism or negativity. It signals, by contrast, a recognition – which

is neither pessimistic nor optimistic - of that which, out of necessity, cannot be

any other way.179 The fate of representation is that it must be played out in a

178
‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, p. 316.
179
This conception of fate is similar in emphasis to the Greek term tuché which, as Nussbaum
shows, refers to ‘what just happens’ or to ‘the element of human existence that humans do not
control’, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy,

95
circular limit in which the repetition of difference is infinitely repeated for no

reason or purpose outside the circular limit itself. Blasted expresses the tragic fate

of representation and, in doing so, contributes towards the continuation of its

infinite and fateful playing out.

Both Terry Eagleton and George Steiner advance the idea that tragedy has no

place or meaning unless there is a conception of something beyond culture. At

different times and in different cultures this has taken different forms or has been

conceived differently. But in all cases, an external or transcendental element – be

it a divine force, God or Nature - is shown to produce restraints on human agency.

The tragic effect is produced by showing the struggle between human beings

trapped within culture and the external forces beyond culture which must, if the

tragic effect is to be achieved, be seen as inexorable. The suggestion made by

Steiner and Eagleton is that if forces external to culture are completely eradicated

from the stage, or if a conception of them is no longer maintained, then the tragic

effect can no longer be produced. By emphasising the closure of representation

Blasted would appear, at first sight, to confirm Eagleton’s concern that the

postmodern period is characterised by a refusal to conceive of anything beyond

culture.180 This question is explored in scene four of the play when Cate tells Ian

that it is wrong to take your own life as it goes against God’s wishes. This leads

to the following exchange between the two characters:

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 89. Nussbaum, as I discuss further in chapter
3a, explains that it is difficult to appreciate the full significance of tuché in English as there is no
single term that captures the full spectrum of meanings intended by the Greek term. Derrida’s
observation, which emphasises the force of necessity and the inhuman (in terms of being beyond
human agency), provides a means of re-conceiving fate along the lines indicated already by the
Greek term tuché, thereby opening ways of thinking this term which is so crucial in interpreting
the tragic.
180
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 287.

96
 Ian: No God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia.
No fucking nothing.
Cate: Got to be something.
Ian: Why?
Cate: Doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Ian: Don’t be fucking stupid, doesn’t make sense anyway. No
reason for there to be a God just because it would be
better if there was.181
(4:55)

Cate’s conviction that there must be something that makes life meaningful is

challenged here by Ian’s atheism. His comment that there is ‘no reason for there

to be a God just because it would be better if there was’ recalls Steiner’s

discussion of the growth in rationalism which, he argues, signalled the

simultaneous death of tragedy. For Steiner the demise of tragedy can be directly

attributed to the growth of rationalism from the seventeenth century onwards and

to an increase in secularism. Steiner ends The Death of Tragedy by lamenting this

demise:

In the nineteenth century, Laplace announced that God was a hypothesis of

which the rational mind had no further need; God took the great
astronomer at his word. But tragedy is that form of art which requires the
intolerable burden of God’s presence. It is now dead because His shadow
no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie.182

Like Laplace, Ian in Blasted sees God as an out-dated hypothesis which no longer

fits with a rational and materialist world-view. At the same time, he reveals an

awareness of what might be lost by such a rationalist view when he states that ‘no

reason for there to be a God just because it would be better if there was’ (my

emphasis). For Cate the question is not one of preference - whether it would be

181
The reference to Narnia made by Ian at the beginning this exchange is significant and will be
discussed further below: see footnote 55.
182
Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, p. 353.

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better or not - but of need: without God as a guiding principle or source of origin

and meaning, life just ‘doesn’t make sense’, and Cate, it seems, needs life to make

sense. From this perspective, the turn away from God also threatens any sense of

meaningfulness or purpose to existence. It is because of this perceived threat that

Steiner makes the link between the growth in rationalism and the demise of

tragedy in theatre and literature: tragedy can only work on this account, if

preceded by a firm ground on which a sense of meaningfulness, value and purpose

to existence is founded. Consequently, the death of God also signals the death, or

impossibility, of tragedy which, as Steiner states, ‘requires the intolerable burden

of God’s presence’.

Steiner’s claim that God’s ‘shadow no longer falls upon us’ as it did on the tragic

characters of classical tragedies is called into question by Kane’s Blasted and by

her work in general in which the question of God is manifested as a recurrent

theme. The conversation cited above is echoed in Kane’s next play, Phaedra’s

Love, in which the debate started with Ian and Cate is developed further between

Hippolytus and the Priest. The Priest’s mention of God is dismissed by

Hippolytus who retorts that ‘There is no God. There is. No God’ (6:94). Kane’s

use of punctuation in this line indicates the paradox which is highlighted in both

plays. Whilst attempting to deny the existence of God, Hippolytus inadvertently

affirms this existence by stating that ‘There is’. Whether Hippolytus is trying to

emphasise that there is no God or disclosing his uncertainty on the subject is

unclear. But what is clear is that the idea of God in the play is no more present

than when Hippolytus is denying His existence. Similarly, in Blasted, although

the focus of the discussion leans towards Ian’s denial of God – and therefore

98
suggests God’s absence – God, or the idea of God, is made present during Cate

and Ian’s discussion. Kane’s exploration of this theme is consistent with Lucien

Goldmann’s theory of the Hidden God who is ‘always absent and always

present’.183 Goldmann suggests that attention to this point is central to tragic

vision and to the development of tragedy. A similar view is advanced by Georg

Lukács who claims that in tragedy ‘God must leave the stage, but must yet remain

a spectator’.184 For both Goldmann and Lukács, God must be both present and

absent for tragedy to work. Lukács’s point can help to elucidate this further and to

account for why Steiner refers to God’s presence as an ‘intolerable burden’. ‘God

must leave the stage’, Lukács insists, because otherwise his presence deprives the

characters of the autonomy and freedom to act independently. With God’s

departure the characters become accountable for their own actions and responsible

for their own destiny. So whereas Ian – free from any burden of responsibility to

God - is shown to be free to take his own life, Cate’s actions are shown to be

restricted and shaped by her faith in God which is, in turn, shown to be merely

unthought convention. Although, on the one hand, God must leave to enable the

characters to become autonomous, God must, nevertheless, ‘remain a spectator’,

or, using Goldmann’s terminology, remain present but hidden from view. For

Cate, God’s hidden presence is essential as it grounds her sense of existence and

provides her with a source of meaning; yet this presence simultaneously deprives

her of the autonomy enjoyed by Ian. It is with this paradox in mind that Steiner

describes God’s presence as an ‘intolerable burden’: if God is absent, then the

character is deprived of any sense of grounding and meaning; yet, if God is

183
Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in The Pensées of Pascal and the
Tragedies of Racine, trans. by Philip Thody (London: Routledge, 1964) p. 36.
184
Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, (London: Merlin Press,1974), p. 154.

99
present, then the character is deprived of autonomy. The strength of Kane’s first

play is that it manages to highlight this paradox thereby confronting and exploring

the question of human autonomy.

Although the question of God, or of a transcendental force outside culture, is

debated in Blasted, it is not my view that Kane is attempting to reinstate God as

an external force whose absence may account for the ills of modern or

postmodern society.185 But it is my view that Kane is attempting to explore the

boundaries and limits of culture, which, in itself, invokes the possibility of

something beyond culture: the boundaries of culture can only be conceived where

there is already a conception of an in and out of culture, an inside and outside the

boundary. By emphasising the limits of language and expressing the closure of

representation, Blasted expresses the tragic fate of representation. The tragic, in

this sense, does not signal pessimism or defeatism but recognition or affirmation

of that which cannot be otherwise. Although the fate of representation to remain

trapped within its own circular play of signs can be perceived negatively or with

anxiety, Derrida finds cause for affirmation within the closed system of

differences which structures language. Extending Saussure’s theories further,

Derrida picks up on the linguist’s insight that language is a system in which signs

signify nothing alone but refer only to other signs.186 John Lechte shows how

185
Kane’s mixed views on the subject of God are discussed by Saunders and were explored in his
interview with her in which she talks of a kind of split in her own personality and intellect
whereby the intense Christian upbringing that she had as a child constantly disrupts her tendency,
as an adult, to disbelieve in God, Love me or kill me, p. 22. Kane talks of a constant debate with
herself that these mixed views generate. The manifestation of this debate in her work can thus be
seen as part of an attempt to externalise and articulate this debate through drama.
186
This point is elucidated in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair which was one of the sources for
Kane’s last play 4.48 Psychosis (see chapter 6 for further references to this text), and which is also
referenced in Blasted during Ian’s refusal of anything other-worldly in which he names and
includes God, Father Christmas, Fairies and Narnia. In chapter 12 of Lewis’s book, a discussion
takes place about the possibility, or impossibility of asserting the reality of any thing or sign

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Derrida highlights the point that Saussure and the later structuralists failed to

recognise the full significance of this insight:

Difference without positive terms implies that this dimension in language

must always remain unperceived, for strictly speaking, it is
unconceptualisable. With Derrida, difference [sic] becomes the proto-type
of what remains outside the scope of Western metaphysical thought
because it is the latter’s very condition of possibility.187

In a similar move to that made in ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of

Representation’ where the unrepresentable origin of life was given to be the

condition of representation, here the unconceptualisable dimension of language is

conceived as the condition of possibility of Western metaphysical thought. The

thought of anything outside or beyond material existence is only possible, on this

account, because of the dimension of différance in language which remains

beyond grasp but which is still palpable as a condition of linguistic possibility.

Blasted announces and expresses the circular limit within which representation

occurs and in which repetition of difference is infinitely played out. By drawing

attention to the process of representation to such a degree, the play exposes the

without reference to other signs. The Queen – in a bid to retain prisoners in her own world known
as ‘underland’ - attempts to undermine the existence of any other worlds or realities. After
discrediting their belief in Narnia, the Queen then turns to their belief in the world that the children
in the story come from; which the reader will recognise as referring to their own world. With a
nod to Plato’s allegory of the cave (which I will discuss further in the next chapter), the Queen first
picks up on the prisoners’ reference to the sun which cannot be seen in the underland and whose
existence they appeal to in order to prove the existence of their world. Their attempts to explain
the sun by comparing it to one of the lamps in the room is ridiculed by the Queen who, in an
argument that resonates with Saussurian overtones, claims that ‘When you try to think out clearly
what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a
dream: and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real
thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story’, C.S Lewis, The Silver Chair, (Harmondsworth:
Puffin Books, 1965) p. 152. The point that signs only refer to other signs is reinforced throughout
the chapter in which the children struggle to prove the existence of things they believe exist but
can only do so by reference to other signs in an endless deferral which never reaches or captures
the thing whose existence they want to prove.
187
John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity,
(London: Routledge, 1994), p.107.

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fundamental structure of the system of language, thereby foregrounding différance

which, for Derrida, remains the very condition of possibility of Western

metaphysical thought at the same time that it remains outside the scope of such

thought. The play, in other words, constantly attempts to confront and articulate

that which cannot be fully conceptualised or articulated. In doing this, the play re-

instigates and maintains a conception of what is outside or beyond culture: a

conception which, according to Eagleton, is eroded or undermined by

postmodernism.

For Eagleton, tragedy is no longer possible because of postmodernism’s refusal to

conceive of anything outside or beyond culture. The belief in a transcendental

force which imposes limits on human agency is considered to be a vital condition

for the presentation of tragedy in order to demonstrate a credible struggle between

the human and the transcendental, and in order to show any struggles on the part

of the human to be ultimately, and inevitably, in vain. In past tragedies this force

has been represented through the Gods, fate, or nature. In Blasted, it is language

itself – or the underlying structure of language as a system of differences – which

is shown to be the force which governs and limits human agency and which leads

to the hierarchical systems of thought which are the basis of the bigotry and

violence shown in the play. Although the characters in the play are shown to be

trapped within the circular repetition of the same structures, at the same time the

underlying structure of language as a system of differences is what enables them

to conceive of a way out of their current predicament, be that Ian’s desire for

death, Cate’s belief in God, or the Soldier’s attempt to bring an end to genocide

by telling his stories to the West. All three characters are shown to be trapped

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within the play but they are all, at the same time, shown to be able to conceive of

an end to their entrapment. The tragedy highlighted in Blasted is that, as Artaud

observes, ‘we are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads’.188 Nevertheless,

as the characters in Blasted show, we continue to conceive of our freedom and, in

doing so, maintain the thought of that which is beyond or outside culture.

Chapter 3a

The Problem of Passion in Seneca and Euripides

188
Artaud, ‘No More Masterpieces’, p. 60.

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In response to the reductive and hostile criticism which surrounded her debut,

Kane complained that ‘there’s been a failure by the critical establishment to

develop an adequate language with which to discuss drama’.189 This perceived

failure could, however, be exacerbated even further by the playwright’s reluctance

to affirm the importance of intertextual influences in her second play Phaedra’s

Love, which she wanted to be viewed and considered entirely on its own merit: ‘I

certainly didn’t want a play that you couldn’t understand unless you knew the

original. I wanted it to stand completely on its own’.190 The reasons for Kane’s

insistence here are interesting as she is usually open and frank in acknowledging

the importance of the various influences that inform her writing.191 In my view

Kane’s insistence seems to be tied up with a desire to make theatre as accessible

and inclusive as possible. Her criticism of the way in which theatre has become

an evening pastime of the middle-classes is documented by Saunders,192 and it is,

I think, partly in an attempt to wrest theatre from what she saw as the confines of

bourgeois constraints that she insists that her play can be understood by anyone,

regardless of whether they have read the classics or not. Whilst agreeing with the

sentiment of this approach, the problem is that by extracting the work from its

context, the critical and theoretical languages which have been developed to

discuss this tradition are simultaneously discarded, resulting in a critical void or in

the kind of reductive criticism that followed Kane’s debut. On its own, and as

critical responses to the play indicate, Phaedra’s Love may appear to be the

189
Natasha Langridge and Heidi Stephenson, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on
Playwriting, (London: Methuen, 1997) p. 132.
190
Kane, interview with Nils Tabert in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 72.
191
See footnote 43 of the Introduction.
192
Love me or kill me, pp. 14-15.

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weakest of Kane’s plays.193 What I aim to do in the following two chapters is to

attempt to address this problem by situating Kane’s play firmly in the context of

the tragic tradition. By interrelating the work of Kane, Seneca (c. 5 BC-AD 65)

and Euripides (c. 480–406 BC), I hope to provide a critical context whereby

certain aspects of Phaedra’s Love can be re-thought and reappraised.

Kane’s play was loosely based on her reading of Seneca’s The Phaedra, which

was in turn based on the Roman playwright’s reading of Euripides’ Hippolytus.194

What I will argue in this and the following chapter, is that the plays presented by

Kane, Seneca and Euripides all share a concern to explore the theme of love,

albeit in entirely different ways and revealing significantly different approaches to

the subject. My main aim in presenting a comparative reading of the plays is to

highlight these different approaches and explore some of the debates about love

that emerge. Although presented differently in each of the versions, an underlying

question persists throughout: can the passions be overcome and is such an

overcoming desirable? The next chapter will consider the way in which Kane’s

play addresses this question in a contemporary context. In order to emphasise the

significance of Kane’s interpretation - both in terms of its contemporary relevance

and in relation to the perennial debate concerning the passions – I will first

concentrate in this chapter on providing a close, comparative reading of Seneca

193
Sierz gives an account of the critics’ response to Phaedra’s Love and cites Michael Billington’s
comment as an example of the reviews that ‘mixed both praise and put-down […] “Viscerally, her
play has undeniable power: intellectually, it’s hard to see what point it is making”’, Sierz, In-Yer-
Face Theatre, p. 108.
194
Saunders explains how the play emerged out of a commission by the Gate Theatre for a ‘new
work by a canonical play from the past’ and discusses how Kane discovered Seneca through
reading Caryl Churchill’s Thyestes, Love me or kill me, p. 71-72.

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and Euripides which aims to highlight the way in which both playwrights explore

the problem of passion.

Seneca’s play The Phaedra ends with Theseus issuing orders for the funeral of his

son Hippolytus. His scattered remains are to be gathered together and then

ritually cremated on ‘the royal funeral pyre’:

O son, in fragments borne

Forth to thy burial, from thy father take
These funeral rites; thee shall the fire burn.
Lay wide the house with dismal murder filled,
Let Mopsopia sound with loud lament.
Ye, to the royal funeral pyre bring flame,
And ye, seek out his body’s scattered parts
Through all the fields. When she is buried,
(turning to PHAEDRA’S body) Let the earth lie heavy on her, let the soil
Weigh down her impious head!195

The careful preparations for Hippolytus’s funeral are sharply contrasted with the

final lines of the play which suggest that Phaedra’s body will be buried hastily and

without the ritualistic blessings which will accompany the funeral of Theseus’s

son. Before this closing scene, Phaedra has just committed suicide in front of

Theseus having first retracted her former accusations of rape against Hippolytus,

thereby exonerating him of all blame. Although Phaedra takes her own life to

restore both Theseus’s honour and the reputation of Hippolytus as ‘pure’ and

‘unstained’ (Seneca, V. i. p. 276), the enactment of this self-sacrifice is not

sufficient to atone for her ‘impiety’ and she continues to be condemned even in

death. Through the emplotment of Seneca’s play, in particular the closing scenes,

195
Seneca, The Phaedra, in An Anthology of Roman Drama, ed. By Philip
Whaley Harsh and trans. by Ella Isabel Harris (New York: Holt Rinehard and
Winston, 1960), Act V, scene i. p. 279. Further references to the play are given
after quotations in the text as: (Seneca, Act, scene, page no.)

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Phaedra is clearly established as the figure responsible for the tragic events.196

The final lines of the play reinforce this by precluding any forgiveness or

understanding of Phaedra’s actions.

In the passage which precedes the final lines of Seneca’s play Theseus and the

Chorus lament the death of Hippolytus:

Chorus: Eternity
Is thine, O Theseus, for lament; pay now
The honors due thy son, and quickly hide
In earth his scattered members so dispersed.
Theseus: O hither, hither bring the dear remains,
Give me the parts from many places brought.
Is this Hippolytus?
…Embrace whatever of thy son is left,
And clasp him to thy bosom wretched one.
Chorus: O father, in their rightful order place
The mangled body’s separated parts,
Restore the severed members to their place.
Lo, here the place the strong right hand should rest,
And here the left that learned to hold the reins:
I recognize the marks on his left side.
How great a part is absent from our tears!
(Seneca, V. i. p. 278)

This lamentation over Hippolytus’s dismembered body differs significantly from

the equivalent passage in Euripides’ Hippolytus, in which the Chorus announces

the arrival of Hippolytus and describes his physical state in the following brief

comment:

196
I use the word ‘emplotment’ instead of ‘plot’ to draw attention to the process whereby the plot
is carefully constructed and to highlight the point that the orientation of this process cannot be
contained within the play itself but can only be understood within the context of a relationship
which involves the audience. It points then, more to an activity or dynamic process than to a static
element ‘there’ in the play. My attention to this word comes from a reading of Paul Ricœur’s
analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics in Time and Narrative, Vol 1, which I will refer to at more length in
the next chapter.

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 Ah, look! Here comes the piteous prince,
His young flesh torn, his fair head bruised.197

In Euripides’ version, Hippolytus is still alive at this point and is thus able to

converse with his father and with the goddess Artemis in the closing scene of the

play. As he feels death approaching he appeals to Theseus: ‘Father, take hold of

me, compose my limbs’ (Euripides, p. 127). This reference to limbs is visually

elaborated in Seneca’s version in which Theseus is literally called upon to re-

construct Hippolytus’s ‘scattered members’ (Seneca, p. 278). Seneca’s

elaboration of this scene presents Theseus with the opportunity to restore order at

the end of the play by providing Hippolytus with the ritualistic blessing which

Phaedra will be denied. The final restoration is dramatically built up to and

maximized by first emphasizing Hippolytus’s lamentable state. The emphasis

given to his fragmented state and fractured body increases the impact of the final

bringing together of his body which simultaneously represents the reconstitution

of order at a wider social level. The imagery of dismemberment used throughout

this passage can be seen, then, as an articulation of the fear of loss of self-

containment and self-control which is manifested throughout the play by the

character of Hippolytus. This fear appears to be underpinned, and fuelled in

Hippolytus’s case, by his awareness of Greek myths. From these myths he has

drawn the conclusion that women are the instigators of all social disorder:

But woman was the leader in all wrongs;

This bold artificer of crime beset
All hearts: so many cities are consumed,

197
Euripides, Hippolytus, in Euripides: Alcestis and other plays, trans. by Philip
Vellacott, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 124. Further references to the
play are given after quotations in the text as: (Euripides, page no.).

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 So many peoples wage destructive war,
So many kingdoms ruined lie overthrown,
By reason of her vile adulteries.
Of others I am silent - Ægeus’ wife
Medea shows how savage women are. (Seneca, II. ii. p. 256)

Hippolytus’s interpretation of the myths thus provides him with a justification for

his feelings toward women and his vow to live without them; ‘I hate, I fear, I

loathe, I flee from all’ (ibid). His fear of women is presented not just as a

personal dislike but as a feeling grounded in the belief that women are the cause

of social disintegration and disturbance. The destruction caused by Phaedra’s

passion for Hippolytus supports this belief in Seneca’s play. The level of

disintegration is represented symbolically by the references to the dismembered

body of Hippolytus in the closing scene. The fear and loathing of the loss of self-

containment and order expressed by Hippolytus throughout the play is now voiced

through the exchange between Theseus and the Chorus. The exclamation: ‘How

great a part is absent from our tears!’ (Seneca, V. i. p. 278), indicates the

underlying concern here: the ‘great part’ appears to refer to the sum total of

Hippolytus’s bodily remains. Because these remains are scattered, the ‘whole’

Hippolytus is not present and therefore cannot be properly grieved or cried over.

The absence of the ‘whole’ elicits a dismayed response from both Theseus and the

Chorus. The Chorus urges Theseus to address this wrong: ‘In their rightful order

place / The mangled body’s separated parts. / Restore the severed members to

their place’ (ibid). Theseus responds, putting his grieving on hold until the

important task of reconstructing Hippolytus’s body is completed: ‘O cheeks be

dry, and let abundant tears / Be stayed, the while I count my son’s torn limbs, /

And form his body’. The prioritizing of this task of re-forming the body is

indicative of the scale of the fear and disgust elicited by the loss of wholeness and

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disorder signalled by Hippolytus’s dismembered state. Once re-formed the

remains will, as Theseus announces, be burnt on the funeral pyre. In this way the

body will be ritualistically disposed of, thereby appeasing the anxieties of the

mourners. The anxiety caused by Hippolytus’s fragmentary state appears, then, to

arise from the threat that this dismembered state poses to notions of self-

containment and order. Whilst in this fragmented state, Hippolytus remains both

present and absent in a sense, and it is not until his limbs have been counted and

reconstructed that he will be fully present again - even though the presence of his

‘whole’ body will signify the actuality of his death. The death of Hippolytus

appears then to cause less anxiety here than the state of his dismembered remains

confirming that what is being evoked in this scene is not the fear of death but the

fear of the state of fragmentation and disorder. The evocation of this fear at the

end of Seneca’s play is strategically important as it allows for a dramatic

resolution - in the form of the re-constructing and ritual blessing of Hippolytus’s

body - through which the fear of fragmentation and disorder can be overcome.

This overcoming allows for the reinstatement of the belief in self-containment and

order through a purging of the tragic emotions of pity and fear. These emotions

are brought into play, then, so that the fear of fragmentation can be overcome or

conquered. This purging of the tragic emotions, and its relation to the notion of

catharsis, will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. However, it is

worth pointing out at this stage that the Senecan overcoming or purging signals a

departure from the Greek tragic tradition. The contrast between the two can be

illustrated by returning to Euripides’ Hippolytus.

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In Seneca’s version Phaedra, as the closing lines of the play reinforce, is

established as the guilty party and instigator of the tragedy which befalls the

Royal house and results in the death of Hippolytus. Theseus ends the play by

calling for the earth to weigh down on Phaedra’s ‘impious head’. This

identification of the ‘head’ as the locus of impiety is especially significant.

Phaedra’s ‘impiety’ was that she fell in love with her husband’s son Hippolytus

yet her sin is symbolically located here in her head rather than her heart. When

she confesses her love to her nurse at the outset of the play the nurse responds by

claiming that ‘thy crime is offspring of thine own self-will’ (Seneca, I. ii. p. 245),

indicating again a belief that love is a result of a considered choice. If this love is

born of her own self-will then it can, as the nurse insists, be overcome through an

effort of the will. Phaedra’s failure to overcome her passion is thus presented as a

failure of her own will. The condemnation of Phaedra at the end of Seneca’s play

represents a condemnation of the failure to put will before passion and,

simultaneously, an inference that the former can overcome the latter. What

distinguishes Euripides’ version from this is that the story which unfolds in his

tragedy is one about the passions rather than one against them.

Euripides’ version begins with a soliloquy from Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual

love, in which she not only foretells the events which will subsequently unfold but

also discloses why these things will occur. Aphrodite has been shunned by

Hippolytus who is shown in the next scene claiming to have ‘no liking for a god

worshipped at night’ (Euripides, p. 86). Instead he worships Artemis, the

huntress-goddess of virginity. When warned by his servant to ‘avoid

exclusiveness’ (Euripides, p. 85) and to show some respect for Aphrodite,

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Hippolytus responds: ‘I greet her from a distance. My body is pure’ (Euripides, p.

86). Aphrodite, incensed by this irreverence, announces that Hippolytus must be

punished for his exclusivity and for his attempt to evade her laws:

Artemis - thinks her the greatest of all divinities.

All day with her, the virgin, he ranges the green woods,
With his swift hounds emptying the wide earth of beasts,
Too fond of company too high for mortal men.
I do not envy them their sport - I have little cause;
But for his insults, his contempt of me, I shall
Punish Hippolytus this very day. My plans,
Begun already, need but little to perfect.
(Euripides, p. 83)

Aphrodite is shown to be infuriated by Hippolytus’s attempt to elevate himself

above the status of mortal men by remaining ‘pure’ or, in other words, remaining

a virgin and abstaining from sexual relations. Hippolytus’s virginity is not,

however, reason in itself for Aphrodite’s punishment. The reason, as Aphrodite

indicates, has more to do with what Hippolytus says rather than what he does or

does not do. It is because of his ‘insults’ and his ‘contempt’ for Aphrodite that he

must be punished. Apart from Aphrodite’s opening speech there is evidence

throughout the play that Hippolytus is well-known for his verbalizations on the

base nature of sexual love and for his avoidance of sexual relationships. When,

later in the play, Theseus confronts Hippolytus, believing him guilty of raping

Phaedra, his words are a reminder of Hippolytus’s reputation for chastity:

So, you are the man above other men,

One who consorts with gods, whose life is chaste,
…Let all take warning: of such men
Beware! With lofty phrases they pursue their prey
To shameful purpose.
(Euripides, p. 112)

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Hippolytus’s virginal status and his reputation as a ‘man above other men’ is, as

Theseus’s speech indicates, common knowledge. Like Aphrodite, Theseus

associates Hippolytus’s virginity with an attempt to elevate himself above

ordinary mortals. His speech also confirms Aphrodite’s claim that Hippolytus

often speaks of his choice to abstain from sexual practice and his belief that this

makes him superior to other men. He then goes on to claim that the ‘lofty

phrases’ used by Hippolytus have been merely a rhetorical ruse fabricated to build

up his reputation as a ‘man above other men’. By warning against ‘such men’

Theseus implies that any man who attempts to remain ‘pure’ like Hippolytus

should be suspected of false or devious pretences. Although Theseus’s accusation

turns out to be wrong - Hippolytus’s ‘lofty’ convictions are genuine as the

audience becomes aware - this passage does attest to the remarks made by

Aphrodite at the outset of the play.

It is not, then, the personal choice made by Hippolytus which incites the wrath of

Aphrodite but his public discourse on the subject. This reveals an acute

awareness of how shared beliefs and normative values can be constructed, shaped

and influenced through language. The influence that Hippolytus’s public

denunciations of sexual love might have on the social imagination of the

Athenians - particularly given his elevated status in society - is therefore seen as a

threat to Aphrodite. If he continues to denounce love and celebrate chastity, the

shared belief in the necessity and inevitability of this emotion might be

undermined. Hippolytus might prove by example that love can be overcome by

an act of will and that a life of ‘purity’ is preferable to a complicated life

involving sexual love. By punishing Hippolytus for his hubristic attempt to

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denounce the divine law, Aphrodite is not just punishing Hippolytus and the rest

of the Royal household but is upholding the belief in the necessity and

inescapability of sexual love. This is what she states in the opening lines of the

play:

To those who reverence my power I show favour,

And throw to the earth those I find arrogant and proud.
For gods too have their pride; and it is in their nature
To enjoy receiving honour from the mortal race.
(Euripides, p. 84)

Through this antagonistic relationship between Aphrodite and Hippolytus,

Euripides puts forward the vital question which underpins all subsequent

renderings of this story: can the passions be overcome and is such an overcoming

desirable? The emplotment of Euripides’ play strongly suggests that such an

overcoming is neither possible nor desirable by showing how, in the case of

Hippolytus, such an attempt to overcome the passions is the cause of the tragic

events that ensue. Hippolytus meets his death in a manner which resonates with

Aphrodite’s warning. He is quite literally thrown down to earth by his own

horses, ‘dragged / Along, his head dashed on the rocks, his flesh mangled’

(Euripides, p. 121). Ironically Hippolytus is killed by the very animals that he

spends most of his time with and his cry, ‘Stop! You were reared in my own

stables - don’t grind me to death!’, reveals his disbelief that the horses should lose

control and fail to obey their master. Symbolically, the role of the horses in

Hippolytus’s death is fully concordant with Aphrodite’s plans. His punishment

for spending all his days ranging the woods hunting and avoiding the company of

mortal men is to be killed by the animals whose company he has chosen above

that of other men. Although Aphrodite issues the threat against Hippolytus, the

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goddess is not, however, attributed with sole responsibility for his death. And

whilst both Phaedra - by leaving a letter accusing Hippolytus of raping her - and

Theseus - by calling on the god Poseidon to bring down his son - are implicated in

the death, the words spoken by Hippolytus himself also play a significant role in

precipitating his downfall. This indicates that blame cannot, as in Seneca’s

interpretation, be simply attributed to Phaedra or any other individual, but that

Hippolytus is also responsible, to some extent, for his own destruction. As he

mounts his chariot and prepares to go into exile he addresses the god Zeus with a

comment that expresses absolute confidence in his own innocence:

Messenger: He raised his hands to heaven and prayed, ‘Zeus, may I die
If I am a guilty man’
(Euripides, p. 119-120)

Since his violent death occurs immediately after this comment it would appear

that he is, in fact, a guilty man despite his own protestations. Hippolytus protests

his own innocence in reference to the accusation of rape made against him by

Phaedra. The reader knows, however, that Hippolytus is not guilty on that

account and that the accusation is fabricated by Phaedra after she overhears the

speech he delivers to her nurse, in which he condemns not only her but the whole

of womankind as unchaste and evil. His condemnation ends with the following

remarks:

My curse on the whole race of women! I shall never

Be sated with my loathing of you. People tell me
I always say this. Why not? Women, it seems, are always
Evil. So, whoever can teach them to be chaste
May forbid me to tread them down with infamy.
(Euripides, p. 103)

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Hippolytus’s violent speech against women, prompted by the nurse’s

unauthorized disclosure of Phaedra’s love for him, leads Phaedra to believe that

she must kill herself before Hippolytus denounces her; an act that she had

previously resigned herself to as the only proper course of action, until being

persuaded against it by her nurse (Euripides, p. 90). Her previous decision now

reasserts itself and in a bid to save her own honour and that of her husband she

decides to incriminate Hippolytus by leaving a letter accusing him of raping her.

This, as she argues, is not merely an act of vengeance but an act intended to teach

Hippolytus a different view of chastity from the one which he upholds as the most

sacred. Hippolytus uses the term chastity solely in reference to sexual abstinence.

Like Seneca’s Hippolytus, he considers all women to be the instigators of social

disorder – ‘an evil pest’ (Euripides, p. 102) - because of their uncontrollable

sexual urges. He even distinguishes between different levels or types of

‘wickedness’ according to the social status and intelligence of women:

The sexual urge breeds wickedness more readily

In clever women…
…, unchaste wives brood on unchastity
At home, while servants traffic their lewdness to the world
(Euripides, pp. 102-3)

Phaedra’s intention, then, is to teach Hippolytus that not only is his prejudice

against women unfounded - as her own self-sacrificing behaviour will prove - but

that his limited understanding of the term chastity has clouded his outlook to such

an extent that his own behaviour can now be described as unchaste.198 Phaedra’s

198
A distinction needs to be drawn here between the modern English
understanding of the term ‘chaste’ and the Greek term sóphrón which will be
clarified below.

116
understanding of the term chastity is expressed in the following lines spoken just

before she takes her own life:

Yet my death will prove fatal to another’s life

And teach him to ride roughshod on my misery.
He shall share equally in my sickness, and learn
That chastity is humility and gentleness.
(Euripides, p. 105)199

Although Hippolytus prides himself on having remained chaste in a bodily sense

his arrogance toward the goddess Aphrodite, his condemnation of women in

general, and his lack of sympathy for Phaedra, indicate that he is unchaste in

every other way, or has failed to learn to be sóphrón. Phaedra’s hope that

Hippolytus will learn from her actions is, however, in vain, as his declaration of

innocence before Zeus indicates. His remark ‘may I die / If I am a guilty man’

(Euripides, pp. 119-120) expresses his absolute conviction in his own innocence

and his failure to acknowledge his own role in Phaedra’s death. Although his lack

of humility before the gods - which initially prompted Aphrodite to curse Phaedra

to fall in love with him - and the lack of gentleness revealed in his outburst to the

nurse, bring about Phaedra’s suicide, Hippolytus remains ignorant of this and

continues to believe that he is beyond reproach. It is this ignorance and lack of

humility - both before the gods and fellow mortals - of which Hippolytus is guilty

and for which he is punished.

199
Philip Vellacott’s translation includes a footnote at this point indicating that the
Greek version of ‘and learn that chastity is…’ reads ‘and learn to be sóphrón’. To
be sóphrón means to be of a sound mind, which, as Vellacott explains, ‘refers not
only to bodily chastity but to modesty and forbearance in social behaviour, and to
humility before the gods’ (Euripides, p. 184).

117
Overall, Euripides’ Hippolytus complies with Aristotle’s theory of what

constitutes a properly tragic hero in that his hamartia (error or fatal flaw leading

to the destruction of the tragic hero (OED), is a fault brought about by an error of

judgement.200 This kind of fault is tragic, according to Aristotle, because it is not

brought about by vice or wickedness but through the ignorance of the hero.

Euripides’ presentation of Hippolytus can help to elucidate Aristotle’s theory

precisely because this character raises the key question of what exactly constitutes

the virtuous life. At first sight, Euripides’ character conflicts with Aristotle’s

description of the properly tragic hero, who is described as:

[T]he intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous

and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and
depravity but by some error of judgement201

Throughout Euripides’ play, Hippolytus is not presented as an ‘intermediate kind

of personage’ but, on the contrary, as a man who believes himself - although this

belief is erroneous - to be ‘pre-eminently virtuous’ and therefore above ‘vice and

depravity’. The emplotment of the play shows, however, that he is in fact, and

contrary to his own belief, ‘a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just’. His error

of judgement is precisely that he fails to recognize himself in this way and sees

himself instead as a ‘man above other men’ (Euripides, p. 112). As he is banished

from the royal palace he claims: ‘You will never meet / A man whose nature is

more pure, more sound, than mine’ (Euripides, p. 117). However, as Phaedra

indicates before writing the incriminating letter, Hippolytus may be physically

200
‘The error or fatal flaw leading to the destruction of the tragic hero or heroine’
[Gk = fault, failure, guilt]’ (OED).
201
Aristotle, ‘On Poetics’ in Rhetoric and On Poetics, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts
and I. Bywater (Pennsylvania, The Franklin Library: 1981), p. 218.

118
chaste but he has not learnt to be chaste, or of a sound mind (sóphrón), in his

social behaviour. He is therefore mistaken in his judgement of what constitutes a

sound nature and hence in his judgement of himself as the possessor of the most

sound and pure nature.

The figure of Hippolytus thus foregrounds the crucial question of what is in fact

meant by the term virtuous; Hippolytus clearly believes himself to be virtuous but

is in fact tragically mistaken in this assumption. An interrogation of this question

is useful here particularly since contemporary definitions in English may even

support Hippolytus’s limited interpretation and understanding of the term:

‘virtuous - 1 possessing or showing moral rectitude. 2 (esp, of a woman) chaste’

(OED). According to this definition, Hippolytus could be described as pre-

eminently virtuous in that he holds moral rectitude to be of supreme importance.

His belief that unchaste women are the cause of all social evil also indicates that

he considers chastity (especially of women) to be synonymous with virtue and a

condition of the virtuous life. However, this understanding of virtue conflicts

with the understandings presented both in Euripides’ play and in the work of

Aristotle. Hippolytus’s attempt to overcome the passions is based on an

assumption that the passions can be completely controlled and eradicated by an

effort of will. This approach to the passions would be taken up by the Greek and

later the Roman Stoics and will be discussed further in relation to Seneca’s

interpretation of the tragedy. According to this approach, the eradication of the

passions is considered to be a necessary pre-condition of a virtuous life. This

conception of the virtuous life is, however, significantly different from the

119
understanding which is presented dramatically in Euripides’ tragedy and later

philosophically in the work of Aristotle.

Through the character Phaedra, Euripides emphasises that living a virtuous life is

not just a matter of being chaste in a bodily sense but also of learning to be

sóphrón, of a sound mind. This approach is supported in Aristotle’s extensive

discussions of virtue in which he argues that to be virtuous does not require

complete abstinence from bodily pleasures nor an eradication of passion but,

instead, a cultivation of temperance, sóphrosuné. Virtue, for Aristotle, is an

intermediate state which avoids both excess and deficiency with regard to feelings

and actions:

By virtue I mean virtue of character; for this [pursues the mean because] it
is concerned with feelings and actions, and these admit of excess,
deficiency and an intermediate condition. We can be afraid, e.g., or be
confident, or have appetites, or get angry, or feel pity, in general have
pleasure or pain, both too much and too little, and in both ways not well;
but [having these feelings] at the right times, about the right things,
towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the
intermediate and best condition, and this is proper to virtue.202

To the vice of excess Aristotle gives the name ‘intemperance’ but the vice of

deficiency, he suggests, is so uncommon that ‘people who are deficient in (bodily)

pleasures […] are not found very much’ and those that are he describes as ‘far

from being human’.203 Whilst the person of virtue and the person of excess are

both attributed with names - the temperate and the intemperate - the person of

deficiency has no name: ‘And the reason he has no name is that he is not found

202
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tans. by Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis, Hackett
Publishing Company: 1985), p. 44.
203
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 83.

120
much’ (ibid). He can be found, however, in Euripides’ tragedy in the character of

Hippolytus. And, in accordance with Aristotle’s comment that such a person is

‘far from being human’, Hippolytus’s humanness, or, more specifically, his

attempt to transcend his own humanness, is called into question throughout the

play. Both Aphrodite and Theseus refer to his tendency to avoid the company of

mortals and to elevate himself above other men (Euripides, pp. 83, 112). The

nurse also attempts to remind him of his humanness in the appeal she makes to

him after he threatens to publicly denounce Phaedra: ‘Forgive son; we are human,

we do wrong by nature’ (Euripides, p. 102). Euripides’ characterization thus

provides an example of, and an insight into, the condition that Aristotle describes

as uncommon and not human.

Conversely, Aristotle’s writing on virtue provides philosophical insight into why

Euripides’ Hippolytus is at fault. Although a full discussion of Aristotle’s

definition of virtue is beyond the scope of this enquiry, two points in particular are

worth foregrounding here and considering in relation to Euripides’ Hippolytus.

First, Aristotle asserts that:

It is a mistake to confine intelligence to knowledge of one’s own good

without reference to the community (…)
For knowledge of one’s own good requires reference to the community.204

According to this point, Hippolytus is fundamentally mistaken in his belief that he

can remain pure and live a good life only by distancing himself from the

community. If ‘knowledge of one’s own good requires reference to the

204
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 159-160.

121
community’ then Hippolytus’s attempt to avoid contact with others contributes to

his downfall. Without any reference to the community Hippolytus cannot acquire

knowledge of his own good which would be the basis of the good life that he

intends to live. This is because the concept of the good or virtuous life, for

Aristotle, only acquires meaning in relation to external ‘goods’ – which include

relationships with others, the emotions of others and other unpredictable factors

beyond the individual’s control. If virtue is the intermediate state which avoids

both excess and deficiency with regard to feelings and actions, then this state can

only be measured in relation to feelings and actions, which necessarily implicate

the individual in an inter-relationship with others. As Aristotle stresses:

[Having these feelings] at the right times, about the right things, toward
the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the intermediate
and best condition, and this is proper to virtue.205

Being virtuous is, then, a state which only acquires its meaning and value in

relation to others. Bearing this in mind, the repeated references to Hippolytus’s

tendency to prefer the company of the gods or animals to the company of other

men can be interpreted as a criticism of Hippolytus’s failure to engage with the

community. Because Hippolytus lacks any sustained engagement with, or

reference to, the community he is therefore ill-equipped to cultivate any

knowledge about his own good.

The second point relates to Hippolytus’s tendency to resist any attempts by others

to alter his beliefs. Although Aristotle asserts that ‘continence and resistance

205
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 44.

122
seem to be good and praiseworthy conditions’,206 he then goes on to question

whether continence is always and unconditionally - as Hippolytus regards - a

desirable condition:

Is incontinence sometimes desirable?

Besides, if continence makes someone prone to abide by every belief, it is
bad, if, e.g., it makes him abide by a false as well [as a true] belief.207

In the case of Hippolytus, his continence does indeed make him abide by a false

belief indicating that incontinence might, as Aristotle infers, be desirable in some

circumstances. Hippolytus’s loathing of women is based upon his belief that they

are all evil. His remarks, however, indicate that he is often questioned on this

belief:

My curse on the whole race of women! I shall never

Be sated with my loathing of you. People tell me
I always say this. Why not? Women, it seems, are always
Evil.
(Euripides, p. 103)

Hippolytus’s reference to other people’s comments is interesting in that it tells us

that other people have noted the frequency of his vilifications of women and that,

despite this, Hippolytus remains adamant in his belief. His expression ‘Why not?’

indicates that he remains impervious and indifferent to the comments of others.

Whilst Hippolytus appears to be proud of his ability to remain unswayed by others

and hold on to his belief, this is not a sign of continence but, as Aristotle would

suggest, a sign of stubbornness.208 Hippolytus’s failure to re-assess his own

206
Ibid, p. 173.
207
Ibid, p. 176.
208
Ibid, p. 194.

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beliefs is, then, intrinsically linked to his refusal to engage with the community.

Without reference to the community and without an element of incontinence - the

‘desirable’ element which would enable him to re-assess previously held beliefs -

Hippolytus continues to abide by the belief that all women are evil. His feelings

for women - expressed as ‘loathing’ - are, then, interrelated with this belief in the

evilness of women.

Aristotle’s approach to human emotions emphasises the inter-relationship between

a felt emotion and a cognitive belief, which is to say that an emotion does not

erupt on its own or as a result of our ‘natural instincts’ but develops in

conjunction with, and contingent on, certain beliefs and in relation to other

people.209 Martha Nussbaum highlights the significance of Aristotle’s approach

with regard to the sustainability of emotions:

[T]hey (human emotions) themselves have a cognitive content; they are

intimately related to beliefs or judgments about the world in such a way
that the removal of the relevant belief will remove not only the reason for
the emotion but also the emotion itself.210

Consequently, if Hippolytus engaged more in dialogue with his fellow mortals

and was willing to have his judgements about women tested and challenged, his

209
Aristotle gives a detailed account of the emotions in Book II of Rhetoric in
which he provides a detailed breakdown of the constituent elements of emotions.
In his first detailed discussion of a specific emotion, which deals with the emotion
of anger, he stresses that the emotion is constituted by a combination of a
particular frame of mind or disposition toward the emotion, in relation to other
people, and dependent on certain conditions or circumstances, ‘Rhetoric’ in
Rhetoric and On Poetics, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts and I. Bywater
(Pennsylvania, The Franklin Library: 1981) pp. 77-83.
210
Martha, C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature, (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1990), p. 291.

124
false belief could potentially be removed. The removal of the belief would, then,

‘remove not only the reason for’ his loathing of women, ‘but also the emotion

itself’. According to this approach, emotions are not considered to be blind surges

of feeling, but forms of evaluative interpretation intrinsically related to beliefs and

judgements about the world. These beliefs and judgements are not fixed but are

constantly shaped, reinforced or altered through the stories that a particular

community tells itself and the discourses which circulate within that community.

Not only does Hippolytus refuse to engage with the community in a debate about

his beliefs but he also attempts to impose his own beliefs - that life without sexual

love is a pre-condition of the virtuous life - on the community. If beliefs are seen

to be intrinsically connected to emotions, then Aphrodite’s response to the way in

which Hippolytus publicly denounces sexual love can be fully appreciated. The

popularization of Hippolytus’s belief, or, in other words, the removal of the belief

in the desirability and necessity of sexual love, could ‘remove not only the reason

for the emotion but also the emotion itself’ as Nussbaum indicates. By protecting

the belief in the necessity of sexual love, Aphrodite is sustaining not only the

belief but also the emotion itself and therefore the life and continued flourishing

of the community. Through the antagonistic relationship set up between

Aphrodite and Hippolytus, and through the subsequent emplotment of the play,

Euripides presents a tragedy about the passions rather than one against them, as

appears to be the case in Seneca’s version. Unlike the dramatic overcoming of the

passions presented by Seneca, the emplotment of Euripides’ play illustrates,

instead, the tragedy of attempting to evade or overcome the passions.

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In Euripides’ version Hippolytus’s hamartia is to believe himself to be immune

from the vagaries of the passions and to be the sole determiner and controller of

his own destiny. His mistake is not deliberately malevolent but, as his servant

claims in his defence, a result of his immaturity. Appealing to Aphrodite to make

allowances for this he pleads: ‘You must forgive him young blood, the eager spirit

that utters / Folly against you’ (Euripides, p. 86). The servant’s reverence for the

goddess is underscored by the way in which his appeal to her reveals a

simultaneous irreverence toward his master by describing his words as folly.

Interestingly both of the dialogues in which Hippolytus discusses his loathing for

sexual love are conducted with servants. The fact that Hippolytus is given advice,

which turns out to be sound, from both his servant and Phaedra’s nurse -

characters who would be seen as socially and morally inferior to him - indicates

that the practical wisdom that both the servant and the nurse display have been

acquired through lived experience and through a shared knowledge of the

complexities of human life. This suggests that practical wisdom is not necessarily

acquired through formal education - which the servants would not have access to -

nor related to social status, and that virtue, as Aristotle states ‘requires

habituation, and therefore requires practice, not just theory’.211 The servants,

then, are revealed to be more sóphrón than Hippolytus, although their virtue or

goodness is not presented as an innate feature of their natures, but as a quality

acquired over time and through practice as well as through deliberation.

The nurse, in particular, reveals a heightened capacity to be able to adjust to the

complexities of human life in her discussion with Phaedra. At first her reaction to

211
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 40.

126
the discovery that Phaedra is in love with Hippolytus is one of desperation. She is

so appalled that she cries: ‘I am dying, my life is over!’ (Euripides, p. 94). When,

however, Phaedra declares that the only way out is to kill herself the nurse

changes her position and looks for an alternative which would not result in

Phaedra’s self-sacrifice. This turn around reveals that to follow the passions is not

to abandon reason altogether but, on the contrary, to engage in thoughtful

deliberation. As the nurse admits: ‘Often in human life / Our second thoughts are

wiser’ (Euripides, p. 96). She then goes on to argue that Phaedra must try to

seduce Hippolytus - as it has been willed by Aphrodite - and to keep their affair a

secret: ‘to keep faults out of sight is mortal wisdom’ (Euripides, p. 97). In this

argument she reveals an acute awareness of the ‘laws’ of both the social order and

the divine order. Her reasoning can be seen as an attempt to create harmony

between the two and thus avert the tragedy which will ensue if one is privileged

over the other. Her advice to Phaedra is remarkably in tune with Aphrodite’s

warnings and her words echo those spoken by the goddess in the opening speech

and cited earlier (Euripides, p. 84):

When Love sweeps on you in her full power, to resist

Is perilous. She steals gently on those who yield to her;
But someone she finds full of pride and arrogance -
Why, what do you think? - she takes and tramples in the
dust!
(Euripides, p. 96)

She describes those who resist or deny love with exactly the same words as

Aphrodite: ‘arrogant and proud’. She also uses the same metaphor to describe

what happens to those who are proud and arrogant: ‘she takes and tramples [them]

in the dust!’; which is a more emphatic version of Aphrodite’s ‘throw to the

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earth’. The fact that the nurse uses the same terms as the goddess indicates that

these metaphors are part of a shared cultural knowledge. The way she poses the

rhetorical question ‘why, what do you think?’ sounds as though she is telling a

well-known story whose outcome is clearly already predictable but is told again

for its effect. Allowing the uneducated nurse and servant to utter the words of

wisdom in the play confirms the point that knowledge about love is learnt through

the telling of stories.212 This supports the argument put forward by Nussbaum,

and informed by Aristotle’s theory of the interrelationship of emotions and

cognitive beliefs, that emotions - or rather a society’s conception of different

emotions - are not learned ‘by sitting in an ethics class’ but ‘in complex

interactions which provide paradigms of emotion and teach the cognitive

categories that underlie the experience of emotion’.213 Nussbaum goes on to

argue that as story-telling is one of the most persuasive means of telling and

learning a society’s beliefs and values, ‘stories will be a major source of any

culture’s emotional life’.214

This link between story-telling and learning can be further elucidated by

considering Aristotle’s theory of tragic emplotment and the effect that this kind of

emplotment has on the reader. In his outline of the types of plot to be avoided in

tragedy, Aristotle insists that ‘a good man must not be seen passing from

happiness to misery’ as such an occurrence ‘is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but

212
In his ‘Introduction’ to Euripides’ Hippolytus Philip Vellacott emphasises the
importance of the character of the nurse who, as an anonymous slave, ‘has a
longer part than anyone except Hippolytus’ (Euripides, p. 27). Although the
nurse’s dishonesty and contriving may provoke the audience’s disapproval he
insists that ‘the audience could learn from her more needed truth, and more
humanity, than from anyone else on the stage’ (ibid).
213
Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, p. 293.
214
Ibid.

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simply odious to us’.215 It is ‘odious’ because it does not adhere to the law of

causality or to the principle of concordance which underpins tragic emplotment.

The tragic effect arises when the emotions of pity and fear are evoked in response

to pitiable or fearful incidents which have not simply occurred by chance, but

seem to occur as a necessary result of a chain of events which has been played out

in front of the audience. Although the incidents appear to follow a certain logic,

or the law of causality, their occurrence still comes as a shock to the audience.

This paradoxical combination of shock and anticipation is, for Aristotle,

characteristic of tragedy:

Tragedy, however, is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also

of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the very greatest
effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in
consequence of one another; there is more of the marvellous in them then
than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance.216

Paul Ricœur uses the term ‘discordant concordance’ to refer to this aspect of

tragic emplotment.217 He argues that the inclusion of discordant elements - fearful

or pitiable incidents which may threaten the plot’s coherence - must be necessary

and therefore appear to be concordant or logical. This is not to say that the plot

unfolds in a logical chronological order, but that it unfolds in a chronological

order which appears to obey a certain logic. As Aristotle indicates, ‘even matters

of chance seem most marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in

them’.218 Hence there is nothing accidental about Hippolytus’s death or about the

215
Aristotle, ‘On Poetics’, p. 218.
216
Aristotle, ‘On Poetics’, p. 215.
217
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and
David Pellauer, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. 43-
45.
218
Aristotle, ‘On Poetics’, p. 215.

129
manner in which he meets his death. Even the role of the horses in his death

becomes necessary - as a direct consequence of his having spent excessive

amounts of time and attention on them - and therefore logical. Everything that

happens in tragedy - including the discordant - does so, or appears to do so, not by

chance, but as a direct consequence of something else.

The ‘one because of [dia] the other’ thus wins out over ‘one after [meta]
the other’. The discordant overthrows the concordant in life, but not in
tragic art.219

Ricœur marks out an important distinction here between the meanings attributed

to the discordant in tragic art as opposed to the discordant in life. The ‘poetic

logic’ which emerges through the inclusion of discordant concordance in tragic art

is not in any sense an imitation of life or the logic of everyday life. Although life

may be disrupted or ruined by discordance, this is not necessary or congruent with

a prior design. In tragedy, however, and through the composition of the plot, a

sense of order and wholeness (holos) is created whereby everything that occurs

does so for a reason and as a logical consequence of prior actions. 220 Chance is

thereby eliminated from the domain of human action and the one because of the

other wins out over the one after the other:

If succession can be subordinated in this way to some logical connection,

it is because the ideas of beginning, middle, and end are not taken from
experience. They are not features of some real action but the effects of the
ordering of the poem.221

219
Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 43.
220
This holos, Ricœur argues, signifies a wholeness not of a temporal kind but of
a logical character, Ibid, p. 38.
221
Ibid, p. 39.

130
Incidents which follow this poetic logic of tragedy are, according to Aristotle,

‘more marvellous’ and ‘have the very greatest effect on the mind’.222 This

comment of Aristotle’s indicates that it is the constitution of the poetic logic -

brought about by the inclusion of pitiable and fearful incidents that occur logically

or out of necessity - which brings about the cathartic effect on the audience.

Whilst Aristotle talks about the effect produced on the mind, it is important to

stress that the effect is produced as a result of the conjoining, or interplay, of

intellect and emotion. The emotions are brought into play, in other words, in

order for the intellect to be aroused or affected. According to the understanding of

catharsis presented in chapter 1, the emphasis on this account is not on a purging

of the emotions but on a bringing into play of the emotions. This effect differs

significantly, as suggested at the beginning of this chapter, from the effect

produced in Seneca’s play, in which the fear of fragmentation is evoked in order

for this fear to be dramatically overcome, or purged, by offering the audience a

final resolution which allays their fear. Although the cathartic effect of tragedy is

commonly translated as a purging of the tragic emotions – ‘an emotional release

in drama or art’ (OED) - which is understood to be morally and psychologically

purifying, the Greek conception of the term points more to an interpretation of it

as a means of clarification or illumination which offers ‘a direct understanding

through feeling of what something means to us’.223 The reason for bringing

emotions into play is not, then, to purge the audience of these emotions, but to

clarify or illuminate their significance.

222
Aristotle, ‘On Poetics’, p. 215.
223
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy, p. 390.

131
 So the characteristic pathé of the plot cannot be separated from its
characteristic learning; pathé and learning together constitute the
characteristic value to us of a well-made narrative. I suspect that Aristotle
meant by katharsis exactly this combination of emotion and learning.224

It is this learning process itself, brought about by the interplay of emotions and

intellect, which is purgative or cathartic. The antagonistic relationship between

Hippolytus and Aphrodite sets up the question of whether the passions - sexual

love in particular in this instance - can and should be overcome to promote

eudaimonia, human flourishing.225 What is learnt through the emplotment of

Euripides’ tragedy is that Hippolytus’s attempt to live a life devoid of passion is

futile and ultimately self-destructive. This reveals that Hippolytus’s judgement

about what constitutes a virtuous life - particularly his conviction that sexual

abstinence is necessary for such a life - is erroneous. What is offered through the

unfolding of the plot is a ‘direct understanding through feeling of what something

means to us’.226 This ‘something’ is simultaneously a clarification of the

importance of the passions in human life and an illumination of what is, and what

is not, constitutive of a virtuous life.

The sharp contrast between the stories told by the nurses in the different versions

is indicative of distinctly different approaches to emotional life. Euripides’ nurse

reveals an awareness of the precariousness of a human life which is subject to

224
James, M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The tragedy of Hector,
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 67.
225
Martha Nussbaum points out that although eudaimonia is often translated as
‘happiness’, the English word does not capture the full sense of the Greek term.
She therefore uses the term ‘human flourishing’ to bring out the emphasis on
activity and completeness of life. Her discussion of this can be found in The
Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 15.
226
Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 390.

132
emotional instability. Although such a vulnerable and unpredictable life may

sometimes be unbearably painful, this is part of what it is to be human. To

attempt to avoid tuché, as Hippolytus does, is to fail to accept one’s humanness or

to become inhuman.227 After recounting tales of how not even the gods are

immune from falling in love the nurse asks Phaedra: ‘Well, what is it but

blasphemy, to wish yourself / Stronger than a god?’ (Euripides, p. 97). Believing

oneself to be immune from the passions is thus presented as synonymous with

believing oneself to be stronger than a god. The case of Hippolytus shows that

such a blasphemous attempt is doomed to failure. The reference to the gods in

Seneca’s play, however, signals a departure from such a view and could be read as

a criticism of the Greek appeal to divine laws. Again it is through the nurse’s

story that a distinctive approach to emotional life can be discerned. In response to

Phaedra’s claim that she has been overcome by the ‘potent god’, the nurse rejects

any appeal to divine laws:

Base lust, crime-maddened, feigns that love’s a god,

Those who have wished great liberty have given
Falsely the name of deity to lust.
…Mad souls
Created empty fables and have feigned

227
Although Nussbaum translates tuché as ‘luck’, she takes care to emphasise that
although the English word does not encompass the full spectrum of meanings
inferred by the Greek term, her translation of the term is used bearing in mind
these meanings. The fact that a direct translation is not possible - or would result
in an awkward composite of the disparate terms luck-chance-necessity –
highlights the point that this concept falls outside the conceptual framework of the
English-speaking community. It is not, then, luck in the accepted use of the term
that is being discussed here, but something more akin to the English notion of
destiny as ‘what is destined to happen’ (OED), which is to say that it has to
happen that way and no other way. As Nussbaum stresses; ‘Tuché does not imply
randomness or absence of causal connections. Its basic meaning is ‘what just
happens’, it is the element of human existence that humans do not control’, The
Fragility of Goodness, p. 89.

133
 Venus’ divinity, the love god’s bow.
(Seneca, I. ii. 246)

Again, as in Euripides’ play, the nurse responds to Phaedra’s confession by

referring to stories. However, this time, unlike Euripides’ nurse who recounts the

story of what happens to those who try to resist love, Seneca’s nurse invokes the

story-telling tradition in order to denounce it. At the same time she dismisses the

belief, upheld by Euripides’ nurse, that love is a god who punishes those that ‘she

finds full of pride and arrogance’ (Euripides, p. 96). She argues that such a belief

is fabricated in order to excuse, or cover up, ‘base lust’. Those (like Euripides)

who have created stories, or ‘empty fables’, in which love is depicted as a god are

accused of taking great liberties or of being ‘mad souls’. To appeal to something

outside one’s own will is thus equated with madness or dismissed as an attempt to

exonerate oneself by apportioning blame to an external, divine agent. The

cautionary approach to questions of passion which characterizes Euripides’

tragedy, and which recognizes that a life with passion is necessarily a precarious

and sometimes unpredictable one, is thereby disavowed in Seneca’s version.

Seneca differs significantly from Euripides in that the emplotment of his play

suggests that the passions can and should be overcome and that, concomitantly,

the element of unpredictability and vulnerability which accompany the passions

can also be eradicated from human life.

The nurse’s rejection of Phaedra’s claim can be seen as an articulation of the

principles of the Stoic school of thought, to which Seneca belonged, which would

be fundamentally opposed to any attempt to appeal to external goods or factors.

This opposition is rooted in the Stoics’ denial of the value or significance of

134
anything except the virtue of the human soul, characterized by its capacity for

practical reasoning. Following this principle, and as Nussbaum clarifies, ‘only

virtue is worth choosing for its own sake; and virtue all by itself suffices for a

completely good human life, that is, for eudaimonia’.228 In some respects this

principle accords with Aristotle’s starting point in the Nicomachean Ethics that

the good is ‘the human soul’s activity expressing virtue’.229 Aristotle divides the

good into three different types: goods of the soul, other goods of the body, and

external goods. Whilst he states that ‘the goods of the soul are said to be goods to

the fullest extent and most of all, and the soul’s actions and activities are ascribed

to the soul’ he then goes on to add that ‘nonetheless, happiness [eudaimonia]

evidently also needs external goods to be added (to the activity), as we said, since

we cannot, or cannot easily, do fine actions if we lack the resources’.230 Aristotle

stresses the social character of human life referring to the significance of such

external goods as ‘friends, wealth, and political power’ and emphasizing that

deprivation of certain external goods has an undeniable impact on the potential for

human flourishing. The tragedy of Euripides’ play is that despite Hippolytus’s

attempts to live a good life, he consistently fails to recognize that goodness is not

achieved on an individual basis but in relation to others. As Phaedra argues, he

may be physically chaste but he has not learnt to be chaste (sóphrón) in his social

behaviour. Even Phaedra’s suicide, which is shown to be a direct result of his

outraged response to the news that she is in love with him, does not cause him to

revaluate his approach to others, and to acknowledge that his actions are

intrinsically related to the actions of others. The cry: ‘weep for the queen, tears

for her tears’ (Euripides, p. 108), which is made by the Chorus as Phaedra‘s dead
228
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 359.
229
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, P. 15.
230
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 21.

135
body is displayed on stage, emphasises the agony which Phaedra suffered before

taking her life. This cry is followed by a question: ‘And who, poor soul, has

dimmed and quenched your life? The chorus highlights the social character of

human action and the fact that the actions of the individual impinge on the lives of

others. Hippolytus’s response to the sight of Phaedra’s body contrasts sharply

with that of the Chorus. Unlike the Chorus, Hippolytus’s first words are not

concerned with others but relate back to himself: ‘I am utterly astonished! It was

only / Just now that I was leaving her’ (Euripides, 111), revealing again his

tendency to place himself before others. Hippolytus’s response to his father’s

insinuations that he is implicated in Phaedra’s death show that he remains certain

of his own innocence: ‘Have I fallen suspect, guiltless as I am? / This is

amazing!’. This amazement is the result of Hippolytus’s belief that he lives his

life outside the boundaries of social interaction and that such a life is a necessary

pre-condition of goodness. By contrasting Hippolytus’s emphatic declarations of

innocence with the emplotment of the play, which shows Hippolytus to be

implicated in Phaedra’s death, Euripides’ play presents the tragedy of failing to

acknowledge the social character of human life and the disastrous consequences

that such a failure can have on the potential for human flourishing.

The Stoics’ denial of the value of anything except the virtue of the human soul

signals an important departure from the Aristotelian appreciation of the

significance of external goods. Whereas Aristotle acknowledges the significance

of these and stresses that ‘knowledge of one’s own good requires reference to the

community’,231 the Stoic view holds that virtue of the soul can only remain intact

231
Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 159-160.

136
if it remains self-contained and untainted by contact with and dependency on

anything external. Underpinning these two contrary approaches to the value of

external goods are two distinct understandings of human virtue. While, for

Aristotle, virtue is not an inherent or natural quality but a quality acquired through

practice and theory and in relation to the community, the Stoics, in sharp contrast,

understand virtue as a first principle. According to this view, virtue is not a

quality which needs to be acquired, or learnt, but which is originally present in the

human soul and as such needs to be protected from external influences in order to

promote eudaimonia. This belief in the inherent quality of virtue and the attempt

to guard against the threat posed by external goods finds its dramatic

personification in the character of Hippolytus. As Hippolytus claims in Euripides’

version, ‘You will never meet / A man whose nature is more pure, more sound,

than mine’ (Euripides, p. 117). Hippolytus’s avoidance of the company of other

mortals and his rejection of a life of emotion is, in Euripides’ play, revealed to be

part of an attempt to remain ‘pure’ and untainted by external influences.

However, whilst in Euripides’ play this attempt proves to be the downfall of the

tragic hero, Seneca’s interpretation presents Hippolytus’s approach to emotional

and social life - particularly through the ritual exaltation of his body which closes

the play - as exemplary and praiseworthy. Hippolytus’s approach to living a good

life is outlined in the response he gives to Phaedra’s nurse, who attempts to

persuade him that his solitary life is ‘unnatural’ and entreats him to ‘Frequent the

city, live among thy kind’:

No other life is more free from fault,

More full of liberty, which better keeps
The ancient customs, than the life of one
Who loves the woods and leaves the city walls;

137
 No passion of the sordid soul inflames
Him who to mountain tops commits himself
Unstained;
(Seneca, II. ii. p. 255)

Although Artemis, the huntress goddess of virginity in Euripides’ version, is

absent from this account, the binary division which is evoked between Nature and

culture is maintained. City life is posited in an oppositional relation to the life of

‘the woods’ and the ‘mountain tops’. Life within the city walls is rejected by

Hippolytus on the grounds that such a life is prey to the ‘passion of the sordid

soul’. Only by leaving the city walls and living amongst nature can one,

according to Hippolytus, be ‘free from fault’ and remain ‘unstained’. This

dialogue indicates that any attempt to remain ‘pure’ is only possible by avoiding

social interaction.

Such a marked shift in emphasis could be attributed, to some extent, to the Greek

philosopher Chrysippus (c. 280 - c. 206 BC) one of the main founders of the Stoic

movement which proved highly influential in the development of Roman

Stoicism. Like Euripides, Chrysippus explored the role of emotions in human life

but, going beyond a mere consideration and illumination of the passions, the Stoic

developed a theory which would aim to extirpate them. Nussbaum discusses

Chrysippus’s theory of emotions at length in a chapter entitled ‘The Stoics and the

extirpation of the Passions’ in The Therapy of Desire. She already refers to

Chrysippus, however, in an earlier work as ‘the most profound thinker on emotion

in the entire philosophical tradition’.232 Although Nussbaum’s admiration for

Chrysippus’s work is evident – the title of her Therapy of Desire is itself a gesture

232
Nussbaum, ‘Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love’ in Love’s Knowledge: Essays
on Philosophy and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 292.

138
of appreciation to the philosopher’s work on therapy - she does not, however,

assent to all his views. Her main point of departure is on the question which has

been central to this chapter: should the passions be overcome, or extirpated, as

Chrysippus believed, and as the emplotment of Seneca’s play implies, or should

they be acknowledged and accepted - as Euripides’ tragic view suggests - as a

necessary element of human existence? Although she expresses an understanding

of why Chrysippus wants to extirpate the passions, which cause so much human

suffering, Nussbaum still asserts a preference for a life with passions - despite its

unpredictability and fragility - over the ‘pure’ yet ‘undifferentiated flatness’ of a

life without them.233

In some respects Chrysippus’s theory of the emotions is comparable to that of

Aristotle in that both philosophers emphasise the cognitive quality of the

emotions. However, the key distinction between the two theories is that whilst

Aristotle believed that a relevant belief was necessary for a passion, or that a

relevant belief was a necessary constituent element in the passion, Nussbaum

points out that Chrysippus held that the belief was identical to the passion.234

Consequently the temporal split inferred by the Aristotelian theory - and most

other theories of emotions until Chrysippus - is disclaimed. The significance of

this claim is that while most theories separate (temporally) the belief and the

passion - locating the former in a rational dimension of the soul and the latter in

an irrational part - Chrysippus’s model locates passion in the same ‘place’ as

practical reason. A passion, then, no matter how excessive or potentially

destructive, is still considered to be ‘rational’, even though it may transcend the

233
Nussbaum. The Therapy of Desire, pp. 385-401.
234
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 371.

139
boundaries of what is deemed to be rational or reasonable. It is rational in the

sense that a passion always accords with a judgement about a certain proposition,

or, as Chrysippus’s model establishes, the passion is an assent to the propositional

value of something. As Nussbaum summarises:

[T]he passion is itself a certain sort of assent or acknowledgement: an

acknowledgement of the tremendously high importance of something
beyond my control, an acknowledgement appropriately called ‘excessive’
because it transgresses the limits prescribed by right reason for our relation
to things external.235

However, in accordance with the Stoic principle that nothing has any value except

the virtue of the human soul, any such judgement must always, without exception,

be an erroneous one. Consequently ‘our relation to things external’ or beyond our

control, which, as such, are considered to have no value or importance, should be

a relation of indifference. The extirpation of the passions is, then, founded on a

theory of rational deliberation and the acceptance of the proposition that there is

no value in anything except the virtue of the human soul. Once this proposition

has been fully assented to, the conditions which are necessary for a certain belief

(that something is of high importance) will have been removed. Because, for

Chrysippus, a belief is identical to a passion, the removal of the conditions upon

which the belief is grounded simultaneously signifies the removal of the passion.

This theory does, however, differ considerably from the one discussed earlier with

regard to the potential removal of Hippolytus’s false belief about women.

According to the Aristotelian approach, whereby emotions are considered to be

forms of evaluative interpretation intrinsically related to beliefs about the world,

235
Ibid, p. 381.

140
emotions - like Hippolytus’s loathing - can be changed in accordance with

changes in beliefs. The vital difference between Aristotle’s theory of the

emotions and that of Chrysippus is that while the former philosopher expounded a

theory which sought to moderate human emotions, the latter considered all

emotions to be unnecessary and counter-productive to human flourishing and thus

promoted their extirpation. Emotions, which necessarily result in the agent’s loss

of absolute control and imply a certain amount of inter-dependency with external

goods (the emotions of others, the actions of others, unexpected events), are not

only denied value but are rejected as counter-productive to a virtuous, self-

sufficient life. Whilst for Aristotle, the character of Hippolytus would represent

the person of deficiency, this tragic hero, who tries to remain ‘unstained’ and to

live and promote a life without emotions, represents the Chrysippean, or Stoic,

ideal.

These contrasting approaches to the emotions are presented and considered

through the two versions of the Phaedra/Hippolytus tragedy which have been

discussed here. The crucial question which is set up in this tragedy - and which

will underpin subsequent renderings of the same story - is whether the passions

can be overcome and if such an overcoming is desirable. This question is one

which is motivated by the desire to limit, or even eradicate, tuché – ‘the element

of human existence that humans do not control’ - from human life.236 Whilst

Euripides’ play shows that such a desire is in itself tragic and can only have tragic

consequences, Seneca’s interpretation, in direct contrast, commends this desire. A

key difference between the two interpretations is that the Roman tragedy is

236
Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 89.

141
characterized by an attempt to overcome that which in the Greek tragedy is upheld

for scrutiny, or illumination, without being resolved. In 1677 Jean Racine adapted

the tragedy again in a version which, as John Cairncross’s ‘Introduction’ notes,

was rated as ‘the masterpiece of the human mind’ by Voltaire.237 Whilst an

examination of Racine’s Phèdre is beyond the scope of this present study, it is

worth pointing out that the writer makes repeated references to the Euripidean

tragedy in the ‘Introduction’ to his play and claims that ‘here is another tragedy of

which I have borrowed the subject from Euripides’.238 In a comparative study of

the plays, Ronald Tobin suggests, however, that ‘the total impression conveyed by

Racine’s Phèdre is more Senecan than Euripidean’.239 This impression seems to

be conveyed most strongly by the inference in Racine’s play that the locus of the

tragic events is within Phaedra and could have been avoided if only she could

contain her lust. As in Seneca’s version, the impression given is that passion can

be avoided or overcome by reason.

The next chapter will look at the ways in which the themes explored by the Greek

and Roman playwrights are brought up to date in the contemporary version

presented by Kane. Making a similar point to that made by Tobin in relation to

Racine’s play, I will argue that despite being borrowed from a Senecan play,

Kane’s version turns out to be more Euripidean than Senecan, and in this respect

presents a contemporary play which is in tune with the Greek tragedian’s

approach to passion.

237
Racine, Phaedra in Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, trans. by John Cairncross, (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963), p. 129.
238
Ibid, p. 145.
239
R. W. Tobin, Racine and Seneca, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p.
146.

142
 Chapter 3b

The Problem of Passion in Phaedra’s Love

Critical responses to Phaedra’s Love (1996) were, in some cases, more hostile

than those that followed Blasted, as exemplified by the remark by one reviewer

that ‘it’s not a theatre critic that’s required here, it’s a psychiatrist’.240 Although

some critics had made more of an attempt to engage with Kane’s first play, it had

still been generally rejected on the grounds that, and as Sierz summarises, ‘the

world of the play is incoherent and its message is lost in unrealistic plotting’.241

This criticism continued to be levelled at Kane after the production of her second

play, Phaedra’s Love, produced at the Gate theatre in 1996. Even critics who

found some merit in her play remained concerned about the lack of coherence and

clarity as indicated by Michael Billington’s comment that ‘viscerally, her play has

undeniable power: intellectually, it’s hard to see what point it is making’.242 Sierz

suggests that this general response is indicative of the expectations held by theatre

reviewers at the time: ‘Years after writers such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels

or Phyllis Nagy had loosened the straitjacket of naturalism, so many reviewers

still expected plays to be realistic’.243 The hostile reception that greeted Kane’s

early work revealed an incapacity or unwillingness on the part of reviewers to

engage with a theatrical style which did not conform to their expectations.

240
Aleks Sierz provides an account of the mixed responses to Blasted and Phaedra’s Love and
records that ‘Charles Spencer claimed to be “seriously concerned about Sarah Kane’s mental
health”’ ending his review with the lines cited above, Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: p. 108.
241
Ibid, p. 95
242
Ibid, p. 108
243
Ibid.

143
The assumption that the world of the play should be coherent, with realistic

plotting and a clear message, can be contested by recalling Aristotle’s theory of

holos alongside Paul Ricœur’s concept of ‘poetic logic’, and by considering these

theories in relation to Phaedra’s Love. In tragedy, Aristotle argues, a sense of

order and wholeness (holos) is created through the composition of the plot,

whereby everything that occurs does so for a reason and as a logical consequence

of prior actions.244 Ricœur stresses that this apparent holos, or wholeness, is an

effect of the ordering of the poem (or play) rather than an imitation of life.

Ricœur thus makes an important distinction between ‘poetic logic’ and the logic

of everyday life. The former, he argues, is ordered and constructed and appears

to follow a certain logic, or design, whereby even the discordant elements - fearful

or pitiable incidents which may threaten the plot’s coherence - appear to be

concordant, as they occur as a logical or necessary consequence of prior

occurrences. Following this logic, even the discordant becomes concordant as it

contributes toward the sense of overall wholeness and completeness. It is for this

reason that pleasure can be derived from watching the enactment of the most

horrific scenes: because ultimately these scenes contribute toward producing a

sense of completeness that is lacking from everyday life. What is vital here is the

distinction between ‘poetic logic’ – whereby the most horrific act can be regarded

as necessary or fitting (in that it follows on as a logical consequence of something

else) - and the logic of everyday life according to which it would be barbaric to

take pleasure in knowing that a tragic event occurred as a logical consequence of

something else. The important point here is the distinction that Ricœur’s reading

helps to draw out between the effect produced by watching or hearing about a
244
See discussion of this in the previous chapter, pp. 65-67, which considers Section 9 of
Aristotle’s On Poetics, pp. 214-215.

144
real-life tragedy and the pleasurable effect that can be brought about through what

he describes as ‘tragic art’: ‘The discordant overthrows the concordant in life but

not in tragic art’.245 What I intend to show throughout this chapter is that the

composition of Phaedra’s Love adheres to the ‘poetic logic’ which, as Ricœur

shows, is characteristic of ‘tragic art’. By doing this I hope to show that judging

the play on whether its plot is ‘realistic’, or ‘coherent’, is problematic if these

qualities are being considered according to the expectations of social realism

which, by definition, attempts to depict a plausible account of everyday life. The

aim of this chapter is therefore to provide a critical context for Kane’s work by

considering Phaedra’s Love as a contemporary form of tragedy.

Given the classical heritage loaded within the title, the opening scene of the play

immediately conflicts with any preconceived notions of what might be expected

from a rendering of a tragic myth and from a character who has previously been

depicted as a noble hero. Any expectations that the audience may have are

immediately challenged from the outset of the play. Rather than presenting

Hippolytus as the active prince who believes himself to be the sole controller of

his own destiny, Kane opens the play by presenting an apathetic character who

merely goes through the motions of living, without feeling and without interest.

Hippolytus sits in a darkened room watching television.

He is sprawled on a sofa surrounded by expensive electronic toys,
empty crisp and sweet packets, and a scattering of used socks and
underwear.
He is eating a hamburger, his eyes fixed on the flickering light of a
Hollywood film.
He sniffs.
He feels a sneeze coming on and rubs his nose to stop it.

245
Ricœur, Time and Narrative, p. 43.

145
 It still irritates him.
He looks around the room and picks up a sock.
He examines the sock carefully then blows his nose on it.
He throws the sock back on the floor and continues to eat the hamburger.
The film becomes particularly violent.
Hippolytus watches impassively.
He picks up another sock, examines it and discards it.
He picks up another, examines it and decides its fine.
He puts his penis into the sock and masturbates until he comes without
a flicker of pleasure.
He takes off the sock and throws it on the floor.
He begins another hamburger.
(1:65)

Overall this scene could be described as the enactment of inaction. Hippolytus

eats without noticing the food, watches a film without responding to the violence

in it, and masturbates without feeling any pleasure. A sense of monotony and lack

of interest is inscribed within the textual presentation of the stage directions

through the repetitive and simple use of language. The repeated invocation of

active verbs: ‘He sniffs’, ‘He looks’, ‘He examines’, juxtaposed with Hippolytus’s

inactivity and indifference, sets the scene by highlighting the overall mood of

apathy. This Hippolytus, who does not ascribe value to anything, not even his

own life which he later describes as ‘filling up time’ (4:79), appears to have

distanced himself altogether from the wider community. This is visually

illustrated by his lack of engagement with any activity, and structurally illustrated

by the non-verbal nature of the opening scene which, through the total absence of

speech, emphasises Hippolytus’s state of isolation. The significance of this

opening scene may easily be skipped over in reading the play-text, but, as a

review of defunct theatre’s production highlights, the scene situates the audience

in an uncomfortable viewing position from the outset.246 Discomfort was

246
Justin Sanders, ‘Phaedra’s Love’, in The Portland Mercury: Theater (01/17/02). Review of
defunct theatre’s production at the Back Door Theater, http://www.portlandmercury.com/2002-01-
17/theater.html.

146
generated, in part, by the silence in the auditorium which lasted for around ten

minutes and was broken only by the sound of Hippolytus wolfing down burgers,

zapping through TV channels and blowing his nose. What is important here is

that, as a result of the discomfort, the audience watching begin to feel as

implicated in what happens, or does not happen, as the character on stage. Their

own lack of activity (enhanced by sitting through ten minutes of mundanity), and

the boredom and potential frustration provoked by this, is put into the spotlight as

much as Hippolytus’s behaviour. This scene provides an illustration of the kind

of experiential theatre that Kane aimed to produce in which the audience would

not just sit back and observe dispassionately but would themselves be involved in

the theatre experience: even if this involvement is at an emotional level rather than

a visible, active one.247 The scene does not just present the theme of boredom and

indifference but may also evoke these states in the audience prompting their

emotional engagement in the play as well as stimulating their intellectual interest.

Through the depiction of Hippolytus, and the repeated use of contemporary motifs

such as the television, electronic toys, hamburgers and the violent Hollywood

film, the opening scene of Phaedra’s Love taps into concerns about apathy and

desensitization in contemporary consumer culture. The concern articulated by

Edward Bond, and discussed in chapter one of this thesis, regarding the

desensitizing effects of mass media is evoked metonymically through the repeated

247
Criticising the way that theatre has become a mere evening pastime for the wealthy middle
classes – which I also refer to at the beginning of the previous chapter – Kane uses a football
analogy to emphasise the way she feels that theatre should involve its audience: ‘I hate the idea of
theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I
love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did
that in the theatre… but they don’t. They expect to sit back and not participate’, David Benedict,
‘Disgusting Violence? Actually it’s Quite a Peaceful Play’, Independent on Sunday, 23 January
1995, cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 15.

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use of these motifs. Hippolytus’s apathetic condition is shown to be intrinsically

related to the cultural artifacts and practices that surround him. The dominance of

objects in this opening scene has a twofold effect: on a symbolic level they clearly

locate the play within the late twentieth century of the Western world; on a

metaphoric level they represent the decadent side of this culture. Kane’s

presentation of Hippolytus can thus be interpreted as a criticism of the

increasingly materialistic nature of contemporary western culture and as a

warning that this materialism engenders apathy and solipsism. At the same time,

however, the depiction of this character has a wider resonance which has more in

common with the tragic hero of previous versions of this play than appears at first

sight. Seen from within the context of the tragic tradition, the opening scene of

Kane’s play takes on a new significance, and functions, within the overall

composition of the play, as a necessary and logical prelude to the subsequent

unfolding of the plot. In Seneca’s The Phaedra, Hippolytus is also disengaged

from the community he inhabits. This disengagement is shown to be a result of

the belief that one can only remain pure and live a good life by avoiding social

interaction with others and living a life without passion (apathei). In Seneca’s

version, the attempt to live a life of apathei is shown to be a strategy of self-

preservation which, although threatened in the case of Hippolytus, is ultimately

upheld as an ideal whose aim is to promote human flourishing. Although Kane

replaces the virgin purist of Seneca and Euripides with a sexually promiscuous

tragic hero, the underlying fear which drove the earlier Hippolytus to protect his

virginity - the fear, that is, of losing one’s absolute self-control as a result of

emotional contact with others - is retained and emphasised in Kane’s play. Whilst

a presentation of Hippolytus as the virgin purist might lack credibility in a

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contemporary context, Kane’s depiction of the sexually active Hippolytus is more

indicative of Kane’s effort to engage with the underlying themes of the tragedy

than a mere gesture to avoid incongruity in a contemporary context. The

descriptions of Hippolytus’s sexual encounters effectively serve to magnify his

apathy, or lack of feeling and concern for others, by highlighting the indifference

he shows towards his sexual partners.

The first reference to Hippolytus’s sexual promiscuity is made in response to

Phaedra’s tentative enquiry into when he last had sex. Hippolytus reveals only a

vague recollection of the details:

Hippolytus: Don’t know. Last time I went out. When was that?
Phaedra: Months ago.
Hippolytus: Really? No. Someone came round. Fat bird.
Smelt funny. And I fucked a man in the garden.
Phaedra: A man?
Hippolytus: Think so. Looked like one but you can never be sure.
(4:76)

Although, unlike the Hippolytus of earlier renderings, he engages in sexual

activity with others, this dialogue indicates that he remains entirely unaffected by

this contact. He remains ‘pure’ or untainted by pathos (passion, suffering,

agitation of the soul) because he fails, or refuses, to acknowledge any differential

qualities in external ‘goods’. The woman he refers to is only vaguely and

superficially distinguished by her funny smell and size. It is the second reference

to the man in the garden, however, that epitomises Hippolytus’s complete failure

to acknowledge differential qualities in others: not even the person’s sex can be

clearly discerned by Hippolytus. Although Hippolytus’s comment ‘Looked like

one but you can never be sure’ may provoke laughter, it is also a comment which

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indicates his refusal to acknowledge difference; a refusal which underpins his

indifference and apathy towards others.

Hippolytus’s failure to differentiate also signals a refusal to invest ‘external

goods’ with value.248 If no distinction is made between one person (or thing) and

another, then equally no value judgements can be applied to such ‘goods’. If there

is no investment in external values there can be no passion (interest, emotion,

feeling) which, as Chrysippus’s theory insists, involves an ‘assent’ to, or

acknowledgement of ‘the tremendously high importance of something beyond my

control’.249 Because Hippolytus never assents to the importance of anything

external he never acknowledges the value of anything which is beyond his own

control. As a result, he never loses self-control and remains, instead, and despite

contact with others, a self-contained individual with a life characterised by its

undifferentiated flatness. In this sense, Kane’s Hippolytus, like Seneca’s, can be

seen as a dramatic personification of the Stoic ideal which recommends that our

relation to things external should be a relation of indifference. This

recommendation of indifference, which goes hand in hand with the extirpation of

the passions, is presented theoretically by Chrysippus and later dramatically by

Seneca, as a prerequisite of human flourishing. Kane’s presentation of Hippolytus

calls this approach to the emotions into question by first taking the Stoic ideal to

its dystopic extreme in order to then set about producing a radical transformation

of character.

248
The term ‘external goods’ is used here in the sense outlined by Aristotle explained in the
previous chapter. Aristotle marks out a division between ‘goods of the soul’, ‘other goods of the
body’ and ‘external goods’ which include people, financial status and social-standing,
Nicomachean Ethics, p. 15
249
Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 381. See previous chapter for a
fuller discussion of this.

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Hippolytus’s indifference is highlighted further throughout the rest of scene four.

When questioned by Phaedra, he claims that he never enjoys sex but practises it

anyway because ‘Life’s too long’ (4:79). Having sex, like eating hamburgers and

watching Hollywood films, is just something he does to fill up time. His

comment that life is just ‘filling up time. Waiting’ (4:79), calls to mind Samuel

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) which opens with the highly significant line

‘nothing to be done’ (Act I).250 When asked what he’s waiting for, Hippolytus

responds: ‘Don’t know. Something to happen’ (ibid). Unlike Beckett’s play, in

which Vladimir and Estragon are fated to go on waiting futilely for someone to

come and something to happen, something does happen in Phaedra’s Love.

Although Kane’s play reveals traces of Beckett, the development of the plot owes

more to the classical tradition in the sense that what is shown at the beginning sets

the scene for an eventual peripeteia –‘sudden change of fortune in a drama or in

life’ (OED), in which Hippolytus’s attitude to life can be examined. Initially,

having sex, like everything else in Hippolytus’s life, is presented as just filling up

time: there is no meaning or value attributed to the practice or to his relations with

those he comes into contact with. Phaedra finally gives up the attempt to change

him ‘to climb inside him and work him out’ (3:71), when she becomes fully aware

of the futility of her attempts and convinced of Hippolytus’s complete

indifference to her. This insight, which results in her subsequent suicide, comes

later in this scene after she performs oral sex on him in an attempt to provoke a

response. The motifs from scene one are used again here to highlight

Hippolytus’s lack of interest: ‘He watches the screen throughout and eats his

250
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, (London: Faber and
Faber, 1986), p. 11.

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sweets’ (4:81). The fact that this lack of feeling and refusal to be affected by

contact with others is not just a natural disposition but a state actively cultivated

by Hippolytus is made manifest by the defensive comment he makes to Phaedra

after she complains about his lack of response: ‘No one burns me, no one fucking

touches me. / So don’t try’ (4:83). His violent reaction - the stage directions

indicate that he ‘grabs Phaedra by the throat’ at this point - is provoked when

Phaedra refers to a woman who, she infers, he was once in love with.

Hippolytus’s claim that no one can touch him is, then, preceded by an outburst of

rage in which he warns Phaedra not to mention his past relationship again. This is

the first occasion on which Hippolytus temporarily loses self-control and

expresses an emotional response. The fact that this is the first time he is shown in

a state of passion indicates that the only value he holds on to passionately is the

belief in his own invulnerability. The response he gives to Phaedra’s plea that she

would like to see him lose himself indicates that his indifference towards sex is an

attempt to remain invulnerable and evade losing any degree of self-control:

Hippolytus: It’s not a pleasant sight.

Phaedra: Why, what do you look like?
Hippolytus: Every other stupid fucker.
(4:82)

Hippolytus equates losing oneself (sexually) with becoming stupid and losing

one’s individuality. His apparent indifference towards sex is shown to be

underpinned by this fear of losing absolute self-control; a fear which, as his

violent response to Phaedra indicates, could stem from a past, failed relationship.

Losing absolute self-control would be ‘stupid’, following Hippolytus’s reasoning,

as it would render him vulnerable to factors beyond his own control, such as the

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actions and feelings of others. An element of unpredictability would thus be

introduced into Hippolytus’s life thereby spoiling its undifferentiated flatness and

undermining his passionate belief in his own invulnerability.

In this sense, Kane’s Hippolytus bears a strong resemblance to the character

depicted by Seneca and Euripides. Although he engages in sexual activity, this

does not alter his attempt to remain unaffected by contact with others - an attempt

which, as in the earlier versions of the play, necessitates a rejection of the

community. In Euripides’ play this rejection of the community is called into

question and ultimately shown to be inhuman, or, in other words, is equated with

an attempt to transcend what it is to be human. Engaging with others and

accepting the element of unpredictability and vulnerability that this engagement in

the community necessarily brings is, in Euripides’ play, presented as a necessary

part of what it is to be human. Although Kane’s version of the play is based on a

reading of Seneca, I will argue here that the emplotment of her play signals an

affinity with the Greek tragedian and a rejection of the Roman playwright’s

approach which, in contrast to Euripides, promotes the extirpation of the passions.

This suggestion of an affinity between Kane and Euripides is made despite Kane’s

claim that she only read Euripides after writing Phaedra’s Love.251 My aim in

making this suggestion is not to dispute Kane’s claim, but to emphasise the point

that an affinity can be detected in terms of the shared vision which pervades both

251
This claim was made during an interview with Nils Tabert which is documented in Saunders,
Love me or Kill me, p. 72. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, however, insists that ‘this must be a gap in
her [Kane’s] memory as she clearly knew Euripides’ text when she wrote her play’ and argues that
‘she changes some aspects of Seneca’s plot construction back to how they are in Euripides’ play’,
‘Re-Writing Seneca: Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love,’ in Bernard Reitz and Alyce von Rothkirch
(eds), Crossing Borders: Intercultural Drama and Theatre at the turn of the Millennium.
Contemporary Drama in English 8 (Trier, 2001), p. 168.

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playwrights’ work. This shared vision is characterized by an affirmation or

acceptance of tuché: the element of human life that humans do not control.

In Seneca’s The Phaedra, the emplotment works towards a final resolution

producing a cathartic effect on the audience whereby the fears and anxieties

evoked are ultimately purged. In contrast, in the plays of Euripides and Kane, it is

the confrontation itself which is cathartic - but now in a different sense of the term

- in that this confrontation illuminates that which cannot be resolved. In other

words the confrontation evokes the implacable and shows that to have emotions

necessarily results in a life with both joy and suffering and with an element of

unpredictability and vulnerability. The tragic vision presented by both Euripides

and Kane affirms this necessity and highlights the danger of trying to avoid or

deny it. Both playwrights enact this affirmation by confronting the implacable

and simultaneously resisting the desire to dramatically overcome it. Rather than

affirming the necessity of the implacable, Seneca’s The Phaedra presents a world

in which human beings have it within their power to overcome whatever they may

be confronted with. Although, at first sight, this negation of the implacable

appears to empower the individual, it does so at a cost. In Seneca’s play once the

‘necessity’ of Phaedra’s love has been disavowed, the result is a clear assignation

of praise and blame. Within this scenario Phaedra is no longer pitied and

understood, as she was in Euripides’ interpretation, but is, instead, condemned

whilst Hippolytus is praised for remaining ‘pure’. Euripides’ sympathetic

portrayal of Phaedra and her actions are thus replaced in Seneca’s version by

vilification and vengeance. The cost of disavowing the implacable is that

empathy and compassion are replaced by a tyrannical will to apportion blame on

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other human beings. In contrast, Kane’s reconfiguration of the plot presents a

confrontation with the implacable which does not allow for a simple assignation

of praise and blame and which provokes, instead, a re-consideration of what it is

to be human.

The question of what it is to be human and to live in a world with other humans is,

as argued in chapter one, a question which is central to tragedy. Goldmann

provides a useful way into this question by highlighting the way in which an

oppositional relationship is often established between the tragic hero and other

human beings:

Setting out from the central theme of the tragic vision, the radical
opposition between, on the one hand, a world of beings lacking in
authentic awareness and human greatness and, on the other, the tragic
characters whose greatness lies precisely in the fact that they refuse this
world and this life, two types of tragedy become possible: those with and
those without peripeteia and recognition.252

The description given of ‘a world of beings lacking in authentic awareness and

human greatness’ refers to the ordinary state of being human. Although milder in

tone, Goldmann’s description can be compared to the insight that Nietzsche finds

in Silenus’s view of human beings as ‘wretched, ephemeral race, children of

chance and tribulation’.253 What both accounts have in common is an acute

awareness of the limitations and vulnerabilities of the human condition. In

contrast, the ‘greatness’ of tragic characters is located in their refusal of this

condition and in their attempts to transcend it. Although the term ‘greatness’ is

252
Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, p. 318.
253
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 27. See chapter one, pp. 16-17 for a discussion of this.

155
used to describe the tragic character, this description does not, I would argue,

signify that the character is to be highly rated on a scale of human greatness.

Instead, the term is applied to describe a condition which, far from being

commendable or exemplary, is shown to be unliveable in that it attempts to escape

its own boundaries. However, it is by highlighting the radical opposition between

the ordinary state of being human, and the tragic struggle against it, that tragic art

can play a vital role in defining and thinking what it is to be human. The kind of

oppositional relationship outlined here is presented in Phaedra’s Love through

Hippolytus’s refusal to engage with others and his rejection of the culture he

inhabits. Rather than signalling a complete lack of interest, his disengagement

suggests instead a strategy of self-preservation. However, in contrast to the earlier

versions, Kane provides a context whereby the goal of Hippolytus’s refusal is not

merely to preserve the integrity of the individual but to invest the culture which is

rejected with renewed meaning. Although Hippolytus is initially presented as an

apathetic character who merely goes through the motions of living, his comments

in scene four about the worthlessness of the birthday presents he receives, which

he describes as ‘tat’ (4:75), indicate his irritation with the consumer-driven culture

he lives in. His awareness of the absurdities and hypocrisies of this culture is

revealed in his reference to the news:

News. Another rape. Child murdered. War somewhere. Few thousand jobs
gone. But none of this matters `cause it’s a royal birthday.254
(4:74)

254
Hippolytus’s ironic comment, which condemns the media for prioritising
certain news items whilst ignoring others recalls Kane’s criticism of media
responses to Blasted which gave more coverage to violence in the play than to
actual events occurring at the time. See chapter 2, page 72 for Kane’s full
comment on this.

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This comment indicates that Hippolytus is far from unaware of social injustices

and that the mask of indifference he wears belies his sense of frustration and

impotence. Following Goldmann’s definition, the ‘greatness’ of Kane’s tragic

character lies in the fact that he refuses the world and the life that he has been

born into. This refusal is shown to be directly linked to his awareness of, and

unwillingness to accept, the injustices of this world. Hippolytus is thus positioned

in an oppositional relationship to the other characters in the play who, in contrast,

are shown to be either unaware of the underlying injustices of their culture or

unwilling to confront them.

Of the two possible types of tragedy described by Goldmann, Phaedra’s Love

belongs to the first type which includes peripeteia and recognition. This type of

tragedy is, for Goldmann,

[…] One where the hero’s recognition of his fate is preceded by a fall
because the tragic character still thinks, at the beginning of the play, that
he can live without compromise and impose his own desires on the world.
The play ends inevitably with his recognition that this was an illusion.255

On this account, the peripeteia is presented as a ‘fall’ that subsequently leads the

tragic character to recognize the erroneous nature of his previous beliefs. In both

Euripides’ and Seneca’s versions Hippolytus remains convinced that he is beyond

reproach throughout the play. While the last scene of Seneca’s play confirms this

by praising Hippolytus and condemning Phaedra, the emplotment of Euripides’

play indicates that it is Hippolytus’s tendency to set himself apart from, and

255
Goldmann, The Hidden God, p. 318.

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above, others which sets off the tragic chain of events. The play does not,

however, end with Hippolytus’s recognition that his attempt to live a life without

compromise was flawed. Instead he remains under the illusion that a life of purity

depends on detachment from the community and the evasion of contact with

others. Consequently, and according to Goldmann’s outline, Euripides’

Hippolytus is a play without recognition. This is because the focus of

Goldmann’s approach is on whether recognition occurs within the text: whether,

in other words, the tragic character passes from ignorance to knowledge.

However, this approach is only valid if emphasis is placed on the internal

structure of the text and if the ‘end’ of the play is considered to be enclosed within

the text itself. Such an approach is challenged by Ricœur’s reading of Aristotle’s

Poetics which, according to Ricœur, ‘does not speak of structure but of

structuration’.256 Ricœur argues that the ‘end’ or orientation of a text cannot be

contained within the text itself but must be understood within the context of a

dynamic relationship which involves not only the author and the text but also the

reader.

They [references from Aristotle’s Poetics] testify to the impossibility, for a

poetics that puts its principal accent on the internal structure of the text, of
locking itself up within the closure of the text. […] The poetics does not
speak of structure but structuration. Structuration is an oriented activity
that is only completed in the spectator or reader.257

Whilst Euripides’ play may close without the tragic hero having passed from

ignorance to knowledge, this does not mean that the play ends without recognition

for the audience. Although the tragic character remains under the same illusion as

256
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 48.
257
Ibid.

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he did at the outset of the play, the structuration of the play leads the audience to

recognize that this illusion is tragic and is the cause of the tragic events that have

unfolded. The structuration of the play is completed, then, not within the play

itself but in the process of reading or watching it. Ricœur’s emphasis on

structuration is in tune with Roland Barthes’s insistence that the site of meaning

and unity lies not with the author but with the reader or audience.258 Moving

away from the idea that the structure, like the meaning, is fixed in the text, this

points more to a dynamic process in which the audience and reader actively

participate in structuring and making sense of the text. The emplotment of

Euripides’ play, which works towards the recognition of Hippolytus’s hamartia

despite - or even aided by - the hero’s failure to recognize his own ignorance,

suggests that the Greek audience for whom the playwright was writing were

familiar with the debates about the struggle between reason and passion and

would recognize Hippolytus’s mistakes.

Kane’s tragedy is not, like the previous renderings, about the struggle between

passion and reason, but, instead, about the rebirth of passion which, as her

depiction of Hippolytus suggests, has either died or been suppressed. Unlike

Euripides’ play which left the audience to recognise the hero’s hamartia, Kane’s

inscribes this recognition into the plot. Kane’s move of introducing the peripeteia

whereby Hippolytus recognizes his faults, is one which offers a significant

departure from any of the previous renderings of this tragedy. As in the previous

versions, Kane’s Phaedra ends her own life when she realizes that her love for

Hippolytus is futile. However, whilst the Hippolytus of Euripides’ and Seneca’s

258
Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 48. See also the Introduction where Barthes’s reference
to Greek tragedy is discussed.

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versions insists on his own innocence when accused of being implicated in her

death, it is this accusation which, for Kane’s Hippolytus, results in peripeteia and

recognition. Hippolytus’s first response to Strophe’s news that her mother is

accusing him of rape is in keeping with the detached and ironic tone which has

become characteristic of his approach to life and to others. His comment, ‘She is?

How exciting’ (5:86), is followed by an interrogation in which Strophe asks if he

is guilty of the accusation:

Strophe: Did you rape her?

Hippolytus: I don’t know. What does that mean?
Strophe: Did you have sex with her?
Hippolytus: Ah. Got you.
Does it matter?
Strophe: Does it matter?
(5:86)

Hippolytus’s tendency to respond not with answers but with further questions

could be seen as mere evasion and as further evidence of his lack of feeling for

others. However, bearing in mind subsequent plot developments, his questioning

can be seen as a re-engagement with the community of speakers. From this

perspective, his questions are not evasive but an attempt to invest language, and

therefore life, with renewed meaning. Hippolytus’s previous rejection of the

culture he inhabits was seen to be a result of his disillusionment with the

meaninglessness of this culture. His interrogation of language thereby signals a

shift from indifference to a renewed concern about meaning. The fact that

Strophe’s response to his question ‘What does that mean’ is inadequate - by

equating rape with having sex she clearly fails to explain the meaning of rape -

highlights the legitimacy of Hippolytus’s concern for exactness. It is through this

dialogue that Kane introduces and explores the question of what constitutes rape

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which is present but left unexamined in previous versions of the tragedy. Rather

than completely dismissing the accusation like the tragic character of Euripides

and Seneca, Kane’s Hippolytus responds by enquiring what exactly Phaedra

means by accusing him of rape. After a lengthy and unsatisfactory exchange of

questions, Strophe finally asks ‘Did you force her’ (5:87), to which Hippolytus

responds with yet another question:

Hippolytus: Did I force you?

Strophe: There aren’t words for what you did to me.
Hippolytus: Then perhaps rape is the best she can do.
(5:87)

Although Hippolytus did not rape Phaedra in the legal sense of the term, which is

to say he did not force her to have sex with him, he nevertheless concedes that the

term ‘rape’ is probably the most appropriate one that Phaedra can use to describe

what Hippolytus did, and what he did not do, to her. The complete indifference

he showed her was then compounded by his comments afterwards in which he

revealed that her daughter Strophe had previously had sex with him and also with

Phaedra’s husband Theseus (4:83). Through this exchange between Hippolytus

and Strophe, the accusation of rape is shown to be not entirely misplaced. The

term, as Kane argues, can even be seen to be appropriate given the cruelty that

Hippolytus subjects Phaedra to:

In Phaedra’s Love, what Hippolytus does to Phaedra is not rape - but the
English language doesn’t contain the words to describe the emotional
decimation he inflicts. ‘Rape’ is the best word Phaedra can find for it, the
most violent and potent, so that’s the word she uses.259

259
Kane in Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 132.

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Inflicting ‘emotional decimation’ on another is shown throughout this scene to be

as potentially damaging as inflicting actual bodily harm. This scene acts, then, as

a prelude to Hippolytus’s transformation which is brought about by the news that

Phaedra has taken her life. His discovery of this and, more pertinently, his

realization of why she took her life, results in a significant changing-point.

Phaedra’s act finally convinces him of the existence, or truth, of her love for him.

This recognition signals the dramatic rebirth of the passions by allowing for a

reconstitution of the belief in love. On the one hand Hippolytus’s refusal to deny

the accusation of rape is a refusal to return to his former apathetic state in which

he denied love: to deny the accusation would be to devalue Phaedra’s love by

denying the decimating effect that his emotional indifference had on her. On the

other hand, this refusal also signals the overcoming of Hippolytus’s former life of

apathei and his recognition that his former aspiration to avoid social interaction

and live beyond the community was self-destructive and harmful to others. Not

only does he refuse to deny the charge of rape but he takes an active role in his

own condemnation by going to turn himself in at the end of this scene. This

uncharacteristic burst of activity, which contrasts sharply with his former

behaviour, indicates that Hippolytus’s acceptance of guilt is intrinsically linked to

an acceptance that his own life cannot be lived and understood in isolation but is

intrinsically linked to the lives of others. His acceptance of this is simultaneously

an acceptance of his own responsibility towards and interdependence on others.

Hippolytus’s assumption of guilt can be considered further in view of Walter

Benjamin’s analysis of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin discusses the paradox

of the tragic hero who assumes full consciousness of guilt despite his ‘innocence’.

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His discussion, which draws on Lukács and Hegel, elucidates Hippolytus’s

behaviour and explains why this behaviour signals the point at which the hero

becomes fully tragic:

What Lukács says is true in respect of the tragic hero, and of him alone:
‘From an external point of view there is no guilt and there can be none
[…]. But in the assumption of guilt, man assents to everything that has
befallen him…Exalted men…let go of nothing, once it has been a part of
their lives; tragedy is therefore their prerogative’. This is a variation on
Hegel’s famous statement: ‘It is a point of honour with such great
characters that they are guilty.’ This is always the guilt of those who are
guilty by their actions, not their will. 260

Hippolytus thus becomes fully tragic in assuming guilt for Phaedra’s suicide. He

may not have willed it, but her suicide was the result of his actions which,

according to Benjamin’s definition, makes him guilty of the charge. Hippolytus’s

assumption of guilt represents a full assent to everything that has befallen him.

Both Strophe and the Priest attempt to persuade him to deny the accusation in

order to save himself and to uphold the decaying monarchy. However, now that

Phaedra’s accusation has proved to be such a pivotal point in his life, he refuses to

reject the accusation as appealing against the charge would not only amount to a

rejection of Phaedra’s love but would represent a blow to his honour and his new-

found confidence in the significance of his own actions. Following his

assumption of guilt, Hippolytus is not weighed down by remorse but, on the

contrary, is exalted as his comments to the Priest indicate:

Priest: Do you feel remorse? […]

Hippolytus: No. No, remorse. Joy, in fact.

260
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 131.

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 Priest: At your mother’s death?
Hippolytus: Suicide, not death. She wasn’t my mother.
Priest: You feel joy at your stepmother’s suicide?
Hippolytus: No. She was human.
Priest: So where do you find your joy?
Hippolytus: Within.
(6:92-93)

Beyond the terse dialogue lies a significant point regarding the distinction

between death and suicide. The distinction which Hippolytus insists on is vital, as

it is not her death in itself that has marked his life but the act of her suicide and

her motivation for committing this act which have led to Hippolytus’

transformation. His joy, then, is not found in Phaedra’s suicide but in the

transformation within himself which this act has engendered. Rather than

condemn Phaedra for accusing him of a crime that he has not committed he

blesses her for loving him: ‘This is her present to me’ (6:90). He goes on to claim

that ‘Not many people get a chance like this. / This isn’t tat. This isn’t bric-a-

brac’, recalling his earlier rejection of the meaninglessness and absurdity of the

‘tat’ he receives on his birthday. The character who dismissed life as meaningless

and ‘filling up time’ now utters the line ‘Life at last’ (6:90). This line is, however,

an expression of tragic irony as Hippolytus’s transformation into the tragic hero

who assumes full responsibility for his own actions proves to be life-defeating.

Goldmann identifies two essential characteristics which distinguish tragic man

from other men:

The first is that he makes this absolute and exclusive demand for
impossible values; and the second is that, as a result of this, his demand is
for ‘all or nothing’, and he is totally indifferent to degrees and
approximations, and to any concept containing the idea of relativity.261

261
Goldmann, The Hidden God, p. 63.

164
Hippolytus’s previous detachment from the community has now been replaced by

a demand for absolute responsibility for one’s actions in relation to the

community. His demand for ‘all or nothing’ is, as Goldmann indicates,

indifferent to degrees and it is this unwillingness to accept any notion of relativity

which results in an impossible or unliveable position. After trying unsuccessfully

to persuade Hippolytus to deny the accusation, the Priest warns him against

investing in absolute and impossible values: ‘If truth is your absolute you will die’

(6:95). It is highly significant that the challenge to Hippolytus’s absolutism

comes from a priest as this serves to highlight even further the point that the world

they live in is governed by the principle of relativity and that not even a

spokesman for a dominant religion can uphold truth as an absolute.262 The priest’s

warning emphasises that Hippolytus’s demand for absolute truth is incompatible

with the world he inhabits.

Hippolytus’s relinquishment of his former aspiration to live a life of complete

self-governance and self-containment indicates a recognition of his own

vulnerability and interdependence on the community he inhabits. This

recognition, and Hippolytus’s full assent to it, is highlighted by the way in which

he breaks free from the police guard in the closing scene and hurls himself into

the aggressive crowd, thereby signalling the final abandonment of his former

drive to self-preservation. The introduction of the crowd in this final scene of the

play is particularly significant as it breaks with the structural composition of the

previous scenes in which no more than two characters appear together at any

given moment. This structural break shifts the focus from a micro or familial

262
I will return to the question of relativity in the next chapter where I evaluate Kane’s exploration
of love further in relation to Cleansed.

165
level to a macro-level. To introduce this shift in the closing scene is an effective

way of emphasizing that the dysfunctions revealed throughout the play - primarily

in relation to Hippolytus - are not contained within one character but are

symptomatic of the condition of a wider community. It is only within the context

of this wider community that the death of Hippolytus acquires any meaning.

As a textual adaptation of Seneca’s play the ending of Phaedra’s Love is highly

significant and offers a critical re-thinking of the earlier version. In contrast to

Seneca’s closure which condemns Phaedra and upholds Hippolytus’s quest for

absolute self-preservation, Kane emphasises the necessity of love and human

interaction whilst also – and this is what makes it tragic – showing that this is

what makes human life unpredictable and vulnerable to suffering. Like Seneca’s

play, Phaedra’s Love culminates in a strategic deployment of the violent imagery

of dismemberment. Unlike Seneca’s closure, in which Theseus and the chorus

lament the sight of Hippolytus’s ‘scattered members’ (Seneca, V. i. p. 278), this

time the audience is presented with a scene in which Hippolytus’s

dismemberment is enacted and even celebrated on stage:

Man 1 pulls down Hippolytus’ trousers.

Woman 2 cuts off his genitals.
They are thrown onto the barbecue.
The children cheer.
A child takes them off the barbecue and throws them at another
child, who screams and runs away.
Much laughter.
Someone retrieves them and they are thrown to a dog.
Theseus takes the knife.
He cuts Hippolytus from groin to chest.
Hippolytus’ bowels are torn out and thrown onto the barbecue.
He is kicked and stoned and spat on.
(8:101)

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Instead of the careful re-construction of Hippolytus’s body which ended Seneca’s

play and symbolized an overcoming of the fear of loss of self-containment,

Kane’s closure presents Hippolytus’s dismemberment in a celebratory and festive

manner. Far from using violence gratuitously, as some critics claimed, Kane’s

use of violence is both necessary and meaningful within the context of this

reconsideration. The scene effectively represents the overcoming of Hippolytus’s

life of absolute self-containment and signals an affirmation of love and human

relations. The final line of the play, uttered by Hippolytus as the vultures descend

on his mutilated body, reinforces this point: ‘If there could have been more

moments like this’ (8:103). This final affirmation of life with pathos - suffering

and passion - indicates that a life of engagement with others, which necessarily

includes an element of unpredictability and vulnerability, is still preferable to an

unvarying and undifferentiated life without it. The tragedy is that Hippolytus only

recognizes this as his life is ending.

Throughout this chapter I have suggested that the significance of Phaedra’s Love

can be best appreciated by taking into account the earlier versions of the play and

by considering the debates about love which underpin these versions. As a textual

adaptation, Kane’s play offers a significant contribution to this debate which cuts

across historical boundaries yet is highly relevant to the contemporary audience.

In practice, however, the problem with the play is that it can too easily descend

into bathos - thereby diminishing the overall effect - if scenes are represented too

naturalistically on stage. The sight of Hippolytus’s body parts being tossed

around the auditorium might, as it did at the first production, provoke audiences to

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laugh rather than to consider the points that the play highlights.263 Whether the

play has a place on the British stage will depend, to a large extent, on how theatre

practitioners respond to the challenges it presents. What is certain is that, as a

textual adaptation, Phaedra’s Love makes a significant contribution to the tragic

tradition which merits consideration alongside the classical versions of Euripides

and Seneca. This is not just because the play offers a reworking of the previous

versions but because it presents a contemporary engagement with the underlying

question of passion which is so intrinsic to the genre of tragedy. Within the

context of Kane’s work, the play stands out as an important piece in that it

provides a complex exploration of the theme of love which would become such a

central concern of the playwright’s work.

263
Aleks Sierz points out that ‘as Hippolytus’s genitals were flung the length of the theatre, several
people laughed’, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 108.

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 Chapter 4

The lover’s discourse in Cleansed:

‘Neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic’

The thematic concerns explored in Phaedra’s Love are developed further in

Kane’s next play Cleansed produced at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in

1998, which probes deeper into the dangerous and repressive side of love.

Although the transformation of Hippolytus in Phaedra’s Love signals an

affirmation of the value and necessity of love, at the same time it demonstrates

that giving up absolute autonomy also results in a state of vulnerability. This, as I

argue in chapter 3b, is theatrically illustrated in the scene in which Hippolytus’s

affirmation of love signals a simultaneous assent to his own destruction at the

hands of the crowd. Hippolytus’s poignant line: ‘If only there could have been

more moments like this’ (8:103), indicates that a life which is marred by

vulnerability and unpredictability is still preferable to the life of undifferentiated

flatness and boredom which characterised his previous existence. Having devised

a play which allows for such a deduction to be made, Kane goes on to push the

boundaries further in Cleansed by exploring the state of vulnerability and

neediness that is already suggested in Phaedra’s Love. To a certain extent, the

composition of Phaedra’s Love is shaped and influenced by the fact that it is a

reinterpretation of a canonical play. The ending of the play is thus highly

significant if read in conjunction with earlier versions but, beyond this context,

what happens to Hippolytus may fail to have much resonance for the

contemporary audience taking the play entirely on its own merit. In Cleansed,

Kane continues to explore the same themes - particularly the state of vulnerability

169
which love necessarily brings – but this time in a way which is unbound by the

same restrictions that influenced the shape and composition of her previous piece.

As in all her work, Kane draws on a wide range of intertextual sources in the

process of writing Cleansed. The choice of acknowledged sources that Kane

discloses in an interview with Nils Tabert are, Saunders indicates, ‘the widest and

most disparate in all of Kane’s work’ and include Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1924),

Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1837), Georg Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c. 1601) and August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata

(1907).264 In this chapter I will look at some of the ways in which Kane

reconfigures aspects of these different sources in order to produce an original play

both in terms of formal composition and thematic intensity. By doing this I aim to

show how form and content come together in Cleansed to articulate and affirm the

tragic nature of love.

Like the content of Cleansed, the title of the play is open to a variety of

interpretations. The title may call to mind ‘ethnic cleansing’ which became an all

too familiar term during the decade in which Kane was writing. In a sense such a

link is valid as Kane was heavily influenced by news of events in the Balkans and,

as Blasted had already demonstrated, was concerned to respond to these atrocities

through her work. Nevertheless, while the play may take some influences from

real events, it is not about these events, whether contemporary (in Bosnia) or past

(in Nazi Germany). Kane makes the important point that it would be

264
Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 87.

170
inappropriate or insensitive to write directly or explicitly about such events as that

would, to some extent, involve appropriating or ‘using’ the suffering of others:

With Cleansed I didn’t want to get into the situation of: this is about
Germany or the Jews. It definitely had a strong impact on me but the play
is not about that, so why use that as to give something a context? Because
then you are being cynical, you are using people’s pain in order to justify
your own work which I don’t think is acceptable.265

Although the play may allude to contemporary or past events it does not present a

direct or naturalistic response to them but offers, instead, a metaphorical

exploration of certain problems – including the loss of self and the limits of the

self - which transcend specific historical contexts.

The ambiguous setting of the play is significant in this exploration as it evokes an

atmosphere of repression and institutionalization without fixing events to a

particular time and place. The reference to ‘smack’ in the opening scene does

suggest a contemporary setting, but the lack of any other clear signifiers

undermines any attempt to determine or fix the historical context. Likewise, the

reference to university rooms and to the perimeter fence of the university serves

more to evoke questions than to provide a clear setting. Kane’s own experience

of feeling stifled by university life may find expression here as Dan Rebellato

indicates: ‘It is not surprising to find that the psychiatric torture camp that is the

setting of Cleansed is said to have been built on the site of a university’.266

Turning a place which is traditionally associated with the advancement of human

265
Kane, interview with Nils Tabert quoted in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 94.
266
Rebellato, ‘Sarah Kane: An Appreciation’, New Theatre Quarterly, 59 (1999), 280-1, p. 281.
Rebellato refers to Kane’s ‘famously fractious relationship’ with the institutions at which she
studied but points out that despite her own reservations about university education she accepted an
interview to talk at Royal Holloway and to talk to students about her work which she did, he
records, with ‘passionate seriousness’ (Ibid).

171
knowledge into a site of repression and torture may also be a way of putting the

role of the university into the spotlight and obliquely raising the question of

whether its purpose in today’s society is to enable human flourishing or to

produce obedient citizens.267

By presenting such an ambiguous yet evocative setting, Kane develops the

innovations presented in Blasted where she specified the location of the play – a

hotel room in Leeds – but then went on to erase the specificity by stating that it is

‘the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’ (1:3). The

juxtaposing of the specific with the non-specific is important as it foreshadows the

collapse of the specifically located first half of the play which gives way to the

second half in which location is no longer clear. Although Kane’s aim was to

express the chaotic and catastrophic effects of war, her formal treatment was

viewed negatively by some critics who interpreted the move as an unacceptable

conflation of irreducibly different situations. Aleks Sierz sums up the unease that

was felt by asking: ‘But doesn’t the equation of a domestic rape with the use of

rape as an instrument of war suggest a moral absolutism quite useless for our

understanding of either crime?’268 First of all it is, I think, worth pointing out that

the two different incidences of rape are not simply equated or treated as the same

in the play but are depicted in entirely different ways as I discuss chapter two.

What is significant, however, is that the gap between them is collapsed in the play

267
In this sense Kane’s play taps into a contemporary debate about the status of today’s university
– particularly concerning the humanities – described as ‘an institution which some would assure
us, is already posthumous, or post-human, or in ruins’ in the ‘Introduction’ to Inhuman
Reflections, Brewster, Joughin, Owen, Walker (eds.), (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), p. 2.
268
Sierz is drawing attention here to David Greig’s ‘Introduction’ to Blasted which, he suggests,
fails to question the premise that there was a connection between a rape in a Leeds hotel room and
the atrocities of civil war in Bosnia, ‘A Review of Complete Plays by Sarah Kane, introduced by
David Greig’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 13, 2003, pp. 115-117, p. 116.

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highlighting the point that brutalities do not just occur somewhere else and are not

just committed by others. Whilst a difference is clearly shown between a single

incident and a large-scale, organised form of abuse, the question raised after the

collapsing of the site-specific set is to what extent the single incident carries the

seed of large-scale violence. If, in other words, rape is perpetrated during ‘peace-

time’, then the step from this to rape as an instrument of war is shown to be a

‘logical’ progression. To make this link does not in itself ‘suggest a moral

absolutism’ as Sierz suggests: the difference in scale or detail of both crimes is not

ignored. But by juxtaposing them Kane prompts the audience to consider the

brutalities of their own culture before assuming an attitude of cultural superiority

toward those of others. Blasted raises these difficult issues in a metaphorical

rather than direct way and by moving away from naturalistic conventions.

Taking the style adopted in the second half of Blasted as a starting point, Kane

deploys an expressionistic approach throughout Cleansed using place names such

as ‘the perimeter fence of a university’, ‘the red room’ ‘the white room’ and the

‘round room’ to set the scenes. The place names express or evoke a sense of

institutionalisation without specifying unnecessary detail which would detract

attention from the world of the play and invite the kind of naturalistically-biased

criticism which surrounded her debut. The evocation of such a setting was

influenced by August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata which, as Saunders points out,

was one of Kane’s primary sources of influence in writing Cleansed.269 In the

Ghost Sonata Strindberg makes similar uses of colour-coded rooms and evokes a

sense of claustrophobia through the depiction of the Colonel’s house; most

269
Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 94-99.

173
notably the cupboard where the Colonel’s wife spends most of her time in an

effort to avoid being seen.270 The expressionistic approach is not only helpful in

evoking an oppressive setting but also allows both Strindberg and Kane to provide

indirect expositions of oppression without making what could be interpreted as

explicit statements regarding specific cases of oppression in the real world.

Strindberg’s depiction of the wife provides a theatrical exposition of internalized

oppression which manifests itself in various guises in Cleansed, and which is

supported by, but not reliant on, dialogue to explain or clarify the points that are

expressed. In Strindberg’s play the Colonel’s wife is also known as the Mummy:

an ambiguous reference to her status as a mother - which in itself is a contentious

point as her child is proof of her adulterous relationship with the Old Man of the

play - and also to her mummified state as indicated by the Old Man’s response to

the student. The woman is represented by the marble statue that, as indicated in

the opening stage directions, is clearly visible in the drawing room of the house

throughout the play. Carved in white marble and surrounded by palm trees

bathed in bright sunlight, the statue resembles a classical Greek sculpture and

represents a vision of ‘ideal woman’ that no woman – not even the one who the

statue is based on – can live up to. The student asks who the statue represents and

whether she is or was as beautiful as the statue indicates. After answering

affirmatively, the Old Man goes on to reveal that ‘she now sits in the shape of a

mummy, worshipping her own statue’.271 Contrasting the pristine statue with the

ghost of a woman who avoids being seen by hiding in a cupboard, is an effective

strategy which draws attention to the process whereby woman becomes her own

270
Saunders compares Grace’s journey through the institution with the one that Strindberg’s
Student takes through the house in Ghost Sonata suggesting that rooms are used in the two plays
‘as places of discovery and revelation for characters’, Love more or Kill me, p. 94.
271
Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata in Plays: One, trans. by Michael Meyer, (London: Methuen,
1987), p. 162.

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oppressor as a result of her ‘failure’ to meet and maintain the ideal upheld by

society’s objectification and sexualisation of her.272

The theme of objectification suggested by Strindberg’s depiction of the Mummy

is taken further in Cleansed. In place of the statue, Kane localises the object of

fetishisation as the woman’s breast: the most visibly obvious signifier of woman

but also the primary object of desire for the pre-sexual and pre-social infant. The

two scenes of the play that present an enactment of sexual intercourse begin in

exactly the same way by focusing on the woman’s breast and the male character’s

fascination with it. In scene five Graham takes off Grace’s shirt ‘stares at her

breasts’ and then ‘sucks her right breast’ (5:120). In scene nineteen the steps are

repeated between the Woman and Tinker with him looking at her breasts and then

taking, again, the right breast into his mouth. The repetition suggests the playing

out of a dance sequence which has already been carefully choreographed rather

than a spontaneous act of love and therefore draws attention to something beyond

love-making. Tinker’s momentary withdrawal and exclamation: ‘Most glorious

fucking breasts I ever met’ (19:147), emphasises the point that Tinker is making

love to a fetish object and not to the Woman who, incidentally, is without a name

in the play. The point that this act is more about Tinker’s relationship with

himself – or about the crisis in his own self – is suggested by the strong link that is

established between the act of love-making and the state of dependency on the

mother.

272
Strindberg is often accused of being unsympathetic towards women – or even of misogyny
according to some critics – but his exploration of the topic of oppression in The Ghost Sonata
reveals a critical approach which, rather than undermining feminist goals, can instead be
interpreted as justifying and anticipating the aims of feminist literary criticism.

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References to the mother figure are made again in the exchanges between Robin

and Grace where, initially, Robin’s lack of maturity is revealed when he tells

Grace about his plans to leave the institution:

Robin Leaving soon. Going to my mum’s.

Grace (Stares)
Robin If I don’t mess up again.
Going to my mum’s, get myself sorted so I –
Get sorted.
Grace (Stares)
Robin What you doing here, don’t have girls here.
(3:115)

Robin’s mum represents a place of safety in contrast to the institution. Unused to

female company, his dependency on his mum is gradually transferred to Grace,

the first woman he comes into contact with. In the next scene between the two

characters, Grace responds to Robin’s declaration of love by telling him ‘You’re

confusing me’ (7:128). Robin’s confusion is shown in the way in which he

imagines Grace in alternative, but equally stereotypical roles, as ideal mother,

wife and then girlfriend. Situating himself in the role of choice-maker, Robin

declares: ‘If I had to get married, I’d marry you’ (7:126). But the extent to which

his choices are prescribed by societal conventions is highlighted by his awkward

phraseology which draws attention to the impossibility of the first ‘choice’ that he

speaks of: ‘My mum weren’t my mum and I had to choose / another, I’d choose

you’ (7:126). By imagining himself choosing his own mother, Robin reveals his

own limits and the limits of his imagined autonomy.

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The fact that Robin remains trapped within an image-repertoire and a chain of

signifiers that is so evidently drawn from previous representations of romantic

love is highlighted when Grace tries to teach him how to write in scene seven.

Kane draws attention here to the very process of writing and, in doing so,

highlights the arbitrary link between signifier and signified. Grace’s account of

how writing is ‘talking without your voice’ in which ‘each letter corresponds to a

sound’ is shown to misrepresent the complexities of writing and representation.

Grace asks Robin to write her name so that ‘it looks like it sounds’ (7:123). But

without the training that would enable him to make the arbitrary link between the

letters and the phonetic sounds Robin is unable to follow through Grace’s

instructions. Nevertheless, he is still able to produce a visual sign which shows an

attempt to ‘talk without his voice’ and which also shows that all sign systems –

not just writing – are loaded with signification.273 Robin ‘looks at her and thinks’,

then ‘starts to write’ and continues to do so throughout the rest of the scene and

during the exchange with Grace until, at the end of the scene, his paper is taken

from him by Tinker (7:123). Responding to Tinker’s derisory enquiry – ‘Fuck is

that?’ – Robin answers with a simple word - ‘flower’ - and whilst Tinker burns his

creation, he explains ‘she smells like a flower’ (7:129). Operating outside the

framework of written convention, Robin has attempted to represent Grace, to

produce a sign that ‘looks like it sounds’. But, and as Tinker’s jibe indicates, the

sign is only meaningful - which is to say the signifier (picture of the flower) only

273
A point that would motivate Barthes to produce a systematic critique of everyday signs in
1950’s France which took Saussure’s linguistic theories further in order to extend them beyond the
realm of language: ‘We [semiologists] shall therefore take language, discourse, speech, etc., to
mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: a photograph will be a kind of
speech for us in the same way as a newspaper article […] This generic way of conceiving language
is in fact justified by the very history of writing: long before the invention of our alphabet, objects
like the Inca quipu, or drawings, as in pictographs, have been accepted as speech’, Barthes,
Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 110-111.

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corresponds to the signified (Robin’s concept of Grace) – for Robin alone. This

highlights a point that I will discuss further in the next chapter, namely that

language can only acquire meaning and value given the conformity of a

community of speakers; the individual cannot operate in isolation but must take

their place in the sign-system which would, in this case, mean writing letters and

not drawing random pictures. Even though Robin seems to ignore the

fundamental rules of written language, and Grace’s efforts to teach him, he still

deploys imagery taken from a repertoire of shared signifiers in his attempt to find

one (the flower) that corresponds to his concept of the woman he claims to be in

love with. His drawing is not at all random, then, but draws on a shared

mythology that associates the flower with woman and romantic love, and in which

woman is turned into the love-object.

In the process of objectifying Grace, it is, however, Robin who becomes the

oppressed by situating himself in the position of rejected lover. This short scene

shows the development of a passion that begins with Robin’s tentative courting of

Grace, which increases in intensity throughout their exchange, and culminates in

his self-destructive decision to stay in the institution (instead of going home as he

talks of doing in scene three) in order to be with Grace. His allusion to the eternal

– he claims that he will never leave – provides a stark contrast to his subsequent

recognition of the laws of mortality which precedes his suicide. Telling Grace

that he thinks he has cracked the numbers he has been working on, he goes on to

demonstrate with the abacus that he has just retrieved from the ashes. Taking up

the abacus, he announces: ‘Right, I’ll – / Days left. Try that’ and then ‘counts off

the beads on a single row’ (17:143). Stopping after seven, he then ‘stares at the

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seven beads’ before continuing to count up to fifty-two on rows three to eight.

After completing the series of fifty-two he stops again and ‘stares at the beads’

before saying ‘Fifty-two sevens’. Creating a visual representation of a calendar

year, Robin, as his staring illustrates, seems to be struck by the significance of

time. What starts off as a demonstration of his achievement in mastering the

abacus – one which he is keen to show off to his beloved - ends up in his own

destruction as his excitement turns into despair. To what extent this is due to

Grace’s lack of response to him or to his recognition of his own mortality is open

to question. Robin begins the scene by deciding to count the ‘Days left’ and his

counting ends at ‘Thirty fifty-two sevens’, in other words, thirty years. Whether

the thirty years refer to his days left in the institution or to the number of days left

of his life is not made clear. But what is suggested through the demonstration

with the abacus is a growing sensation of entrapment and temporal limits that

Robin responds to by cutting short his life.

Kane acknowledged Büchner’s Woyzeck as one of the key sources of influence for

Cleansed. Attention has been drawn, in particular, to the structural similarities

that Cleansed shares with Woyzeck which is composed of short scenes of intense

dramatic moments and which tells the tragic story of a betrayed lover.274 What I

want to emphasise here are some of the thematic similarities between the two

plays. Written between 1836 and 1837, Woyzeck, according to Price’s

274
Kane was familiar with Büchner’s work having directed Woyzeck during completion of
Cleansed. See Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 87 for Kane’s discussion of the link between her
directorial experience of Büchner’s play and the influence this had on her own writing.

179
‘Introduction’ to the play, ‘was the first working-class tragedy’.275 What proves

to be the key factor in the tragic downfall of Woyzeck is, for Price:

[T]he discrepancy between his intellectual and his affective nature.

Intellectually he is a man whose reach exceeds his grasp. He has a
pathetic longing to understand life, but is not equipped to do so. His
mental ambitions plague him.276

Price’s profile of Woyzeck could just as easily be applied to Kane’s Robin who

also tries to grasp that which is beyond his reach. The idea of expressing the

oppressive nature of time in Cleansed can also be compared to Büchner’s play

which starts with a philosophical exchange between the Captain and Woyzeck in

which the educated Captain tell his subordinate to be more conscious of time:

Not so fast, Woyzeck. One thing after another. You’re making

me quite dizzy. So, you finish ten minutes early – what use is that
to me? Think, Woyzeck, you’ve got a good thirty years ahead of
you. Thirty years. That’s three hundred and sixty months. Not to
mention days, hours, and minutes! What are you going to do with
all that time? Space it out, Woyzeck!
(Scene i. p. 107)

The abacus in Cleansed functions in the same way as the words here in order to

convey the point made by the Captain’s speech and to bring home to Robin the

limits of his own mortality. Spacing out the time differently, the result is still the

same in that it provides an estimate of how much longer the characters have to

live: ‘thirty years’. Contrasting the idea of eternity with the transience of human

life, the Captain goes on to reveal the anxiety that this thought causes him:

When I think about eternity I start worrying – about the

275
Georg Büchner, Woyzeck in The Plays of Georg Büchner, trans. by Victor Price, (London:
Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xvi.
276
Ibid.

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 world. Food for thought, Woyzeck, food for thought. Eternity is
eternity is eternity. That’s quite clear. But then again it’s not eternity
at all, it’s the twinkling of an eye. Yes, the twinkling of an eye.
Woyzeck, I shudder when I think that the earth takes a whole day to
rotate. What a waste of time! And where’s it going to end? Woyzeck,
the very sight of a millwheel depresses me.
(ibid)

For the Captain, the sight of a millwheel turning reminds him of the incessant

rotating of the earth which, as his words suggest, is conceived as both

interminably drawn out and over in an instant. The effect that the millwheel has

on the Captain is reproduced in Cleansed with the abacus introducing a different

spatial metaphor to capture the ‘movement’ of time. This time the ‘shudder’ felt

by the Captain when he contemplates the wastefulness, or pointlessness, of time is

represented by Robin’s suicide. His previous allusion to the eternal was made in a

state of innocence before he had contemplated the meaning of eternity or thought

about time in any depth. But with the abacus providing him with food for

thought, he comes to an understanding of the limits of his own life but without the

capacity to deal with it. Like Woyzeck, he has a ‘longing to understand life, but is

not equipped to do so’ and so, overcome by an affective response to his

confrontation with the ineffable, he ends his life.

Like Blasted, the violence in Cleansed received much critical attention. This

time, however, and in contrast to the hostile responses to Kane’s first play, more

attention was given to the role that violence played. Kane disclosed that another

key source for the play came from the controversial claim made by Barthes that

the situation of a rejected lover is similar to that of a prisoner of Dachau.277

Whilst Barthes’s controversial claim may have provided a thematic ground for

277
Interview with Nils Tabert cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 93.

181
Cleansed, the structure of A Lover’s Discourse, where the claim is presented, also

proved highly influential in the formal composition of the play.278 Despite being

considered a work of literary criticism, Barthes’s text does not present a theory or

philosophy of love but, instead, offers the reader fragments put together

alphabetically rather than conceptually or thematically. The structure of the book

thus attempts to express the way that the discourse of love proceeds: without

obeying conventional structures and in intense outbursts rather than logically

developed arguments. By organizing the book into fragments that are ordered

alphabetically and according to their theme, Barthes attempts to discourage the

temptation on the part of the reader to impose an ultimate meaning or narrative:

‘There was no question here of a love story (or of the history of love)’ or, as he

also expresses it ‘a philosophy of love’.279 In an introductory section entitled

‘How this book is constructed’ – which clearly alerts the reader to the importance

of the mode of construction chosen – Barthes clarifies that what he is proposing to

write is:

[A] portrait – but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one

which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking
within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who
does not speak.280

Kane’s play adopts a similar structure by presenting twenty scenes which are

episodic rather than sequential. Although there is some plot development in the

play it is perhaps more appropriate to consider this development as an

accumulation of extreme moments rather than as an unfolding of plot. Like

278
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books,
1990).
279
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 8.
280
Ibid, p. 3.

182
Barthes’s, Kane was more concerned to express the discourse of love – in all its

extremities and complexities – than to present a psychological portrait of

characters. The importance of this formal move is that it avoids presenting a

single character as an example of ‘the extreme lover’ which can be held up for

scrutiny and then explained away or categorized as an exception to the ‘norm’.

Instead, what is presented is a portrait of the discourse of love and not of the

singular and exceptional lover.

The extreme situations presented in Cleansed represent an attempt by Kane to

theatrically explore the controversial claim made by Barthes in which he equates

the extreme situation of a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp with the plight of

a rejected lover. Ken Urban, who directed the New York production of the play

emphasises that the link made by Barthes draws on Bruno Bettelheim’s studies in

psychosis and identification of ‘limit-experiences, moments when your entire

sense of self is ripped from you’.281 Rather less sensitively, theatre reviewer

Martin Morrow, argues that the link ‘suggests a black sense of humour at work’ in

Kane’s play.282 Whilst it is true that humour is present in Kane’s work, it is

misplaced to locate it in such a link and by doing so Morrow’s interpretation fails

to acknowledge the seriousness of the point that Cleansed addresses and implies a

lack of sensitivity on the part of the playwright that is unjustified. In order to

examine this link more carefully it is worth considering Barthes’s comment

further and looking also at the context in which he makes the point.

281
‘Ken Urban Cleansed’, nytheatre voices, 1 Feb 2004,
http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/voiceweb/v-urban.htm, p. 2
282
Martin Morrow, ‘Love as a form of torture’, FFWD Weekly, 26 Feb 2004,
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/2004/0226/the3.htm 2, p. 2.

183
What Barthes emphasises in A Lover’s Discourse is that the discourse of love – or

of the lover – is necessarily of the order of the obscene: it is, by definition,

excessive and exaggerated and thus sounds incongruous with other discourses of

contemporary culture. Because of this, he argues, the discourse of love is

repressed from culture and ‘no one dares offer his discourse publicly without a

serious mediation: novel, play or analysis’.283 And it is also because of this very

point that Barthes takes up the project of presenting that which is, as he describes,

‘driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the “unreal”’.284 The lover’s

discourse, on this account, is perceived as a site of that which is repressed from

culture and therefore a site which is worthy of careful examination for the cultural

critic. Barthes does not make the connection between imprisonment in a

concentration camp and what he calls the ‘amorous catastrophe’ lightly, but does

so in order to put forward a series of questions not only regarding dominant

perceptions of love, but also concerning subjectivity. Having put forward the

connection, Barthes immediately questions the validity of such a link and in doing

so provides an account of how the lover is perceived according to dominant logic

as weak and infantile:

Is it not indecent to compare the situation of a love-sick subject to that of

an inmate of Dachau? Can one of the most unimaginable insults of
History be compared with a trivial, childish, sophisticated, obscure
incident occurring to a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his
own Image-Repertoire?285

By raising these questions Barthes is able to present a view which would contrast

the ‘unimaginable’ horrors of the holocaust with the imagined ‘incident’ of love

283
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 177.
284
Ibid, p. 1.
285
Ibid, p. 49.

184
which is conceived in contradictory terms as ‘trivial, childish’, yet also

‘sophisticated’ and ‘obscure’. The contradictions point to a knot in the text that

calls for attention and prompts the reader to stop and unravel the terms that have

been juxtaposed. On the one hand, the love incident is described as silly or

befitting a child and of little value or importance. But in complete contrast it is

also described as highly developed and complicated (OED definition of

sophisticated), and obscure: not easy to express or understand or hidden from

view (OED). Barthes’s rhetorical device here, which draws attention to a blatant

contradiction in the text, already warns that he is not merely stating an opinion but

inviting the reader to consider carefully the premises on which the questions he

puts forward are built. Given the lead up to the statement, Barthes’s description

of the lover as ‘a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his own Image-

Repertoire’ cannot be read purely at face value. First of all the description of the

subject as ‘comfortable’ flies in the face of a poststructural view of the subject

(which would be anything but comfortable) and calls to mind a view of the

centred-subject as a fixed and stable locus of meaning and intent. Then the

comment that this subject is ‘merely the victim of his own Image-Repertoire’

insinuates that the subject should be in control of the Image-Repertoire – what

s/he thinks, sees, perceives, remembers – and not gullible to its tricks: an

insinuation which, again, calls on the assumptions of an I-centred approach to

subjectivity. By raising these questions, Barthes shows how – according to an I-

centred approach to subjectivity – love-sickness becomes synonymous with

weakness and is interpreted as a failure on the part of the subject to be in complete

control of their own destiny.

185
Given the charged example that Barthes puts forward, the reader is at first invited

to take the position of the fixed subject and to regard the link between the love-

sick individual and the prisoner as, indeed, obscene. Kane admitted to being

initially ‘appalled’ at the link and to thinking ‘how can he possibly suggest the

pain of love is as bad as that’.286 In another entry of A Lover’s Discourse, entitled

‘Love’s Obscenity’, Barthes again emphasises the indecency of the love-sick

subject whose actions and responses appear to be entirely disproportionate

compared to other catastrophic situations:

[N]othing can escape the unseemliness of a subject who collapses in tears

because his other behaves distantly, ‘when there are still so many men in
the world who are dying of hunger, when so many nations are struggling
for their freedom,’ etc.287

Again, through the use of quotation marks, Barthes is drawing attention to a

typical response to the love-sick subject which denies or undermines the intensity

or ‘reality’ of the love by way of contrasting it with examples of real suffering in

the world. The extremity of the situations invoked in both of Barthes’s entries

invites a distinction to be established between what is acknowledged as ‘real’

suffering, and what is suspiciously regarded as the ‘unreal’ suffering of the love-

sick subject. Whilst the question may, in effect, be more about degrees of

significance than about what is real or not, Barthes point serves to highlight the

way in which a distinction emerges between the two categories. It is precisely

because it is designated as unreal – or belonging to the realm of the unreal - that

the lover’s discourse provokes suspicion, derision or outrage. But it is also

because of this that Barthes finds the excessive nature of the lover’s discourse so

286
Kane interview with Nils Tabert cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 93.
287
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 178.

186
intriguing: because it calls into question the very category of the real – or what is

considered to belong to the realm of the real - and destabilises the notion of the

fixed, ‘comfortable’ subject in control of their own mind and destiny.

The link between love – or the discourse of love – and subjectivity is explored by

Catherine Belsey in The Subject of Tragedy which traces the thematic exploration

of love in tragedies and other writings of the seventeenth century showing how

these writings made manifest the preoccupations and conflicting views that were

instrumental in shaping the developing social order. One point that Belsey

emphasises is that ‘love in this period is differentiated increasingly decisively

from lust as having its origins in the mind, the very essence of the humanist

subject’.288 On this account, writings which repeatedly locate love in the human

mind contribute towards the developing notion that the human mind is the locus

of the human subject who is, in turn, given to be the origin of history. During the

development of modern society, romantic love becomes the foundation on which

liberal marriage - and by extension the nuclear family - is founded. Women, as

Belsey indicates, ‘find a place in marriage, and the cement of liberal marriage is

romantic love’.289 Marriage is, in other words, a means for women to find a place

in society; to become subjects and to enjoy the status and privileges – however
288
Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 106. Plato’s influence on this
emerging view of love is worth pointing out as it is in his writings that a distinction is first drawn
between different levels of love with spiritual love (platonic) being the ultimate goal as distinct
from mere physical love or lust. An interesting point is highlighted in the ‘Introduction’ to Plato’s
Symposium which emphasises further Belsey’s argument that what is now considered to be a
‘norm’ – romantic love as the foundation of liberal, heterosexual marriage – is founded on cultural
and historical conventions rather than natural givens. Contextualizing Plato’s text for the
contemporary reader, Walter Hamilton explains that ‘the love with which the dialogue is
concerned, and which is accepted as a matter of course by all the speakers, including Socrates, is
homosexual love; it is assumed without argument that this alone is capable of satisfying a man’s
highest and noblest aspirations, and the love of man and woman, when it is mentioned at all, is
spoken of as altogether inferior, a purely physical impulse whose sole object is the procreation of
children’, Plato, The Symposium, trans. by Walter Hamilton, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1951) p. 12.
289
Ibid, p. 206.

187
limited these may have been at this point in history – that came with being a

subject. This in itself does not fundamentally challenge patriarchy but instead

signals a development whereby, as Belsey describes it, ‘love makes slavery

blessed’.290 Belsey backs up this point by citing non-literary texts of the same

period which reveal changing attitudes towards patriarchal power relations as

indicated in one source which argues that the wife is ‘to bee governed with love,

not overruled by tyranny’.291 But while this account emphasises the way in which

a discourse of love is harnessed for hegemonic purposes, Belsey’s analysis also

reveals a paradox whereby the excesses of love also threaten to destabilise the

dominant socio-political conventions that they otherwise maintain. Insofar as it is

‘an intimate, private relationship’, Belsey claims, love is also ‘the repudiation of

the political, its antithesis’.292 It is arguably this tension between love as

hegemonically safe on the one hand, and as transcending or challenging the socio-

political order on the other, that motivates Barthes to compose A Lover’s

Discourse. It is, in other words, precisely when it is most excessive and

exaggerated that the lover’s discourse reveals the tension, thereby exposing and

challenging the boundaries upon which societal conventions are based,

particularly the boundaries between self and other and the conventional view of

the stable, I-centred subject.

Because the lover’s discourse sounds incongruous to the contemporary ear,

Barthes’s argues that ‘no one dares offer his discourse publicly without a serious

mediation: novel, play or analysis’.293 But by extension it could also be argued

290
Ibid, p. 214.
291
Ibid, p. 214.
292
Ibid, p. 206.
293
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 177.

188
that given the dominance of social realism in the theatre during the late twentieth

century, such self-censoring also extends to the playwright who would be

reluctant to offer up a serious and extreme discourse on love; not least because

such an offering might be derided on account of its excesses, but also given the

preoccupation with specific social concerns, which, following some critics, it is

theatre’s job to attend to.294 The point that the excesses of the lover’s discourse

are falling out of currency in contemporary culture is already raised at the

beginning of the twentieth century in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata. The Old Man

explains to the young Student that he and ‘the old woman in the window’

(Mummy) had ‘once vowed to be eternally true to each other. Eternally’.295 The

word ‘eternally’ is repeated and emphasised in order to highlight the contrast

between different attitudes to relationships: the former being characterised by

excessive appeals to abstract concepts and the latter being founded on a more

pragmatic approach as revealed by the student: ‘How little your generation

understood of life. We don’t talk to our girls like that nowadays’.296 Kane

reformulates this conflict of attitudes in Cleansed through the exchanges between

Rod and Carl where the problems and contradictions inherent in attempting to

express or articulate love verbally are explored. In scene two, Rod responds to

Carl’s promises that ‘I’ll always love you’ and ‘I’ll never leave you’ by laughing

(2:110). He refuses to accept or adopt the excessive discourse spoken by Carl

and, instead, and in a way which calls to mind Hippolytus’s radical insistence on

absolute truth, offers Carl only his honesty: ‘I love you now. I’m with you now.

294
James Macdonald talks of this tendency in his appraisal of Kane’s work and refers to the
playwright’s ability to go against the grain of received dramatic forms of the time which were, he
argues, ‘driven by a clear political agenda, kitted out with signposts indicating meaning, and
generally featuring a hefty state-of-the-nation speech somewhere near the end’, Macdonald, ‘They
Never Got Her’, Observer Review, 2 February 1999.
295
Strindberg, Ghost Sonata, p. 164.
296
Ibid.

189
I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. Now. That’s it. No more.

Don’t make me lie’ (2:111). Kane presents two conflicting discourses here: the

lover’s discourse, which is characterised by excess and unsupportable claims, and

the pragmatic discourse which is unwilling to state anything beyond that which is

actual and knowable.

In Carl’s case, his excessive claims come back to haunt him when Tinker, after

hearing the exchange between the two lovers, puts Carl’s love to the test. The

role of Tinker throughout the play is interesting as he appears to be almost

omnipresent in the same way as the gods of Greek tragedies, eavesdropping on

private conversations and then meddling (as his name suggests) in the characters’

destinies.297 In scene four he threatens to impale Carl with a pole. The terrified

Carl soon breaks his earlier vow by crying ‘Rod not me don’t kill me ROD NOT

ME’ (4:117). His betrayal is not just represented through language but also

through the symbolism of what follows. First Tinker produces a large pair of

scissors and cuts off his tongue and then forces him to swallow the ring that he

had given to Rod along with his promises.298 As Saunders points out, Tinker

intervenes throughout the play in the lives of other characters in order to attempt

‘to crush all expressions of love’.299 But the interesting point is that despite the

intensity of these interventions love continues to flourish in the repressive

institution. However, the range of relationships presented in the play ensures that

297
Ken Urban points out that his name is also ‘undoubtedly referencing the Daily Mail critic [Jack
Tinker] so harsh toward Blasted’, Urban, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’, p. 43.
298
The symbolic use of violence in this scene was emphasised in the first production by deploying
highly stylised movements and by using props such as red ribbons and balloons in order to
discourage a naturalistic viewing approach to what is depicted on stage. The significance of
theatrical imagery is emphasised by director James Macdonald who comments that ‘the bulk of
meaning is carried through imagery’, cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 88.
299
Saunders, Love me or kill me, pp. 96-98.

190
what is presented is not a mere reinforcement of the kind of romantic view of love

that, following Belsey’s account, provided the underpinning of modern society by

normalising the heterosexual couple and sanctifying it through the act of marriage.

The focus is not on one idealised couple but on the endurance of love despite

attempts to repress it and despite the fact that the relationships presented fall

outside dominant heterosexual norms.

The only heterosexual relationship to emerge in the play (apart from the

incestuous relationship between Grace and Graham) is between Tinker and the

Woman in the peep show booth. This relationship appears to be based not on love

but on mutual dependency. Feeding the viewing mechanism of the booth with

coins throughout his encounters with the Woman, Tinker displays a conflicting

desire to both enjoy the sexual stimulation provided and, at the same time, to save

the Woman from her current situation: ‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s not right’ he

tells her on his first visit (6:122). At the end of the next scene between them, the

Woman responds to Tinker’s interest by asking him to save her (9:130). But it is

clear through the Woman’s role-playing – which culminates in her naming herself

Grace to please Tinker – that she is merely exchanging one form of sexual

servitude for another. Kane’s depiction of this relationship indicates that there

may still be some validity in the claim made by Belsey that, in some cases, the

heterosexual partnership represents a form of legalised prostitution.300 From this

perspective Tinker’s interest in ‘saving’ the Woman signals a patriarchal desire to

300
Belsey’s argument brings together both feminist criticism and Marxist politics. Marx and
Engels make the link between marriage and prostitution in the Communist Manifesto where, after
advancing a critique of ‘bourgeois marriage’, they argue that the abolition of the present system of
production must bring with it the abolition of a community of women springing from that system,
i.e., of prostitution both public and private, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 101.

191
suppress the disruptive elements of female sexuality and to harness and control

this sexuality in a hegemonically safe and private relationship. Even during his

own private relationship, Tinker represents the repressive force that is more

clearly evident in his brutal attempts to repress all manifestations of love in others.

The other main relationships that Tinker attempts to break up are either

marginalised or completely illicit according to dominant, heterosexual norms.

The first scene in which Tinker tortures one of the lovers occurs in scene four in

which Carl ‘is being heavily beaten by an unseen group of men’ (4:116). The fact

that the men remain unseen suggests a ritualistic attack in which Carl is punished

on account of his sexuality. This is born out by Tinker’s verbal abuse throughout

the scene which centres on the male body and begins with his threat to impale

Carl with a pole. In the torture scene that follows, ‘Carl’s trousers are pulled

down and a pole is pushed a few inches up his anus’ while Tinker proceeds to

interrogate him (4:117). The information he tries to extract relates to Carl’s

sexual relationship with his partner Rod. Tinker’s derision of this relationship is

made explicit in the connection he makes between their love-making and his

physical abuse of Carl: ‘Close your eyes imagine it’s him’, he tells Carl before

going on to imitate him saying ‘Rodney Rodney split me in half’ (4:117). The

scene ends with the removal of Carl’s tongue as a form of symbolic punishment

for betraying his lover. What is not clear is whether this represents an attempt by

Tinker to crush ‘all expressions of love’ – as Saunders suggests - or whether,

instead, Tinker is engaged in a mission to stamp out what he sees as illicit

relationships which threaten to undermine the stability of the institution.301

301
See footnote 36.

192
Apart from the thematic content, the perimeter fence that figures so strongly in the

stage directions also indicates that the play is engaged in an exploration of border-

line experiences, or experiences that threaten the dominant boundaries of society

represented by the university. The first scene of the play, like others, is enacted

‘just inside the perimeter fence of a university’ (1:107), suggesting that what

occurs does so at the margins of the institution. Tinker provides Graham with a

quantity of smack sufficient for an overdose in this opening scene. However, the

most significant marginal experience that is referred to here concerns something

other than drug abuse. Picking up on the brother/sister relationships in

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Kane presents a relationship that challenges the

most fundamental familial and societal boundaries.302 In the middle of his

exchange with Tinker, Graham starts to disclose the reason for his suicidal act by

saying ‘My sister, she wants - ’ (1:107). Leaving the sentence unfinished, this

line merely provides the audience with an ambiguous clue that Graham’s

relationship with his sister contributes, somehow, to his despair. It is unclear

whether his next line, ‘I know my limits’, refers to the amount of smack that he

can handle or to his sense of his own limitations regarding what his sister wants.

It becomes clear that what Grace wants from her brother goes against familial and

cultural limits in subsequent scenes which provide the most forceful

representation in the play of a love that breaks with cultural conventions. Cultural

boundaries and conventions regarding relationships are clearly posited in

Shakespeare’s play which provides a clear delineation between different forms of

302
As Saunders points out, ‘the central relationship in Cleansed between Grace and her brother is
taken from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night’, Love me or kill me, p. 95.

193
love through the Duke’s appraisal of Olivia, whose grieving for her brother

resembles that of a grieving widow in its intensity:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill’d the flock of all affections else
That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill’d.
(Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I. i. 33)

For the Duke, Olivia’s intense feelings for ‘but’ a brother testify to her capacity to

love fully. Taking her present state as a benchmark of her strength of feeling, he

goes on to imagine the magnitude of her affections when she is consumed by love

for a man who fulfils the role of lover, not brother. This positive interpretation of

Olivia’s behaviour is contrasted a little later with the response of her uncle Sir

Toby Belch, who considers the intensity of her grieving to be inappropriate:

‘What a plague means my niece, to take the death / of her brother thus? I am sure

care’s an enemy to / life’ (I. iii. 1). Unlike the Duke, Sir Toby detects something

inappropriate in his niece’s behaviour and sees her response to her brother’s death

as disproportional and beyond conventional norms. The reference to plague here

is highly significant as it introduces the idea that an inappropriate relationship

between siblings is not just a private matter – it is not just damaging for the sister

in this case - but represents a threat to civic order in the same way that a plague

signals widespread devastation. Although cultural conventions concerning

relationships and gender identities are ultimately resolved in Twelfth Night, they

are highlighted in the play which, however tentatively, raises the incest taboo, and

through it, the question of whether love can be entirely controlled or civilised.

194
The claim made by Sir Toby in Twelfth Night that ‘care’s an enemy of life’

expresses the fatal duality that Kane explores throughout Cleansed. Generally

speaking care – or love – is considered to be a positive force and one which, as

Belsey emphasises, underpins the development of civil society. At the same

time, however, what is shown in both Shakespeare’s and Kane’s plays is that love

is also potentially life-destroying and represents a constant threat to the stability of

the societal structures that it otherwise helps to maintain. In Olivia’s case, her

love for her brother prevents her from leading the kind of life thought to befit a

young countess. In Grace’s case the intensity of her feeling is expressed in the

line ‘love me or kill me Graham’ (5:120), which powerfully illustrates the point

that love can indeed be an enemy of life. But illustrating this point and

highlighting the double-edged nature of love is not to make a case against love. It

is precisely by presenting a love which cannot be fulfilled – except in Grace’s

own mind – that a notion of love as stronger than cultural boundaries is

reinforced. If there was any possibility of Grace coming to terms with the

impossibility of her desire – something which is negated by the intensity of her

speech – or of her love being reciprocated – which is denied at the outset by

Graham’s death – then the result would not be as effective.

It is precisely because the situation is irresolvable that the tragic effect is

achieved. However, it does not follow, that this evocation of the tragic presents a

fatalistic and negative view of love. On the contrary, by presenting such a

forceful account of love – one that breaks the most fundamental familial and

societal boundaries – the play challenges the pragmatic approach expressed by the

195
Student in Strindberg’s play who claims that ‘we don’t talk to our girls like that

nowadays’.303 Although written at the beginning of the twentieth century, it could

be argued that this approach, which proudly disclaims any unsupportable notion

such as the ‘eternal’, and derides the naivety of earlier periods, is characteristic of

the contemporary landscape in which Kane writes. This is precisely the argument

put forward by Barthes who claims that the discourse of love is repressed from

culture on account of its excesses and its incongruity with other discourses: ‘it is

completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or

derided by them’.304 Kane’s writing – not just in Cleansed but throughout her

plays – represents an attempt to make manifest this forsaken or repressed

discourse through the medium of playwriting.

Although Kane’s exploration of the subject of love is possibly more acute or

obvious in Cleansed, it is by no means isolated to this play but remains a key

concern of the playwright’s and one that she explores continuously, albeit in

different ways, throughout her work. Her last piece, 4.48 Psychosis, also presents

the excessive and violent nature of the lover’s discourse as indicated in the

following lines uttered by one of the voices in the play:

Cut out my tongue / tear out my hair / cut off my limbs / but leave me my
love / I would rather have lost my legs / pulled out my teeth / gouged out
my eyes / than lost my love
(230)

The sequence of words that follows this – ‘flash flicker slash burn wring press

dam slash / flash flicker punch burn float flicker dab flicker’ – which is repeated

303
Strindberg, Ghost Sonata, p. 164.
304
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 1.

196
over and over with slight variations to the sequence, suggests that the violence

articulated by the voice is followed by an act of actual self-harm. By giving such

an explicit account of the physical tortures that the lover would endure, or would

readily inflict upon himself/herself, the voice appears to want to prove the

intensity of the love felt. The anatomical breakdown of the body into parts that

can be removed, extracted, and disposed of is contrasted with that which is

conceived as invisible and indivisible: ‘my love’. The body is, in this instance,

subordinated to that which transcends the material. In a move which has more in

common with the classical tradition than with the social concerns of contemporary

drama, Kane presents a view of love as originating in the human mind which, as

Belsey argues, ‘constitutes the very essence of the humanist subject’.305 But while

such an approach is, as Mark Ravenhill argues, indicative of a ‘classical

sensibility’, it is one which, at the same time, remains highly attuned to problems

that are of critical concern at the end of the twentieth century.306

Kane’s comments in the early stages of writing her last play indicate that she is

returning to a familiar theme: ‘yet another play, which is about the split between

one’s consciousness and one’s physical being’.307 In the lines from 4.48

Psychosis cited above, the split is made manifest in a way which clearly

subordinates physical being and locates love in the mind of the lover. But this is

not the mind given to be the ‘essence of the humanist subject’ as stable locus of

intent and meaning. Instead, what is revealed is a consciousness in flux which

305
Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 106.
306
Ravenhill refers to Kane as ‘a contemporary writer with a classical sensibility’, ‘Obituary’,
Independent, 23 February 1999.
307
Interview with Nils Tabert cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 113.

197
develops not in isolation, but in relation to others and by constantly negotiating

conflicting discourses.308

A clear distinction between self and other is theatrically blurred in Kane’s

depiction of the relationship between Grace and Graham in Cleansed. In death,

Graham appears to be more alive for Grace than he was when he was alive which,

in a sense, emphasises the fact that their relationship is impossible in the realm of

the living. In response to Robin’s wish ‘to change Graham dead to Graham alive’

she argues that ‘it’s not necessary, Robin. It’s not like he’s dead’ (7:125). This is

not meant literarily, however, as indicated in her insistence to Robin that

‘Graham’s not a thing to change. And he’s not in your life’ (7:126). This is

significant as it suggests that Graham can be seen at this point of the play as a

product of Grace’s consciousness rather than a being existing in the exterior

world. The scenes between Grace and Graham can be interpreted, then, as an

attempt to enact the troubled life of a consciousness that has lost a loved one.

According to such a reading Graham would not be seen as a thing/person existing

in the world, or even as a ghost, but as a projection of Grace’s consciousness. At

times Grace’s love for Graham is shown to be a source of strength, as in scene

eleven when his voice talks her through the beating and rape that she suffers. At

other times, however, her own sense of self is threatened by her inability to

imagine her life without him as illustrated in her gradual deterioration. Through

the nightmare situation at the end of the play – in which Grace is being gradually

eaten by rats – Kane provides a stark theatrical account of the extremities that

Barthes writes about in A Lover’s Discourse. Reflecting on her reading of the

308
I will discuss the split between consciousness and physical being at greater length in the final
chapter showing how the problem is explored across Kane’s plays and linking these explorations
to a theoretical movement toward posthumanism.

198
controversial text, Kane concluded that ‘it’s about the loss of self. And when you

lose yourself where do you go?’309 Cleansed provides the audience with an

intense exploration of this question and in doing so confronts not only the

complexities of love but also key problems concerning notions of selfhood.

Kane’s exploration of love is, as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter,

intrinsically related to questions of subjectivity. The approach to subjectivity

revealed in her work is, to some extent, consistent with a poststructuralist view

which challenges the notion of a fixed, I-centred subject and emphasises the

importance of inter-subjectivity and intertextuality in the constitution of the

subject. A significant feature of such a view is that meanings and values are taken

to be contingent and mutable, not fixed or essential: a point which can be

interpreted as both liberating and dangerous.310 What is interesting about Kane’s

work is that it combines a poststructural sensitivity towards questions of

subjectivity while holding on to, or re-affirming, a notion of value through

exploring the significance of love. The risk with such an approach is that a

theatrical excursion into such territory may be regarded as trite as indicated in the

following review of the first production: ‘Love, in Miss Kane’s devising, is the

309
Ibid, p. 93
310
The liberating aspect of such a turn is evident insofar as it opens up horizons of thought and
challenges previous assumptions and prejudices. However, such an emphasis on contingency can
lead to a relativistic view whereby all meanings and values are taken to be obsolete in a
postmodern world. The danger of such a view is that the negation of all meanings and values may
also represent the negation, or the undermining of, any attempt to broach ethical questions and
may consequently signal the end of ethics. Christopher Norris attempts to defend Derrida’s work
against such a perception by insisting that ‘deconstruction has nothing in common with those
forms of extreme anti-cognitivist doctrine that would claim to have come out “beyond” all
distinctions between truth and falsehood, reason and rhetoric, fact and fiction […] Derrida has
been at some pains to dissociate his project from the kind of irrationalist or nihilist outlook which
takes it for granted that truth and reason are obsolete values. He has a continuing critical
engagement with the truth-claims and ethical values of Enlightenment thought’, cited by Madan
Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, (Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 56.

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play’s problem and also, sentimentally, the answer’.311 The way Kane is referred

to here supports Ken Urban’s claim that part of the controversy regarding her

work ‘comes down to the fact that she is a woman playwright writing about

violence in a way that is typically the purview of men’.312 Interestingly, the

reviewer in this instance touches on a key insight of the play but then dismisses it

as sentimental. Love is, quite rightly, both the problem and the answer of the

play. This does not, however, indicate sentimentality on the part of the writer but,

instead, an ability to confront and express the duality which is an inescapable

aspect of love.

In a fragment entitled ‘The Intractable’, Barthes describes the situation of the

lover as one in which the duality is affirmed: ‘I am simultaneously and

contradictorily happy and wretched’.313 Barthes shows how the lover’s discourse

challenges dominant logic which would consider concepts such as happy and

wretched, or success and failure, as oppositional. Experiencing both states at one

and the same time, the lover is, for Barthes, “neither victor nor vanquished: I am

tragic”.314 This is not, as I have argued, to describe the lover’s state in negative

terms but to reveal the intractable nature of a state which brings about both

happiness and wretchedness. And as both Barthes’s text and Kane’s theatrical

exploration of the subject reveal, to affirm the tragic nature of love is,

simultaneously, to affirm love as a value:

311
Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Force Fed horror at gross banquet of cruelties’,
http://www.nigeledwards.dial.pipex.com/cleansed.htm, 18 May 2004, p. 2.
312
Ken Urban, ‘Cleansed’, nytheatre voices, p. 2.
313
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 22.
314
Ibid, p. 23.

200
 Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs,
despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within
myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most
divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to
depreciate love, I persist: ‘I know, I know, but all the same …’315

Refusing to give up on their love in spite of the suffering that is inflicted on them,

the characters in Cleansed affirm love as a value worth holding on to at any cost.

How this sits with the post-structural notion that all values are relative and

contingent is worth considering. The emergence of this notion depends to a large

extent on the work of Nietzsche whose call for a transvaluation of all values is

often cited as a significant turning point in philosophy and one which underpins

post-structural and postmodern approaches to value and meaning.316 In his

‘Introduction’ to Postmodern Literary Theory, Niall Lucy indicates that an over-

emphasis – and possible misinterpretation – of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘there are no

facts, only interpretations’, has resulted in an ‘evacuation of evaluation’ in post-

modern criticism or, in other words, to a general stance of indifference towards

any statement of positive value.317 Such a stance is contested by John Lippitt and

Jim Urpeth in their ‘Introduction’ to Nietzsche and the Divine which aims to re-

open discussion on Nietzsche’s thought and to challenge the view that his writing

calls for a simple negation of all values. Instead emphasis is placed on

Nietzsche’s challenge to received structures of thought whereby ‘the basic

trajectory of his critique, as one of “transvaluation”, of necessity propels thought

315
Ibid, p. 22.
316
This point is made explicit in the ‘Introduction’ to An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism
and Postmodernism where Sarup sets out to ‘argue that many of the characteristic beliefs of post-
structuralists have their roots in Nietzsche’s thought’, p. 4.
317
Niall Lucy (ed.) Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
2000) p. 29.

201
beyond […] static oppositional structures’.318 From this perspective, Nietzsche’s

call does not signal a complete abandonment or rejection of all values. What it

does, by contrast, is to disavow the oppositional structures which frame and limit

dominant Western logic, thereby attempting to instigate a move beyond such

static and limiting points of reference.

By subjecting love to the most painstaking theatrical revaluation, Kane’s plays

reinforce the value of love but in a way which takes cognisance of the

complexities and difficulties that love brings with it. In this respect, her work

represents an affirmative stance despite, or with full knowledge of, the tragic

nature of love. This stance challenges dominant logic which, according to

Barthes’s account, disavows the tragic by insisting on oppositional thinking – one

is either happy or wretched but not simultaneously both – and depreciates love by

failing to acknowledge the full extent of its reach. Far from being negative or

depressing, Kane’s affirmation of the tragic represents a forceful attempt to

revaluate and to reappraise the core values of society with a view to effecting

positive change within society. This is clearly indicated in the following

comment made by the playwright in response to the question of how much despair

the theatre audience can take:

If we can experience something through art, then we might be able to

change our future, because experience engraves lessons on our hearts
through suffering, whereas speculation leaves us untouched.319

318
John Lippitt and Jim Urpeth, (eds.), Nietzsche and the Divine, (Manchester: Clinamen Press,
2000), p. xii.
319
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 133.

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 Chapter 5

Crave and the question of the self

Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding
our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane.
We don’t know her. We never knew her. Let’s look at her work.320

In the previous chapters I have looked at different aspects of Kane’s plays

emphasising ways in which the tragic is foregrounded and articulated. My focus,

as I stated in the Introduction, has been on evaluating the plays themselves and

not on discussing the life and death of the playwright. Using the term ‘tragedy’ in

relation to Kane is, however, fraught with difficulty because of the tendency

among critics to read her plays retrospectively as a reflection or expression of the

distressed, suicidal mind of the playwright. From such a biographical perspective

there is a danger that the use of the term may be associated too readily with the

playwright than with her work. Kane committed suicide in February 1999, shortly

after writing her fifth and last play 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and at a time when, after

the success of Crave (1998), her work was being reviewed and anticipated

positively. Her premature death may, both from the perspective of those who

knew her and those who appreciated her work, be regarded as ‘tragic’ in the

everyday sense of the term and regardless of the debates surrounding the word’s

correct usage.321 Nevertheless, from a literary perspective, it does not follow that

the work she produced should therefore be considered as ‘tragic’. If her work is

read as a contemporary form of tragedy this should be on account of aspects found

320
Mark Ravenhill, ‘Suicide art? She’s better than that’, in The Guardian, Culture, 12 October
2005, p. 20.
321
See Introduction, p. 12 for a discussion of this.

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in the plays themselves and not because of the circumstances of Kane’s life and

death.

Kane’s last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis both explore depression, suicide,

and questions of selfhood in ways which are formally innovative and challenging.

Because of the parallels between the circumstances of the playwright’s death and

the themes explored in her work, some commentators viewed her later plays

biographically as an expression of her own personal anguish as indicated by the

following comment by Phyllis Nagy: ‘when we get to 4.48 Psychosis the

insularity reaches a point where it becomes, despite its other elements, a suicide

note’.322 Shortly after Kane’s death, Rebellato argued against the tendency to

draw parallels between the details of the playwright’s life and the contents of her

work suggesting that ‘it is easy to look back and find hints of Sarah’s life in the

work, but to do so is to do a disservice both to the work and the life’.323 My aim

in this chapter and chapter six is to extend this argument by focusing on thematic

and formal developments in Kane’s last two plays. I will draw out the social

significance of some of the points explored in the plays, thereby challenging both

the accusation that Kane’s later work is insular and the assumption that the plays

represent a straightforward expression or reflection of the playwright’s mind.

In 4.48 Psychosis this kind of author-based approach to reading is called into

question when attention is drawn to the very act of writing: ‘Last in a long line of

literary kleptomaniacs / (a time honoured tradition) / Theft is the holy act / On a

twisted path to expression’ (213). From this perspective, the written text is not

322
Conversation between Nagy and Saunders in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 159.
323
Rebellato, ‘Sarah Kane: An Appreciation’, New Theatre Quarterly, 59 (1999), 280-1, p. 281.

204
seen as the expression of a self, but as the result of the weaving together of other

texts that have been collected or ‘stolen’ from other sources. This emphasis on

intertextuality calls to mind Barthes’s insistence that ‘the text is not a line of

words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God)

but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them

original, blend and clash’.324 Barthes’s famous announcement of the ‘death of the

author’ is another way of saying that the author should not be regarded as the

ultimate source of meaning and intent and that instead the text should be open to

interpretation. In ‘The Death of the Playwright?’, Adrian Page suggests that

‘modern drama has not been prone to the fallacies that modern theory has set out

to expose’ in that there prevails an understanding that the production of meaning

results from a collaboration between playwright, producer, and audience.325 Page

therefore claims that ‘the need to declare the death of the author, the denial of the

author as the ultimate source of the text’s meaning, seems more pertinent to

literary criticism than the theatre’.326 Critical responses to Kane’s work call

Page’s claim into question and indicate that the reception of contemporary drama

is still constrained by the view that the key to the text (or play) is located within

the playwright.

The fact that this view is often shared by theatre audiences was highlighted at a

post-show discussion about Liquid Theatre’s production of Crave at Battersea

Arts Centre (20 Feb 2004) in which audience members repeatedly raised the issue

of Kane’s suicide rather than discussing aspects of the play or performance and

324
Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 146.
325
Adrian Page, ‘Introduction: The Death of the Playwright?’ in The Death of the Playwright, ed.
Clive Bloom, (London: Macmillan Press, 1992), p. 1.
326
Ibid.

205
agreed that the information they had read about the playwright had a strong

bearing on the way they viewed the play. Rather than encouraging new

interpretations to be made, it would seem that revivals of the plays are hindered as

long as the tendency to read them for clues to the author’s state of mind remains.

This tendency is fostered by the kind of sensational writing found in the following

review of Liquid Theatre’s production: ‘Sarah Kane wrote this 40-minute stream

of anguished reflections, yearnings and confessions for four voices not long

before she committed suicide’.327 By failing to distinguish between the writer’s

personal life and death on the one hand and the contents of her writing on the

other, this kind of review encourages the audience to view the play as a prelude to

suicide and, as such, closes down its potential. In other words, and as stressed by

Steven Barfield who chaired the post-show discussion, it reduces critical social

questions raised in Kane’s writing to a level of individual or personal crisis. The

result of this reduction is to make these issues more digestible, and in some ways

safer, by suppressing their social significance.

Whilst, thematically, Kane’s last two plays share many similarities they remain

entirely different pieces which probe into fundamental problems of human

existence in unique ways. In chapter six I will look more closely at 4.48

Psychosis discussing Kane’s exploration of the inhuman. In this chapter I will

concentrate on Crave arguing that it represents a developed and carefully-crafted

attempt to articulate the question of the self and the problem of being human. In

this respect it continues the exploration of the human condition which is so

intrinsic to tragedy, but presents this exploration in a new and challenging form

327
Fiona Mountford, Theatre review of Crave, ‘Off West End’, Evening Standard Metro, (Feb
2004) p. 20.

206
which pushes at the boundaries of theatrical conventions and expectations. One

of the themes explored in Crave had already been touched upon in Kane’s first

play Blasted in which the question whether it is preferable to live or die is raised.

Ian, as discussed in chapter two, challenges conventional logic - which assumes

that being alive is preferable to being dead - by calling the baby ‘a lucky bastard’

for having just died (4:57). Toward the end of Crave, the voice of C, who is

plagued throughout the play by memories of sexual abuse involving both her

father and grandfather, asks ‘why did I not die at birth?’ (193). The question

posed here recalls an earlier section in which C’s anger at not having died at birth

is made more explicit:

Let the day perish in which I was born

Let the blackness of the night terrify it
Let the stars of its dawn be dark
May it not see the eyelids of the morning
Because it did not shut the door of my mother’s womb
(189)

Kane’s attention to rhythm and musicality in her last two plays has been widely

acknowledged. Greig refers to the ‘liquid, poetic voice of Crave’ and similarly

Urban identifies ‘the creation of a distinctly poetic style’ in both Crave and 4.48

Psychosis’.328 What I want to emphasise here is the significance of this use of

poetic language in relation to the themes explored.

In the section cited above, the lyricism of the piece allows Kane to present the

most repulsive ideas while, paradoxically, pleasing the ear of the audience.

Rather than achieving a synthesis of form and content as Kane often aimed to do,

328
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. Urban, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’, p. 43.

207
she achieves something altogether different here where the formal presentation -

which is carefully crafted and composed - contrasts sharply with the shattering

thematic content. Kane’s play thus reveals a similar capacity to that which

Nietzsche finds in Attic tragedy in the sense that it reveals disturbing thoughts

about human life while, at the same time, managing ‘to transform those repulsive

thoughts about the terrible and absurd aspects of existence into representations

with which it [is] possible to live’.329 The play does this by presenting ideas in a

lyrical form which, like Attic tragedy for Nietzsche, has an intoxicating effect on

the audience stimulating an emotional and mental state which is distinct from the

everyday attitude and which is more capable of digesting the subject-matter of the

play. Challenging modern views which interpret the Chorus of Greek tragedy

from an intellectual perspective as the ‘ideal spectator’ or as ‘a group-

representation of the audience’, Nietzsche examines the origins and function of

the Chorus.330 Emphasising the absolute centrality of the role of the Chorus,

Nietzsche argues that Greek tragedy ‘arose from the tragic chorus and was

originally chorus and nothing but chorus’.331 This point is supported by Clifford

Leech who states that ‘the Chorus was historically […] the first element in

tragedy, then first one actor, then two (in Aeschylus), then three (in Sophocles),

shared the performance with the Chorus’.332 Having located the origin of tragedy

in the Chorus, Nietzsche then contends that examining the function of the Chorus

further will help to understand the very nature and effect of tragic drama. What

329
Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, p. 130.
330
Nietzsche criticises A. W. Schlegel’s view that the Chorus represents ‘the quintessence and
distillation of the crowd of spectators as the ‘ideal spectator’, The Birth of Tragedy in The Birth of
Tragedy and Other Writings, p. 37. The common view of the Chorus as a ‘group-representation of
the audience and its memories, its fears, its aspirations’ is presented by Clifford Leech, Tragedy,
(London: Methuen, 1969), p. 71.
331
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 36.
332
Leech, Tragedy, p. 70.

208
Nietzsche stresses above all in his examination of the Chorus is the importance of

music, song and verse. The intoxicating effect stimulated by these elements helps

to awaken what he describes as the ‘Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in

intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting’.333

The effect of this is that it enables an abandonment of the principle of

individuation which, temporarily at least, offers a sense of relief from solitude:

‘each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his

neighbour, but quite literally one with him’.334 The conceptual distinction

between the individual and the collective referred to here is one of the key themes

running through Crave as I will go on to illustrate. Importantly, however, the

play does not just present the theme for intellectual contemplation but, through its

formal structure and musicality, aims to produce an effect on the audience at a

visceral level in a way reminiscent of Greek tragedy and in a way which

encourages the audience to experience the uncertainty concerning the questions

raised by the play. Recalling the first production of Crave, Sierz uses the same

terminology as Nietzsche in his description of Attic tragedy by describing the

effect of the play as ‘intoxicating’.335

The distinction between the individual and the collective is blurred throughout

Crave both thematically and by different structural features, one of which is the

deliberately ambiguous presentation of the four ‘characters’, or voices, of the play

who are identified only by the letters C, M, B and A. Accustomed to the

naturalistic play where clear and convincing characterisation is often a benchmark

of a well-made play, the theatre-audience is required to make a considerable

333
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 17.
334
Ibid, p. 18
335
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 118.

209
adjustment. Rather than following the development of the characters presented,

the audience must piece together the different information given in an attempt to

formulate their own idea of who the characters are. But even if they make a

concerted effort to do this, connecting information provided by the speeches and

finding continuity where there initially appear to be only random and

disconnected utterances, the overall composition of the play works against this

attempt. In some sections the voices do utter lines that are consistent with the

archetypes indicated by letters M (for Mother), C (Child), B (Boy) and A

(Abuser), and, however fragmentarily, different narratives begin to emerge.336 In

other sections, rather than revealing what seem to be personal experiences,

memories and thoughts, the voices speak in third person or recite lines from

written texts including Biblical references such as ‘Glory be to the Father’ and

‘As it was in the beginning’ (197). The effect of this is to prevent the audience

from establishing a clear sense of character or narrative even though the very

structure of the play encourages the search for this. Formally, as well as

thematically, Crave shows the idea of the fixed, knowable individual to be

illusory as the characters constantly elude identification. But at the same time,

experientially, the play instigates the very process in which the inevitable search

for identity – of both self and other - is carried out.

Confusion about the characters is generated further by another formal device

whereby lines uttered by one voice are later reiterated word-for-word by another.

336
The archetypes given here are provided by Kane in an interview with Rebellato where she
discloses some of the meanings that can be associated with the letters and explains that she didn’t
want to make these too explicit from the outset of the play, preferring to keep interpretations open:
‘I didn’t want to write those things down because then I thought they’d get fixed in those things
forever and nothing would ever change’, Rebellato, ‘Brief Encounter’ in Saunders, Love me or kill
me, p. 104.

210
Early in the play C states: ‘you’ve fallen in love with someone that doesn’t exist’,

to which A responds: ‘Tragedy’ (158). Later the line is repeated but this time by

A. C’s ‘No’, which comes straight after, may or may not be seen as a response to

A’s statement. The repetition of such a memorable line by different characters

suggests that the voices are conduits for language rather than organs through

which individuals express their personal thoughts. The significance of this is that

the question of who says it and in what context becomes less important than the

actual meaning of the statement which the audience is left to consider. If the idea

of the stable subject is shown to be illusory throughout the play, then perhaps the

inference here is that one can only ever fall in love with an illusion or with

‘someone that doesn’t exist’.

The blurring of the distinction between characters is taken further by the recurrent

theme of inherited or shared memories. The idea that an individual is formed, to a

large extent, by their own personal and unique memories is called into question.

The first and most explicit example of this comes early in the play when M recalls

a childhood memory which begins with her running through a poppy field at the

back of her grandfather’s farm. The image evoked by this description already

casts doubt on the authenticity of the memory by setting the scene in such a

picturesque style which calls to mind the impressionist painting of Claude Monet.

It then transpires that the ‘memory’ of bursting in on her grandparents kissing is

not, in fact, her own recollection of past events but relates to something that

happened to her mother. M recalls how her mother responded when she described

the ‘memory’ to her by staring at her oddly and then saying: ‘That didn’t happen

to you. It happened to me. My father died before you were born. When that

211
happened I was pregnant with you, but I didn’t know it until the day of his

funeral’ (159). Different layers are presented in this short passage from the vivid

account of M running through the field, the descriptive encounter with her

grandparents, her memory of relating it to her mother and her word-for-word

recollection of her mother’s response. With each new layer more doubt is cast on

the reliability of memory and on the individual’s capacity to recall their own

experiences which contribute to their overall sense of self. C’s line – ‘we pass

these messages on’ – delivered immediately after M’s speech introduces the idea

of a shared memory or consciousness which is alluded to again later in one of the

sections of the play in which communication between the characters is achieved,

albeit momentarily:

B Look. My nose.
M What about it.
B What do you think.
C Broken
B I’ve never broken a bone in my body.
A Like Christ.
B But my Dad has. Smashed his nose in a car crash when he
was eighteen. And I’ve got this. Genetically impossible, but
there it is. We pass these messages faster than we think and
in ways we don’t think possible.
(162)

Repeating C’s earlier remark that ‘we pass these messages on’ (159), B’s story –

impossible as it may be – indicates that the construction of the self is a highly

complex process which is not just determined by biological or genetic factors but

is influenced in a myriad of ways by the messages, memories, and experiences of

others.

212
Although, on the one hand, the play highlights the essential interrelatedness of self

and others, on the other hand it also draws attention to a sense of isolation and

solitude which is formally emphasised by the lack of communication between the

characters. At certain moments in the play the characters’ lines do link together

and suggest fragments of dialogue as indicated above. But these moments are

only sporadic and any sense of continuity or cohesion is soon shattered leaving

the characters to utter disconnected lines and to speak at odds with each other.

The first production of the play highlighted the separation between the characters

by presenting them seated on a row of chairs facing the audience in a way that

resembled the set of a chat show.337 Liquid Theatre’s production in February

2004 took a different approach by having the characters move around the set and,

occasionally, interact with each other. This increased the tension of the piece and

also helped to draw attention to the moments of stillness – such as A’s long love

speech (169) – by shifting the pace and dynamics throughout.

The shift in pace achieved by Liquid Theatre represents a significant achievement

given that there are no specific stage directions provided in the play-text and in

view of the fact that the characters lines run into one another without any

indication of plot development. Although narrative strands may begin to emerge,

they are dissipated by the frequent topic changes and interruptions of other voices

which break up any appearance of continuity. While a sense of an ending may be

implied by the reference to death, the play closes, as it begins, without any clear

sense of direction or purpose and with doubt about what, if anything, has

happened. The formal structure, again, reflects a theme which runs not just

337
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 118.

213
through Crave but through the whole of Kane’s work: the question of whether

human life has any meaning or purpose or whether, as C suggests at one point, it

is merely ‘a stream of haphazard events like any other’ (196). Earlier, and in

another section where the voices come together, life is compared to other events

which occur in Nature and, for which, no explanation or meaning is usually

sought:

A Life happens.
B Like flowers.
C Like sunshine.
A Like nightfall.
C A motion away
B Not a motion towards.
A It is not my fault.
C As if the direction makes any difference.
M Nobody knows.
(191)

The idea that life just happens, with no goal or ultimate meaning, is emphasised

by introducing uncertainty around the idea of motion and direction. Both C and B

agree that life is ‘a motion away’ not ‘towards’. But whether perceived as a

motion away from birth or a motion towards death, what is highlighted is that life

is a mere trajectory between birth and death. C’s remark: ‘As if the direction

makes any difference’, indicates that the very idea of direction conceals the fact

that life proceeds on this trajectory for no apparent reason and with no ultimate

purpose.

The reference to flowers, sunshine, and nightfall above recall C’s curse against

Nature in the passage discussed earlier which begins: ‘let the blackness of the

night terrify it’, and ends: ‘Because it did not shut the door of my mother’s womb

214
(189). Although Nature is assumed to be without purpose or underlying meaning

‘it’ is, nevertheless – and in the absence of any metaphysical force such as God –

blamed by C for allowing her to be born. Anxiety about birth is highlighted by

the use of powerful imagery which is evoked again a little later:

C Why did I not die at birth.

M Come forth from the womb
B And expire
(193)

The references in both passages to the mother’s womb and to the moment of birth

recall Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which Pozzo delivers the following speech:

[Suddenly furious.] Have you not done tormenting me

with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When!
One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any
other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind,
one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we
shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not
enough for you? [Calmer.] They give birth astride of a
grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once
more.
(Act II, p. 83)

Having made this speech Pozzo exits, but the impact it has on Vladimir is

indicated shortly after when he reformulates the image in which birth and death

are presented as just moments apart: ‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.

Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps’ (II. p. 84).

The trajectory between birth and death is presented as just a moment, or as barely

perceptible, with the word ‘lingeringly’ offering the only indication of a

separation of time between the two. The separation between birth and death is

similarly cut short in Crave by the lines: ‘Come forth from the womb / And

expire’ (193). If the trajectory between birth and death is perceived to be without

215
purpose or ultimate meaning, then the difference between expiring at the instant

of birth or eighty years later is shown to be insignificant. Cutting short the

trajectory is presented as a means of giving the voices what they most crave: ‘to

be free of memory / free of desire’ (198) and free from the transience and

uncertainty which is their lives.

In an earlier section of the play, which calls to mind the famous ‘to be, or not to

be’ speech of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the voices deliver the following lines:

A What do you want?

C To die.
B To sleep.
M No more.
(158)

Like Hamlet, the voices in Crave question whether ‘’tis nobler in the mind to

suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a

sea of troubles’ and thereby end one’s life (III. i. 58).338 Shakespeare’s canonical

play is rated as one of the greatest tragedies written in English. By contrast,

Kane’s play, which explores similar themes, is still read primarily as a reflection

of the author’s state of mind rather than as an attempt to present questions related

to human existence in an innovative new form and in a way which is highly

relevant to the end of the century in which she wrote. Although the questions

raised in the play relate to problems of selfhood, it does not follow that Kane is

simply engaged in an exercise of introspection using the play to express her own

anxieties. Rather, she is, as in all her work, drawing on a wide range of other

338
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

216
textual sources which explore similar themes and reconfiguring them alongside

her own writing to produce an original piece of work which dares to address the

human condition.

Kane’s willingness to address this theme jars against dominant critical views of

the time in which scepticism regarding the ‘essentialist’ tendencies of any attempt

to posit such a thing as a condition common to all humans dominates. This kind

of scepticism is illustrated in Robert Hapgood’s ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The

artistry of Franco Zeffirelli’.339 Although one the one hand he acknowledges

Zeffirelli’s talent for popularising Shakespeare’s plays - explaining that his

Hamlet ‘speaks to my current students more powerfully than any other film

version of the play’ – on the other hand he rapidly dismisses the director’s claim

that Shakespeare’s plays apply ‘to every human being on earth, no matter what

cultural background’ as ‘essentialist and universalist’.340 Kane’s willingness to

explore the unfashionable subject of the human condition offers an opportunity to

examine the terms that had become common critical currency by the late nineties

by asking whether there are in fact issues which are ‘essentially’ and ‘universally’

relevant to all humans. The major themes explored in Crave which are, arguably,

relevant to all humans include the question of memory and its reliability in the

construction of the self, the question of life and whether it has any meaning, the

inevitability of death and the thought of suicide. By foregrounding issues which

are common to all humans, Kane’s work does not forsake or deny the important

point that other problems are rooted in culturally and historically specific

contexts. What is original about her work is that it manages to articulate both
339
Hapgood, ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The artistry of Franco Zeffirelli’, in Shakespeare, The
Movie, eds. Lynda . Boose and Richard Burt, (London: Routledge, 1997).
340
Ibid, p. 83 and 81.

217
levels: the universal and essential problems of human existence and the culturally

and historically specific concerns of late-twentieth-century Western culture.

Urban suggests that ‘while the narrative [of Crave] suggests the pain of

individuals, the play has a distinctly international consciousness; B’s use of

Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and German takes the personal and places it in a global

context’.341 The play’s ‘international consciousness’ is indeed suggested by the

inclusion of different languages and through references to flying (176), to

different landscapes across the globe, and to people of different nationalities

including the Japanese man (165), the Vietnamese girl (180) and the American

translator (160). On the one hand the inclusion of these elements is indicative of

increasing globalisation and of the interchange of languages and cultures that this

brings with it. But whereas globalisation may imply an improvement in

communication between different cultures and language-communities, the

structure of the play suggests a constant failure of communication and draws

attention to an increasing sense of alienation and isolation at a personal level.

This is illustrated by A’s story of the translator:

An American woman translated a novel from Spanish into

English. She asked her Spanish classmate his opinion of
her work. The translation was very bad. He said he would
help her and she offered to pay him for his time. He
refused. She offered to take him out for dinner. This was
acceptable to him so he agreed. But she forgot. The
Spaniard is still waiting for his dinner.
(160)

341
Urban, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’, p. 43.

218
On the face of it the tale highlights the problems inherent in translating accurately

from one language to another and also reveals different attitudes to the notion of

helping someone out, with the American’s offer of payment being contrasted with

the Spaniard’s preferred choice of dining out together. But what makes this tale

particularly significant are the two lines spoken next by B and C:

B El dinero viene solo

C Alone
(160)

The translation of B’s Spanish line into English is given at the end of the play-text

as ‘money comes alone’ (201). Emphasis on the key word of this expression is

given in C’s next utterance: ‘alone’. With the introduction of this moral to the

story, the tale takes on a wider significance beyond that of the two translators and

can be read as a critique of advanced consumerism whereby the relentless

exchange of goods and services results in a deterioration, or obliteration, of

human relations. This can be illustrated further by reference to 4.48 Psychosis

which begins with a discussion about friendship in which the question: ‘what do

you offer your friends to make them so supportive’ (206) is asked repeatedly.

What is highlighted and questioned here is, again, the idea that something –

support in this instance – must be given in exchange for something else and

cannot escape the system, or logic, of exchange.

In Crave, a sense of solitude is evoked both as a symptom of advanced capitalism

on the one hand and, on the other, as a condition of being human. As in all

Kane’s work, love is presented as a possible response to the problem. But by

focusing on love Kane is not, as I argued in the previous chapter, presenting a

219
simple and sentimental answer to human problems but, rather, is highlighting

further the complexities of human life. Introducing Crave, Greig argues that

‘binding the piece, as in Cleansed, is the exploration of love’s assault upon the

wholeness of the self. She draws upon many forms of love: primarily sexual love,

maternal love and abusive love’.342 Love, as Greig argues, is presented as an

‘assault upon the wholeness of the self’ throughout Kane’s work. But, at the same

time, the very idea of being ‘whole’, or the assumption that being ‘whole’ is either

desirable or achievable, is called into question throughout her plays. Immediately

after the story of the translator and the ‘alone’ spoken by C, M says: ‘If love

would come’ (160). Continuing the thread shortly afterward M declares: ‘You

stop thinking of yourself as I, you think of we’ (161). This point about thinking of

oneself in a plural rather than singular sense is also articulated formally

throughout the play in which no single ‘I’ can be clearly discerned and which

shows, instead, the constant interweaving of different voices, memories and

desires.

Because of the subject-matter of the play and the playwright’s subsequent suicide,

there is a tendency to read her later work, primarily, as charting a breakdown or

crisis in the individual. But, as I will argue further in the next chapter on 4.48

Psychosis, this tendency overlooks the point that Kane’s plays articulate problems

and struggles which are not just a symptom of the depressed mind but relate to

key critical questions concerning the relation between all individuals and the

wider community they ‘inhabit’. Contesting the dominant Western view of the

individual subject as a uniquely singular being, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that: ‘A

342
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.

220
single being is a contradiction in terms. Such a being, which would be its own

foundation, origin and intimacy, would be incapable of Being, in every sense that

this expression can have’.343 The contradiction, for Nancy, lies in the point that

Being is essentially relational and cannot be conceived in any other way than

‘being-with’ or being-with-one-another’.344 The formulation that Nancy presents

marks out a relation which is more fundamental than that implied by the terms

‘self’ and ‘other’ whereby, despite critical attempts to bridge the gap between the

two, a conceptual division between them is still maintained, with one term (self)

taking precedence over the other. As well as designating a more primordial

relation with others, the term ‘one-another’ also avoids positing a single self

which, as Nancy argues, suppresses the plurality and mutability of each ‘self’.

But the key point that Nancy’s formulation highlights is contained in the word

‘with’ which emphasises the relational aspect of Being and the absolute necessity

of coexistence:

[N]ot being able to say ‘we’ is what plunges every ‘I’ whether individual
or collective, into the insanity where he cannot say ‘I’ either. To want to
say ‘we’ is not at all sentimental, not at all familial or ‘communitarian.’ It
is existence reclaiming its due or its condition: coexistence.345

On Nancy’s account, coexistence is presented not just as something desirable for

humanity but as its very condition. Consequently, the erosion of a sense of

togetherness, or interrelatedness with others, – which represents a denial of the

conditions of existence - is shown to result in a simultaneous sense of self-

alienation.

343
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert D. Richardso and Anne E. O’Byrne, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 12.
344
Ibid, p. xvi.
345
Ibid, p. 42.

221
This sense of alienation from both self and others is articulated throughout Crave

both in the characters’ failed attempts at establishing relations with others and in

their perceptions and revelations about themselves. M’s disclosure at one point of

the play is particularly effective in highlighting a disturbing sense of self-

estrangement:

Sometimes the shape of my head alarms me. When I catch

sight of it reflected in a darkened train window, the
landscape passing through the image of my head. Not that
there is anything unusual or … alarming … about the
shape of my head, but it does … alarm me.
(160)

Although Crave provides a harrowing articulation of the problem of alienation,

this in itself does not render the play pessimistic or depressive. Thematically, a

response to the problem is indicated in M’s comment that through love ‘you stop

thinking of yourself as I, you think of we’ (161). Despite the apparent

sentimentality of this claim, the insight it reveals with regard to the problem of

thinking of oneself in a purely singular sense is significant and is also highlighted

constantly by the formal construction of the piece which points to a way of

conceiving the ‘self’ as plural rather than singular. The interweaving of different

voices, memories and desires, together with the uncertainty generated regarding

the characters’ identities and the connections between them, ensure that the

audience is prevented from thinking of the characters as fixed, singular

individuals. Instead, by highlighting the interrelatedness of events, memories and

desires, the play highlights the point made by Nancy that coexistence is an

222
essential condition of human existence.346 However simple this point may appear,

the problem of how to co-exist is one which, as Nancy insists, requires urgent

attention.

In the epigraph to his book Nancy lists the conflicts that are occurring across the

globe at the time of writing – 1995 – and indicates quite clearly that his

conceptualisation of the ‘I’ as ‘being-with-one-another’ represents an attempt to

develop a way of thinking that might offer some way out of these conflicts.347

Speaking against the backdrop of the same atrocities – including the war in the

Balkans that influenced Blasted - Kane states that the problems she addresses in

her writing ‘are the ones we have as human beings’.348 One of the most

fundamental problems facing all human beings both today and at the time Kane

wrote is the question of how to co-exist. The innovations of Kane’s work

represent an original and important attempt to address this problem in the theatre.

In her last two plays Kane not only pushes at theatrical boundaries in terms of the

formal innovations advanced, but also challenges conceptual boundaries

concerning identity and ways of thinking the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

She does this by developing a new tragic aesthetic which articulates questions and

problems intrinsic to the genre of tragedy not only thematically, but also, and

crucially, through its challenging formal construction. Her plays thus continue the

legacy of tragedy initiated by the Greek tragedians, but in a way which is

motivated and focused on the problems of the present.

346
Ibid.
347
Ibid, p. xi-xiv.
348
Kane in Langridge and Stephenson, p. 134.

223
The fact that Kane wrote the first draft of Crave under the pseudonym Marie

Kelvedon highlights the point that Kane was herself suffering from the oppressive

result of having her own identity and creativity closed down by the myth of ‘Sarah

Kane’ that was already forming around her work. Recalling Kane’s words,

Ravenhill points out that ‘she didn’t want people to read the play as “the new one

by the woman who wrote Blasted”’.349 To read the play as just another one by the

author of Blasted, or as one by a woman who then killed herself, is not only to do

a disservice to the playwright and to her work but also represents a failure to

engage with the critical questions that the play opens up. As Ravenhill insists,

and as I will go on to argue in the next chapter: ‘We don’t know her. We never

knew her. Let’s look at her work’.350

349
Ravenhill, ‘Suicide art? She’s better than that’, p. 20.
350
Ibid.

224
 Chapter 6

The Inhuman in 4.48 Psychosis

In the previous chapter I presented a reading of Crave which aims to challenge the

view that Kane’s later work represents an introspective turn and offers little more

than an insight into her own tormented or suicidal mind. Instead, I argue, the play

draws on a wide range of textual sources and reconfigures them alongside her

own writing to produce an original piece of work which explores problems facing

all human beings at the end of the twentieth century. What singles Kane out from

other writers of this period is her ability and willingness to confront and articulate

problems which are culturally and historically specific while also attending to

questions of universal and essential relevance. Although her attention to these

questions and her interest in the human condition represent a return to the

concerns of tragedy, it is a return which, as I argued in the previous chapter, is

very much rooted in and motivated by present-day concerns. It is also a ‘return’,

or a move, which represents a re-birth for the genre itself insofar as Kane’s

experimentation with form advances new possibilities for tragic theatre.

Throughout this thesis I have referred to Kane’s interest in the question of the

human and looked at ways in which her plays explore this concern. In this

chapter I will develop this further introducing the question of the inhuman and

looking at how Kane explores and articulates this theme in her last play 4.48

Psychosis.

It is, again, by way of engagement with a wide variety of textual sources that

Kane produces a play which raises a series of important themes and questions

225
concerning the human condition. The play’s title refers to 4.48 am, a time which

is mentioned more than once in the play, when the human will to live is

apparently at its lowest: ‘At 4.48 / when desperation visits / I shall hang myself /

to the sound of my lover’s breathing’ (229). The title also alludes to one of the

literary influences in the play, C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair.351 In Lewis’s story

a prince, who has been imprisoned and kept under the enchantment of the Queen

of Underland for ten years, experiences one hour every night when he is free from

the spell and in touch with his ‘real’, or former, non-enchanted self. In order to

explain and contain this phenomenon, the Queen and all her underlings treat the

occurrence as his hour of insanity, tying him to the silver chair so that he cannot

escape from the dark castle before the ‘madness’ passes. Pleading with the

children who have been sent to free him, the prince cries: ‘Quick! I am sane.

Every night I am sane. If only I could get out of this enchanted chair, it would

last. I should be a man again. But every night they bind me, and so every night

my chance is gone’.352 Like the prince, one of the voices in the play experiences

just over an hour of sanity every morning from 4.48 am. At all other times they

cannot touch what they call their ‘essential self’: ‘When it has passed, I shall be

gone again, a fragmented puppet, a grotesque fool’ (229). The voice and the

prince share the same anxiety in that it is when they regard themselves as insane

and grotesque that they are regarded as sane by others, as expressed in the

following line from the play: ‘Why do you believe me then and not now?’ (229).

351
Actor Daniel Evans, who appeared in both Cleansed and 4.48 Psychosis, reveals how, in
preparation for 4.48, and in view of Kane’s absence, he and the other actors read the books that the
playwright had been reading around the time of writing the play, including C.S. Lewis’s The Silver
Chair, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar amongst other non-
literary texts. Revealing the importance of an intertextual approach to Kane’s work, Evans
indicates that they dipped into a ‘huge reading list’ compiled by Kane’s brother listing the books
found at his sister’s bedside. Evans in conversation with Saunders, Saunders, 2002: pp. 178-179.
352
C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, (Harmondsworth: Puffin/Penguin Books, 1965), p. 142.

226
This raises one of the key questions highlighted in 4.48 Psychosis which will be

explored throughout this chapter: who defines what is and is not sane and

according to what criteria?

The problem of holding on to what one considers ‘sanity’ in the face of the

confusion and distraction generated by conflicting discourses is highlighted in

C.S. Lewis’s story where Aslan warns Jill to keep her mind clear, to be wary of

misleading signs, and to pay no attention to appearances: ‘Remember the signs

and believe the signs. Nothing else matters’.353 The signs that Jill must remember

represent ‘the truth’, or the guiding principles which she must follow in order to

complete her important task. While in Kane’s play, ‘the light’ replaces ‘the

signs’, the meaning expressed remains the same: ‘Remember the light and believe

the light. / Nothing matters more’ (229). Condensing the ideas presented in the

conversation between Aslan and Jill, Kane reconfigures them into one single

sentence: ‘Stop judging by appearances and make a right judgement’ (229). What

comes across in both Lewis’s story and Kane’s play is the idea that – despite the

existence of different worlds, or different layers of reality, and the competing

discourses and signs that make up these realities – there exist ‘true signs’ or ‘a

right judgement’ that is more important than the world of appearances. My

intention in drawing out the similarities between Lewis’s and Kane’s texts is to

emphasize that what is expressed in 4.48 Psychosis is not simply the workings of

a troubled psyche, but represents an intertextual engagement which raises key

philosophical questions concerning the nature of truth and appearances. The

questions that are raised by both Kane and Lewis find an early textual

353
Ibid, pp. 50-51.

227
presentation in Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII of The Republic, where

the shadows seen in the cave represent mere illusion or appearance in contrast to

the light of the sun that represents ‘the Form of the good’ which, according to the

dialogue presented:

[I]s perceived last and with some difficulty, but when it is seen it must be
inferred that it is the cause of all that is right and beautiful in all things
[…] and the giver of truth and reason, and this form of the good must be
seen by whosoever would act wisely in public or in private’.354

The emphasis in Plato’s distinction between the world of mere appearance and the

higher truths represented in the simile of the sun is precisely on perceptions.

Plato is not merely advancing the view that there is ‘a truth’ or ‘Form of the good’

‘out there’. After talking through the story of the cave-dwellers and explaining

the simile whereby the sun is contrasted with the illusions or shadows of the cave,

Socrates delivers a line which is key to this understanding: ‘Whether it be actually

true, God knows. But this is how it appears to me’.355 The ‘form of the good’ as

that which ‘is the cause of all that is right and beautiful’ is conceived, then, as

something which can be perceived, but only through effort and - importantly in

view of the link I make here with the play - not without considerable pain.

Apart from C.S. Lewis’s tale Kane also drew on other literary sources including

Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which contemplates the absurdity of

human existence; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) which, like Kane’s play,

explores the problem of depression; and Attempts on Her Life (1997) by

354
Plato, The Republic, par. 517.
355
Ibid.

228
playwright Martin Crimp.356 In Crimp’s play a debate is presented between two

speakers in an art gallery who consider whether the work of an artist (which

consists of a collection of objects associated with the artist’s attempts to kill

herself) calls for a critic or a therapist.357 The remark made during this debate –

‘here is the work of a girl who quite clearly should’ve been admitted not to an art

school but to a psychiatric unit’ - recalls some of the more negative responses to

Kane’s earlier work, particularly the suggestion made by journalist Charles

Spencer discussed in chapter 3b that ‘it’s not a theatre critic that’s required here,

it’s a psychiatrist’.358 Crimp’s play, first performed in March 1997 and written in

the aftermath of Kane’s debut, satirises the kind of reductive criticism that

surrounded this debut and also anticipates the controversy which would

overshadow the reception of her last play.

As well as the literary sources, Kane also drew on a variety of texts by

psychologists and other writers on the subject of depression and suicide. To read

the play only as an exploration of these subjects is, however, to miss some of the

critical insights that the piece offers. 4.48 Psychosis represents an attempt to

express the tragic condition of postmodern existence in which the individual

struggles to maintain sanity and the will to live despite the apparent senselessness

and aimlessness of life, and against the backdrop of a century in which the value

of human life has been undermined by the horrors of genocide and war. The play,

then, is by no means an ‘extended suicide note’ but, rather, an exploration of the

struggle between the affirmation and negation of life as articulated in one of the

356
The references listed here are provided by actor Daniel Evans as detailed in footnote 1.
357
Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life, (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 45-47.
358
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: p. 108.

229
last lines of the play: ‘I have no desire for death / no suicide ever had’ (244).

Comments made by Kane suggest that her last play is an attempt to give voice to a

widespread condition rather than a unique personal plight. Contemplating suicide,

one of the voices in the play states that: ‘This is not a world in which I wish to

live’ (210). The problems, from this perspective, are located not solely in the

individual but in the wider world the individual inhabits. Although the play does

explore the workings of the individual psyche it also prompts the reader to step

beyond the realm of individual psychology and to pay greater attention to the

interrelatedness of the individual and the world in which they live. A point made

by Kane in an interview with Nils Tabert may help to elucidate this point:

I think to a certain degree you have to deaden your ability to feel and
perceive. In order to function you have to cut out at least one part of
your mind. Otherwise you’d be chronically sane in a society which is
chronically insane.359

A similar viewpoint is put forward by Bond who wonders how it is that most of us

appear to be sane when we live in societies that are insane:

We live rational daily lives but our societies make grotesque weapons,
economically destroy their environment, make some rich and others poor,
some powerful and others impotent and in these and other ways are
flagrantly unjust.360

In line with Bond, Kane suggests that society is chronically insane and that in

order to function in this insanity one needs to deaden one’s capacity to feel and

perceive, to switch off a part of the mind, or, as one of the voices in the play says,

‘to embrace beautiful lies’ (229).

359
Kane, interview with Nils Tabert in Saunders, Love me or Kill me, p. 114.
360
Bond, ‘Social Madness’, in The Hidden Plot, p. 87.

230
Kane’s suggestion that a degree of switching off is necessary is made in relation

to the question of how the individual functions, or fails to function, on an

everyday basis while being constantly bombarded with images and stories of

horror and destruction.361 In order to get on, to go about one’s daily business, one

has to deaden one’s capacity for feeling or perceiving certain things, otherwise

one would become dysfunctional. In stark contrast to this suggestion, Kane

claims on another occasion that ‘sometimes we need to descend into hell

imaginatively in order to avoid going there in reality’.362 Kane’s ambivalent

approach to this question of switching off or not is dramatically explored in 4.48

Psychosis which presents a critique of psychological approaches which attempt to

cure the individual by deadening their capacity to feel and perceive. The

playwright’s approach to this question is reminiscent of the writings of C.G. Jung

whose work on the psyche will be drawn upon here in order to explore the

questions opened up by the play in more depth. Like Kane, Jung was highly

critical of systematic approaches to the psyche and aimed to develop an approach

which would not result in a diminishment of psychic life.363 The suggestion that

deadening your ability to feel and perceive is essential for self-preservation is

361
Kane’s disclosure about the effect the news had on her while she was writing
Blasted is indicative of the extent to which one’s everyday activities can be
interrupted and affected: ‘I switched on the news one night while I was having a
break from writing, and there was a very old woman’s face in Srebrenica just
weeping and looking into the camera and saying “please, please, somebody help
us, because we need the UN to come here and help us”. I thought this is absolutely
terrible and I’m writing this ridiculous play about two people in a room. What’s
the point of carrying on?’, Rebellato, ‘Brief Encounter’ cited in Saunders, Love
me or kill me, p. 39.
362
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 137.
363
Like Kane, Jung also received intense criticism during his lifetime on account of his work. An
interrogation of why Jung has been neglected and marginalized along with a re-evaluation of his
work and its relation to contemporary thought is given in Susan Rowland, Jung: A Feminist
Revision, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

231
echoed by Jung who states that ‘consciousness should defend its reason and

protect itself’: cutting out a part of the mind is, metaphorically speaking, a way of

protecting consciousness from that which it might not be able to cope with.364

Displaying the same kind of ambivalence as Kane, Jung goes on to affirm the role

of the unconscious despite having issued the warning about protecting

consciousness: ‘Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the

chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too –

as much of it as we can stand’.365 Jung defines the unconscious as a concept

rather than as a quality or feature of nature: ‘in my view the unconscious is a

psychological borderline concept, which covers all psychic contents or processes

that are not conscious, i.e., not related to the ego in any perceptible way’.366 As a

borderline concept, the unconscious designates anything that is not immediately

and directly perceivable to the conscious ego; be that something which is already

known but has been forgotten or is not being thought in a specific instance, or

something which has been perceived by the senses but not distinguished by

conscious thought. Importantly, this concept of the unconscious relates not only

to the personal unconscious but also to a ‘collective unconscious’: the significance

of this will be drawn out later in relation to Kane’s play. The unconscious, then,

signals a potentiality whereby that which is perceived by the conscious ego can,

potentially, be transformed. This is why Jung stresses that although

consciousness must protect itself, the unconscious must also have its way, as it is

precisely the movement between the conscious and the unconscious which impels

364
Jung, ‘Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation’, in Collected Works 9i: 275-289, (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), par. 522.
365
Ibid.
366
Jung, ‘Definitions’, in Collected Works 6: 408-486, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1971), par. 837.

232
consciousness to transform itself and to avoid stasis. Jung warns of the dangers of

suppressing the unconscious: ‘Because the unconscious is life and this life turns

against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis’.367

In general, Jung argues, psychic equilibrium is maintained or regulated by the

relation between the conscious ego and the unconscious: ‘the unconscious

processes that compensate the conscious ego contain all those elements that are

necessary for the self-regulation of the psyche as a whole’.368 The unconscious,

according to Jung, has a creative function in that it helps to maintain psychic

equilibrium and thus promote psychological health. It performs this function, in

the main, without the knowledge of the conscious ego or, so to speak, behind the

back of consciousness. A similarity is sometimes drawn between the work of the

psychoanalyst and the artist in relation to the way in which they both attempt to

harness the creative potential of the unconscious in order to promote harmony.

Anaïs Nin, a writer who acknowledges Jung’s influence on her own work,

expresses the following view:

What the psychoanalysts stress, the relation between dreams and our
conscious acts, is what the poets already know. The poets walk this bridge
with ease, from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to
psychological reality. Their profession is to fuse them so that they may
function harmoniously.369

367
Jung, ‘Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation’, par. 521.
368
Jung, ‘The Function of the Unconscious’, in Collected Works 7: 173-187,
(London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1966), par. 275. Jung clarifies his use of the
term ‘compensate’ as follows: ‘I expressly use the word “compensatory” and not
the word “contrary” because conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in
opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is
the self’ (Ibid, par. 274).
369
Cited in Helen Tookey, Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), p. 131.

233
Like the psychoanalyst, the poet, Nin claims, has a particular insight into the

world of the psyche. She imagines the gap between the conscious ego and the

unconscious as a bridge and stresses the constructive role played by the poet,

whose job it is to bridge this gap. Nin’s account of the poet clearly attempts to

harness the creative potential of the unconscious in order to promote harmony.

However, whilst not wishing to deny the constructive potential of poetry (or any

art), I want to call into question Nin’s over-emphasis on the harmonizing or

curative effect of poetry. By encouraging that which may be otherwise banished

from the conscious ego into consciousness, art may, contrary to Nin’s optimistic

suggestion, promote disturbance and even alarm instead of psychological

harmony. The creation of art may also involve more difficulties and

psychological hardship than Nin allows for in her claim that ‘the poets walk this

bridge with ease’. The poet, the writer, and the reader may, in fact, walk the

bridge with less ease and with far more risk than Nin suggests.

The alignment between psychology and literature shown above is underpinned by

the assumption that art serves a civilizing and life-enhancing function; an

assumption which constitutes one of the fundamental principles of liberal

humanism. What I want to do here is to challenge this assumption and to

emphasize, instead, the risky and even dangerous side of art. The intention is not

in any way to present a case against art but, instead, to contribute towards a way

of thinking about aesthetic affect which takes into account and considers its

negative as well as its positive potential. It is, I will argue, the mutual necessity

and coexistence of both the negative and the positive moment which underlies the

radical potential of the aesthetic: its potential, that is, to transform consciousness.

234
In particular I want to challenge the assumption that bridging the gap between the

conscious ego and the unconscious is a stress-free business which is conducive to

well-being. As Dollimore argues, ‘only the utterly naïve can believe that all

repression/suppression is bad’.370 The self-regulation of the psyche involves, as

Jung acknowledges, the process of repressing and suppressing unconscious

elements from the conscious ego. If this process is, in general, maintained

unconsciously and in the interest of the psyche, then it is, as Dollimore suggests,

naïve to believe that such a process is ‘bad’ and that everything contained in the

unconscious must be brought to consciousness. He goes on to suggest that ‘there

can be no guarantee that the imaginative exploration of the return of the repressed

will be conducive to the health of either the individual or the society’.371

The question comes back to how much of the chaotic life of the unconscious we

can stand, or to the two contrasting viewpoints put forward by Kane. Aware of

the potential dangers of descending into hell imaginatively, the playwright does,

however, justify this on the grounds that through this we can avoid going there in

reality. There is, then, a clear sense that such an imaginative project is not just

concerned with the realm of the imagination but is oriented towards producing an

effect in reality. In contrast to the everyday concern with functioning and trying

to stay sane in an apparently insane society, Kane expresses a will to challenge the

realities with which she is faced and to confront the problems of society. The

oscillation between these two positions is a crucial point which highlights the

tension between Kane the individual attempting to function on an everyday level,

and Kane the writer pushing creative boundaries to their limits. On the one hand

370
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. xxviii.
371
Ibid.

235
she expresses the conviction that we do need to switch off a part of our mind in

order to function, while, on the other hand, and especially as a writer, she is

unwilling to, or even incapable of switching off. This is not merely a question of

which hat Kane is wearing - as if switching in and out of writer/non-writer role

was like playing different characters in a play - but of a more fundamental

question concerning subjectivity and the question of free will.

To ask how much of the chaotic life of the unconscious we can stand may imply a

degree of choice, as if the conscious ego could decide on the desirable quantity.

For Jung the desirable or appropriate quantity is, in general, measured by the

whole psyche: in general, psychic equilibrium is maintained by way of the self-

regulating processes of the unconscious. What is significant about Jung’s insight

is that the emphasis is placed not on the willful role of the conscious ego, but on

the more complex role played by the whole psyche. Decisions about what can be

thought or allowed into consciousness are not taken solely by the conscious ego,

but are regulated by the unconscious which involves not just the personal, but

also, and crucially, the collective. Thoughts come, in a sense, when they want,

not when ‘I’ want them to. Christopher Hauke’s postmodern intervention into

Jungian studies likens Jung’s conception of the unconscious with Nietzsche’s

approach to subjectivity:

A thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when ‘I’ want: so that it is a
falsification of the facts to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the
predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘I’
is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, above all not an
‘immediate certainty’.372
372
Christopher Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 149.

236
The ‘famous old “I”’ that Nietzsche refers to is, as Hauke points out, the

‘Cartesian and Kantian view of the subject as an indispensable and central

focus’.373 The assumption that it is the subject or conscious ego that thinks and is

the centre or locus of meaning and intention has come under critical attack in

postmodern approaches to subjectivity. Critical responses to the work of Kane -

in particular to her last play – are, nevertheless, underpinned by an implicit appeal

to the notion of a centred, Cartesian subject and to the author-based reading

approaches which such a notion supports. Conflating the biographical details of

the playwright’s life and death with the contents of her work undermines the

potential effect of the play by reading the piece as just a reflection of the author’s

depressed state of mind, thereby closing down the issues raised before they have

even been considered. Following this approach, the work of the playwright is

read retrospectively as nothing more than a prelude to suicide, or as the product of

the suicidal mind, and the questions raised are reduced to a matter of individual

psychology or pathology rather than one of collective concern. Singling out the

author as the source of meaning and intention thus effects a separation between

the author, the reader and the wider community they inhabit. This separation

enables a distance to be forged and maintained between the individual author and

the collective: a distance which, as will be illustrated now in relation to 4.48

Psychosis, parallels the divide which is constructed between the psychotic and the

sane. In both cases - that of the author/collective and psychotic/sane - the

construction and maintenance of such a divide serves to deflect attention from

what the author or psychotic may be able to illuminate about the collective.

373
Ibid.

237
Greig’s ‘Introduction’ to the Complete Plays reinforces the view that Kane’s last

play signals the culmination of a dramatic experiment which turns increasingly

inward and away from the world:

4.48 Psychosis sees the ultimate narrowing of Kane’s focus in her work.
The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved from civil war, into the
family, into the couple, into the individual and finally into the theatre of
psychosis: the mind itself.374

Although he does go on to caution the reader not to equate the mind of the play

with that of the author, I wonder whether it is helpful or even accurate to sum up

her work, as he does, as a narrowing of focus. Nagy expresses a similar view, but

goes further by suggesting that the end result of this narrowing of focus is that the

audience becomes superfluous or irrelevant:

I believe that the process began with Cleansed - there’s a sense that we -
the audience - are not necessary. We don’t have to be there. Which again
I find fascinating, yet it goes against every instinct I have about how
drama communicates.375

It is on this basis that she concludes that Kane’s later work signals an immersion

in self and a retreat from the world. What Nagy refers to here as ‘instincts’,

however, are dramatic conventions which have been culturally and historically

shaped in line with dominant conceptual norms. Kane’s overturning of these

dramatic conventions thus signals a simultaneous challenge to these norms. It is, I

think, this challenge, and not just the staging of shocking material, which

produces such a disorientating, or disturbing, effect on the audience.

374
Greig, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.
375
Conversation between Saunders and Phyllis Nagy in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 159.

238
The formal structure of 4.48 Psychosis departs from dominant, naturalistic,

theatrical conventions in most aspects: there are no set characters, no set scenes,

and no apparent plot. What we seem to be presented with are different discourses

which are expressed through different voices, sometimes speaking in the mode of

narrator, sometimes delivering monologues, sometimes recalling past events and

sometimes indicating a dialogue between two people, most probably a doctor or

physician and a patient. At other times the text seems to indicate passages to be

read aloud, at one point from the Bible and at another point from medical notes.

There are also sections which may make no sense whatsoever if merely read, but

which could be brought to life through performance, such as the series of numbers

which, when reading the play-text, appear to be inserted entirely at random.

David Evans, one of the actors from the first production, explains that these

sections indicate an exercise which is often used by psychiatric nurses in order to

assess levels of concentration in patients.376 While the point of their insertion is,

as Evans indicates, to show that the patient in the play cannot concentrate, the

inclusion of these exercises also provides another (numerical rather than

linguistic) means whereby the ‘sane’ define what is then designated as ‘insane’.

Although the play may look (especially if read rather than seen) as if it has been

put together at random, or as a series of disconnected fragments, there is a point to

the way in which the play has been carefully constructed. The play is not about a

single, self-enclosed mind cut off from the world, but about the struggle of a mind

which is constructed within different discourses and is constantly at odds with

them.

376
Conversation between Saunders and Daniel Evans, Saunders, Love me or kill me, p.175-176.

239
Because the subject of the play is psychosis, the structure of the play - in

particular the interweaving of different discourses - has been interpreted as a

reflection, or depiction, of the nature of the psychotic mind. The formal departure

from naturalistic conventions is attributed to the subject matter and to the need to

represent this subject-matter dramatically. A turn away from realism is seen as

necessary and appropriate in order to represent the patient’s flight from reality.

The structural composition of the play is thus read as an attempt to explore the

boundaries between different mental states: ‘These discourses are used as a way

of making language attempt to express the boundaries between reality, fantasy and

different mental states’.377 However, rather than just exploring, or expressing,

these boundaries the play effectively collapses them and calls them into question.

By collapsing the conceptual boundaries between reality and fantasy, the play

calls into question the category of ‘the Real’ and the coterminous category of the

subject (usually represented through the character of a play) who is supposed to

recognise and take his/her place in this reality. Instead the play expresses

different layers of ‘reality’ and shows how subjectivity comes about (or fails) in

the process of negotiating these different layers. This expression of the process of

subjectivity illustrates the complexities and difficulties which constitute the life of

the psyche which Jung took care to emphasise:

The psyche is far from being a homogenous unit - on the contrary, it is a

boiling cauldron of contradictory impulses, inhibitions, and affects, and for
many people the conflict between them is so insupportable that they even
wish for the deliverance preached by theologians.378

377
Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 112.
378
Jung, ‘Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype’, in Collected Works 9i: 75-110,
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), par. 190.

240
The conflict in 4.48 Psychosis does eventually become insupportable as born out

in the statement that ‘I have resigned myself to death this year’ (208) - not so

much a wish for deliverance as a resignation. However, though the subject-matter

of the play may be psychosis, it does not follow that the formal composition of the

play is a mere reflection of a psychotic, or abnormal, state of mind. Instead, the

formal structure of the play can be seen as an attempt to articulate the complex

and heterogeneous nature of all psychic life, not just that of the psychotic.

It is perhaps due to the formal innovations of the play - and the assumption that its

structure reflects the chaotic nature of the psychotic mind - that this point tends to

be overlooked. The structure is regarded as a way of expressing a complete

departure from realism rather than as another way of presenting what we consider

to be ‘reality’.379 What the play expresses - the conflictual and contradictory

nature of psychic life - can be explicated further by turning to Jung’s approach to

psychosis which, as Susan Rowland points out, differs from most other

approaches in its refusal to regard psychosis or schizophrenic episodes in purely

negative terms as pathological symptoms to be eliminated: ‘What crucially

distinguishes Jung from much of the psychiatric practice surrounding him (Freud

included) was his refusal to regard spontaneous unconscious fantasies as

379
Although ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ are highly contested terms, there is
general consensus that the terms emerged in response to the scientific age in
which Ibsen and Strindberg were writing. Naturalism in theatre emerged as an
attempt to endow drama with the capacity to be as ‘objective’ and ‘true’ as
science. As such, uses of the terms naturalism and realism are often underpinned
by an assumption that there is an objective reality exterior to the observer which
the observer (the dramatist in the case of theatre) can attempt to depict as
accurately and truthfully as possible.

241
definitively pathological’.380 Instead of regarding psychosis merely as an illness,

Jung sees it as ‘an extreme dissociation of the personality […] due to the activity

of unconscious complexes and the phenomenon of splitting’.381 However, what

is, on the one hand, attributable to the psychotic condition is, on the other, given

to be a normal feature of psychic life. ‘To have complexes’, Jung argues, ‘is in

itself normal’.382 Similarly, the phenomenon of splitting (or the dissociation of

personality) is presented as another normal activity of the psyche: ‘Although this

peculiarity is most clearly observable in psychopathology, fundamentally it is a

normal phenomenon’.383 What is significant here is that it is the observation of

psychopathology that illuminates that which is considered to be normal

psychological phenomena. It is because it is manifested more intensely or

extremely than usual that it is so clearly observable.

The key insight here is that rather than positing or reinforcing an opposition

between the categories of the psychotic and the non-psychotic, or the sane and the

insane, Jung’s approach presents, instead, different degrees of psychic activity.

The benefit of such an approach is that it can attempt to understand the ‘psychotic

condition’ rather than merely diagnose it within a tautological and relational logic:

one which either seeks to explain itself through its diagnosis or which offers an

explanation in relation to its opposite, in relation, that is, to what is considered to

be normal psychological behaviour. The ‘psychotic condition’, from this

perspective, can be understood not as an abnormality, but as an intensification or

380
Susan Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision, p. 16.
381
Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon, http://cgjungpage.org/jplexiscon.html, (1991), p. 78.
382
Jung, ‘The Tavistock Lectures: Lecture V’ in Collected Works 18: 135-182, (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), par. 382.
383
Jung, ‘Psychological Factors Determining Human Behaviour’ in Collected Works 8: 114-125,
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), par. 253.

242
increase in unconscious activity. Such an increase can occur, Jung emphasizes,

when unconscious factors are repressed: ‘The demands of the unconscious then

force themselves imperiously on consciousness and bring about a disastrous

split’.384 ‘In more extreme cases’ Jung goes on, ‘the split ends in suicide’. If we

remember that the unconscious is, for Jung, both personal and collective, then we

can understand the psychotic condition as resulting not just from the personal

psyche but from the collective: from the ‘demands of the unconscious’ - which is

both personal and collective - that ‘force themselves imperiously on

consciousness’. Listening to these demands, listening, that is, to the

manifestations of the ‘psychotic’ mind may, then, indicate what is repressed by

consciousness and by society.

The anxiety and frustration which result from not being listened to is highlighted

in the sections of the play that indicate a dialogue between physician and patient.

In the following exchange, the patient urges the physician not just to attempt to

cure her – ‘straighten me out’ - but to listen and try to understand her:385

Please. Don’t switch off my mind by attempting to straighten me out.

Listen, and understand, and when you feel contempt don’t express it, at
least not verbally, at least not to me. (220)

The suppliant tone of this plea contrasts with the previous dialogue in which the

patient becomes increasingly frustrated by the physician’s unwillingness to listen.

384
Jung, ‘General Description of the Types in Collected Works 6: 330-407, (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1971), par. 573.
385
Although I use the feminine pronoun to refer to both the patient and the physician here, this is
an arbitrary choice as the gender of the speakers is not specified by the text. Kane’s decision to
omit gender, or any other identity, specifications can be linked to her attempt to go beyond identity
politics and to address the problems that, she argues, we have as human beings which I will
discuss in more detail in the final chapter.

243
Rather than listening and responding to the patient, the physician merely offers

comments and posits questions that have been prescribed by prior assumptions.

The theme of this dialogue is self-harm and the physician’s way of dealing with

this phenomenon is to draw on a systematic approach to it: to position herself as

the knower of a knowledge-system. On discovering that the patient has cut her

own arm she responds by commenting ‘that’s a very immature, attention seeking

thing to do’ and then by asking ‘did it give you relief?’.386 This question is

repeated four times and on each occasion the patient answers ‘no’. After the

fourth time the physician stops and states ‘I don’t understand why you did that’,

indicating, for the first time, not just a lack of understanding, but a willingness to

admit such a lack. The patient responds by simply saying ‘then ask’. The

willingness to question is, however, immediately replaced by a reversion to the

former ‘knowing’ position and by a reformulation of the same question: ‘Did it

reduce the tension?’. The frustration of the patient is articulated in the stage

directions which indicate ‘a long silence’. The silence is broken by a change of

strategy by the physician who re-directs the dialogue back into the diagnostic

sphere by shifting attention away from the psychological and onto the physical:

‘I’d like to look, to see if it’s infected’. When the patient refuses to comply, the

physician resorts again to the knowledge-system which provides her not only with

a diagnosis, but also with a prognosis: ‘I thought you might do this. Lots of people

do. It relieves the tension’. The patient’s response to this is to question the basis

upon which such knowledge is founded: ‘Have you ever done it?’ she asks, and

then goes on to highlight the fact that such knowledge is not based on, or

reflective of, experience but is textually inscribed: ‘No. Far too fucking sane and

386
The dialogue discussed here is given on pages 216-218 of the play. All further
quotations from this dialogue refer to these pages.

244
sensible. I don’t know where you read that, but it does not relieve the tension’.

This comment not only serves to highlight the fact that the physician’s knowledge

is derived from textual sources, but simultaneously calls these sources into

question.

The play draws attention to procedures aimed at treating psychological illnesses

which Kane became aware of after studying different textual sources on the

subject. The numerical exercise referred to earlier is taken from one such source,

as is another section of the play which indicates a recitation of targets:

[T]o achieve goals and ambitions / to overcome obstacles and attain a high
standard / to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent / to
overcome opposition / to have control and influence over others / to
defend myself / to defend my psychological space (233-235).

This section is, as David Evans discovered in his preparation for the first

production of the play, taken directly from The Suicidal Mind by suicidologist

Edwin Schneidman, which, Evans suggests, ‘is very key to 4.48 Psychosis’.387

An earlier essay by Schneidman - which Kane may or may not have drawn

directly from in the play - offers advice for anyone who has dealings with

‘suicidal people’. What I want to briefly draw attention to is the systematic nature

of the suicidology developed here, which aims to equip the reader with the

knowledge required to detect the signs of a potential suicide. Schneidman’s

epistemological approach starts off by classifying the various signs of potential

suicide, which he distinguishes as follows: ‘(1) direct, (2) inferred, (3) elicited, (4)

387
Conversation between Saunders and Daniel Evans, Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 178.

245
self-rated, and (5) retrospective’.388 By producing such a taxonomy, verbal and

behavioural expressions can be located within an enclosed system of signs (within

the language of suicidology) and then diagnosed according to these categories.

The aim of constructing such a system is to invest the individual working or living

with a ‘suicidal person’ with the knowledge to be able to prevent suicide.

However, the exchange between the physician and the patient in 4.48 Psychosis

highlights some of the problems inherent in such an approach. The construction

of an epistemology - suicidology - sets up a hierarchical relationship between

knower (physician) and object of knowledge (suicide and suicidal patient), within

which the physician clearly has the upper-hand. Rather than listening and

responding to the patient, the physician draws on the systematic knowledge

available to her in order to posit questions and offer diagnoses that are

underpinned by prior assumptions. Rather than helping the patient, this approach

merely serves to anger and frustrate her. The confidence engendered by a

systematic approach to suicide prevention may, this suggests, undermine its very

aim of reducing suicide.

The dialogue in the play can be compared to an example of a possible dialogue

between physician and patient which is imagined in Schneidman’s essay under the

third category of ‘elicited signs’.

Experience with suicidal people indicates that direct questions about

suicidal intent may be asked easily without deleterious effects […]. These
often can be asked in a series of approximation, such as the following:
‘How have you been feeling?’ (‘Badly.’) ‘How are things going for
you?’ (‘Not well.’) ‘You seem to be having a lot of trouble.’ (‘I am.’)
388
Schneidman, ‘Suicide, Lethality, and the psychological autopsy’, in Aspects of Depression, eds.
E. S. Schneidman and M. J. Ortega, (London: Little, Brown & Company, pp. 1969), 225-8, p. 228.

246
 ‘Have you had any thoughts of killing yourself?’ (‘Yes, I have.’) ‘What
exactly had you planned to do?’ And so on.389

What is notable here is that the dialogue is driven by the physician and by the

assumption that the patient will collaborate fully. The pattern, or development, of

the dialogue is entirely dependent on the compliance of the patient which is, in

this imaginary instance, given without any deviation or trouble. The patient’s

answers are not only in accord with the expectations of the physician (and thus

easy to follow up with the next question on the list) but are also succinct and

focused. In the play, the patient’s failure to respond with the ‘right’ answers

produces frustration for both the patient and the physician. The suggestion that

‘direct questions about suicidal intent may be asked without deleterious effect’

may need to be revaluated. The effect of such a line of questioning in the play is

to inflict more pain on the patient by refusing to listen when she fails to comply

with the expectations of the physician. The increasing frustration and anger of the

patient is expressed in her attempt to intervene in the questioning process: ‘Why

don’t you ask me why?/Why did I cut my arm’. To ask this question would signal

a relinquishment of power for the physician, as the patient would thereby become

a participant in the process of positing questions. The physician negates such a

change by refusing to ask the proffered question and by asking, instead, ‘would

you like to tell me?’ - a question which has already been answered, in a sense, by

the patient. The question ‘why did you cut your arm’ is finally asked by the

physician but only after the patient has been frustrated and belittled by the

exchange. Her response: ‘because it feels fucking great. Because it feels fucking

amazing’ is completely ignored by the physician who, on hearing this, reverts

389
Ibid, p. 231.

247
immediately to diagnostic mode by asking, again, ‘can I look?’. What is made

manifest in this dialogue is a violent power struggle between physician and patient

in which the latter’s attempts to be heard are constantly suppressed by the

former.390

Jung’s turn away from psychoanalysis, underpinned, as it is, by a refusal of

systematic techniques, may help to address the unbalance which is perceived and

highlighted in 4.48 Psychosis, and to encourage an approach to depression and

suicide which sets out to listen to, rather than to merely diagnose, the patient. His

challenge to ‘the widespread prejudice that analysis is something like a ‘cure’ to

which one submits for a time and is then healed’ can be brought to bear to respond

to the patient’s wish to be listened to rather than ‘cured’.391 The crucial feature of

such an approach is that it attempts to consider each case afresh, without prior

assumptions:

The enormous variation among individuals and their neuroses has set
before me the ideal of approaching each case with a minimum of prior
assumptions. The ideal would naturally be to have no assumptions at all.
But this is impossible even if one exercises the most rigorous self-
criticism, for one is oneself the biggest of all one’s assumptions, and one
with the gravest consequences. Try as we may to have no assumptions
and to use no ready-made methods, the assumption that I myself am will
determine my method: as I am, so will I proceed.392

390
The link between knowledge and power in relation to mental illness has been
highlighted in Foucault’s extensive work on the subject. See in particular his
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R.
Howard, (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973).
391
Jung, ‘The Transcendent Function’ in Collected Works 8: 67-91, (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1969), par. 142.
392
Jung, ‘Appendix: The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy’, in Collected Works 16: 327-337,
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), par. 543.

248
Jung’s ideal of an assumption-free approach not only challenges the systematic

methods that are called into question in 4.48 Psychosis, but provides a further

insight which may shed light on some of the contradictions which are highlighted

in the play. In the dialogue discussed above, the last word is given to the

physician who diagnoses the patient as ‘ill’ and then goes on to add: ‘It’s not your

fault. But you have to take/responsibility for you own actions. Please don’t do it

again’. The contradiction here is that while the assignation of blame is precluded

by the diagnosis of an illness, the individual is still held responsible for her own

actions, even though these actions have been identified as symptoms of an illness

which, following this diagnosis, are not her fault. The assumption underpinning

the physician’s comment is that of an I-centred subject in control of, and entirely

responsible for, his/her actions and destiny. This determines the method used by

the physician and allows her to impart such confident advice whilst remaining

oblivious to the contradiction which pervades it. The physician’s attempts

(whether conscious or unconscious) to control and contain the dialogue can thus

be seen as a way of silencing the verbal and behavioural expressions of the patient

which threaten to expose this contradiction and to undermine the assumption of an

I-centred subject which, as Jung suggests, is the biggest assumption of all.

This assumption is challenged throughout the play, which calls into question the

idea that the ‘I’, or the conscious ego is the centre and locus of meaning, and

presents instead a view of the psyche as ‘a boiling cauldron of contradictory

impulses, inhibitions, and affects’.393 Rather than seeing this condition as an

aberration, Jung’s theory of the psyche would suggest that what is presented in the

393
Jung, ‘Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype’, par. 190.

249
play is an intensification or magnification of what is fundamentally normal

psychic phenomena. One of the key innovations of the play is that no characters

are prescribed by the stage directions. This formal innovation is critical insofar as

it challenges the assumption that the individual (traditionally represented or

embodied in the character of a play) is the centre and locus of meaning and intent.

Instead the individual is shown to be ‘a boiling cauldron of contradictory

impulses’, struggling to maintain equilibrium. The loss of this equilibrium is

shown in the play to be a result of an over-activation of the unconscious; of the

constant eruption of the unconscious into consciousness. The voice of the patient

oscillates between not wanting to stop these eruptions - as indicated in the plea

‘Please. Don’t switch off my mind by attempting to straighten me out’ (220), and

not being able to tolerate these eruptions: ‘Okay, let’s do it, let’s do the drugs,

let’s do the chemical lobotomy, let’s shut down the higher functions of my brain,

and perhaps I’ll be a bit more fucking capable of living’ (221). The snag is,

however, that although one may try to switch off – as the patient does through

chemical lobotomy - consciousness cannot be fooled that easily and living in a

switched-off state proves to be as unsatisfactory as the previous state. Switching

off a part of the mind may help the patient to function, but may also lead to what

Jung describes as an abaissement du niveau mental – ‘a lowering of the level of

consciousness, a mental and emotional condition experienced as “loss of soul”’.394

Such a loss of soul is articulated towards the end of the play in expressions such

as ‘the capture / the rapture / the rupture / of a soul’ (242). The formal structure

becomes increasingly fragmented at this point emphasizing both the patient’s

disconnection from the world - which is signalled by the relinquishment of

394
Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon, p. 2.

250
dialogue with others - and by her articulation of a sense of gradual disintegration

of both body and soul: ‘my body flies apart’ (238). Although switching off a part

of the mind may have been deemed necessary in order to function, this act results

in a loss: ‘It is done / behold the Eunuch / of castrated thought’ (242). Cutting

out a part of the mind is presented as a form of castration; as the castration of

thought. The ‘Eunuch’ that remains after castration experiences the cut as an

intolerable loss of body and soul. Jung’s theory of abaissement du niveau mental

can help to consider the question of the soul, and the sense of its loss, in an age in

which such terminology may be falling out of currency or even credibility. Jung

links the experience of loss of soul with a lowering of the level of consciousness,

which is to say that the lowering of the level of consciousness is experienced as a

loss of soul. According to Jung’s view of the psyche, the movement between the

unconscious and the conscious ego is necessary in promoting psychic equilibrium.

This movement or oscillation is understood, then, as the very life-force of the

psyche; a notion whose essence is captured or manifested in the idea of the soul.

If the movement of consciousness is hindered or stopped in the manner described

above (whether by ‘chemical lobotomy’ or other means), then it is the very life-

force (soul) of the psyche which is being arrested. From this perspective, the

experience of loss of soul expressed by the patient can be understood not - as it

sometimes is - as an expression of madness or fantasy, but as an insight into the

life of the psyche. This supports the suggestion made by Hauke that the

‘psychotic’ may actually ‘be more in touch with psychic reality than the

“sane”’.395 From this perspective, the suppression and exclusion of the psychotic

- which Hauke compares to the Victorians’ approach to their ‘savages’ - in

395
Christopher Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern, p. 272.

251
contemporary society serves to preserve dominant rationality and to present it

back to itself as the only possible reality: ‘By its exalting itself to unitary status,

such a reality might be just as “mad” - that is, solipsistically out of touch with the

wider range of realities - when it is viewed in contrast to the conventional

“madness”’.396 The exclusion and marginalization of the ‘psychotic’ is thus at the

detriment of the wider culture which may have something to learn from the

former.

In 1931 Jung wrote: ‘About a third of my cases are not suffering from any

clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their

lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age’.397

This sense of aimlessness is strongly manifested in 4.48 Psychosis when the

patient states that ‘there’s not a drug on earth that can make life meaningful’ (p.

220). Instead of engaging with this point, the physician responds by dismissing

the comment: ‘You allow this state of desperate absurdity’ (220). The physician’s

response is underpinned, again, by an assumption: the assumption that life is,

essentially, meaningful and that to think otherwise is absurd. To think otherwise

is, however, to give the unconscious the chance of having its way alongside

consciousness as opposed to suppressing whatever threatens the norms and

conventions of day-to-day life. The difference, however, between acknowledging

the unconscious and succumbing to it entirely is pointed out by Jung in a letter of

1940, in which he warns the addressee not to put too much trust in the

unconscious. He also makes a useful distinction between the human and the

396
Ibid, p. 275.
397
Jung, ‘The Aims of Psychotherapy’ in Collected Works 16: 36-52, (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966), par. 81-4.

252
inhuman which is of particular relevance to contemporary critical and literary

theory.398

You trust your unconscious as if it were a loving father. But it is nature

and cannot be made use of as if it were a reliable human being. It is
inhuman and it needs the human mind to function usefully for man’s
purposes.399

In this passage Jung aligns the unconscious with nature whilst consciousness, in

turn, is aligned with culture. Whilst a definitive line is not drawn between the two

- in fact it is the interplay between the two which constitutes the balanced psyche

as discussed above - the division between the two is useful in that it helps to

separate that which is culturally constituted from that which is given in nature.

Consciousness, insofar as it is developed and constituted in culture, belongs to the

realm of the human whereas the unconscious, on this account, is designated as

inhuman on the grounds that it is not at the level of culture and therefore

humanness.

398
For an introduction to recent debates about the inhuman see Brewster, Joughin,
Owen, Walker (eds.) Inhuman Reflections (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000).
399
Jung, C. G. Jung Letters, Vol 1, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p.
283. Jung’s terminology should be approached with caution here, particularly
bearing in mind the fact that this point was made briefly in a letter and not in an
extensive written document. On the one hand, he emphasises the point that the
unconscious cannot be fully trusted, or relied upon, as it is not human and
therefore not fully knowable or controllable. However, in the next sentence he
appears to contradict the first point by implying that the unconscious can be
appropriated by the conscious ego: ‘it needs the human mind to function usefully
for man’s purposes’. The terminology used here - particularly the words
‘function’, ‘usefully’ and ‘purposes’ - emanate from Jung’s conscious ego and, as
such, privilege the assumptions and tendencies of the ego: its tendency to theorise
and rationalise. In a sense then, Jung’s conscious ego gets in the way of the point
that he is making: that the unconscious is unknowable and ungraspable.

253
Any use of the term ‘inhuman’ is problematic in that the word – like tragedy -

carries with it a whole host of negative connotations and baggage that cannot be

simply overstepped. In an article which looks at the place the inhuman occupies

in Nietzsche’s thought, David Owen provides an insightful delineation of the

different conceptions of the term that emerge. The first conception of the term

that Owen singles out defines a ‘mode of behaviour towards the slave and the

stranger […] that Nietzsche identifies with noble ethics in its ancient form’.400 On

this account, the advancement of a noble ethics in Ancient Greece was promoted

on the basis of, or at the cost of, the de-humanization of other (allegedly lesser)

human beings. This conception of the term would accord with the dominant

understanding of the term ‘inhumane’ as relating to the barbarous and callous

treatment of others. The most barbaric acts committed against human beings by

other human beings during modern times are invoked at one point in the play in

the passage which begins ‘I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the /

Arabs […]’ (227). The use of the first-person pronoun is highly significant and

prompts the audience or reader to wonder who this ‘I’ refers to which appears to

take responsibility for all the atrocities accounted for. The references to entirely

different, but equally atrocious incidents suggests a recurrence of the barbaric

which is articulated in the subsequent lines: ‘When I die / I’m going to be

reincarnated as your child only fifty / times worse and as mad as all fuck I’m

going to make / your life a living fucking hell’ (227). The point that the inhuman

is born at the same time as the human is emphasized in the image of the child as a

reincarnation of the ‘I’ who appears to be the agent, or instigator, of every

400
David Owen, ‘The Inhuman, the all-too-human and the over-human: Nietzsche, ethics and
Enlightenment’, in Inhuman Reflections, p. 18.

254
historical atrocity committed. The composition of this passage not only presents a

temporary breakdown of the distinctions between different historical events, but

also disavows a position which would allow for the clear identification of

perpetrators and victims. Instead, and using Jung’s conception of the unconscious

as both personal and collective, the ‘I’ can be seen as a way of presenting the idea

of a collective unconscious which takes account of, and full responsibility for, all

humanity and all inhumanity. The idea that this collective unconscious - and the

burden it represents - lives on is articulated in the threat that ‘when I die / I’m

going to be reincarnated as your child’. The final lines of this passage capture the

revulsion that this burden represents:

- […] I REFUSE I REFUSE I / REFUSE LOOK AWAY FROM ME

- It’s all right.
- LOOK AWAY FROM ME
- It’s all right, I’m here.
- Look away from me

According to Christopher Innes, the refusal in this speech leaves only one

solution. Citing the line: ‘an ineffectual moral spasm / the only alternative to

murder’, Innes suggests that ‘in this context the ‘moral spasm’ is expressed in

suicide’.401 Although Kane’s subsequent suicide does tempt the reader to veer

toward the idea that suicide is presented as inevitable in the play, I would like to

suggest an alternative reading of this. The refusal to acknowledge the inhuman

and the temptation to look away from it are contrasted with a quieter voice which

simply offers a reassurance that ‘it’s all right, I’m here’. The struggle is perhaps

indicative of two different approaches to the inhuman: one which refuses to own

401
Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002)

255
up to it, or insists that it is always other (reproachable) humans who are guilty of

inhumanity, and another which acknowledges a collective responsibility for

keeping ‘our’ inhumanity in check. Kane’s dramatic use of the singular pronoun

in this passage could be understood as expressing the idea of the moral law in the

Kantian sense – the ‘categorical imperative’ - as that which is good for the whole

of humanity. Joaquim Siles-Borràs illustrates the link between any understanding

of the individual and the collective act by pointing out that, according to

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, ‘every time I choose not to obey the moral law and

I obey instead an evil maxim, I am perpetrating evil against the whole of

humanity. By adopting an evil maxim that says that I can kill in a particular

situation, I am prescribing that it is good to kill on such occasions and, therefore,

that to kill can be good’.402 This point emphasises the weight of responsibility on

the individual and on the significance of every decision made by the individual in

relation to the whole of humanity. Each individual is, on this account – and like

Kane’s ‘I’ in the above passage – understood to be acting and making decisions

on behalf of the whole of humanity and in a way which impacts upon the whole of

humanity. As Emil Fackenheim emphasises with regard to Kant’s moral

philosophy:

Nothing in heaven or earth is more important than the moment in which a

man – any man [or woman I might add] – makes himself good or bad.
And whenever a man makes such a decision, the universe, so to speak,
holds its breath.403

402
Joaquim Siles-Borràs, ‘Evil, Freedom and Responsibility: An essay on Kant’s Moral
Philosophy’, The Richmond Journal of Philosophy, Issue 4, (Summer 2003), pp. 39-45, p. 42.
403
Emil L. Fackenheim, ‘Kant and Radical Evil’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XXIII,
(1953-54), p. 353.

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Although this represents an enormous and potentially unbearable burden on the

individual, it is in this very moment that Kant’s philosophy endows the human

being with a dimension of freedom with which they are able to deliberate what is

morally good and choose accordingly. To take away this dimension of freedom

would be to devoid the human of all morality which would, in effect, empty

human life of any meaning. Meaning is found precisely in the freedom to choose

which, as indicated above, is not the kind of freedom of choice associated with the

self-fashioning delights of consumerism, but with a moral responsibility to make

the choices that one would confidently prescribe for the whole of humanity.

Apart from the first conception of the inhuman (as inhumane), Owen marks out

two further ways in which the term is advanced in Nietzsche’s work. The first

describes the inhuman (or anti-human) rejection, or undermining, of the

conditions and character of human existence which – Nietzsche claims -

characterizes the approach of the philosophical tradition.404 Although a full

discussion of this aspect of Nietzsche’s work is beyond the scope of this chapter

the point could be elucidated by reference to the Kantian moral law described

above. The sheer weight of responsibility on the individual to abide by the moral

law at all times and regardless of circumstance - to consider one’s acts in relation

to the whole of humankind (as acts which one would happily prescribe for the

whole of humankind) rather than contingent on specific, situations and factors –

arguably represents a ‘rejection, or undermining of, the conditions and character

404
David Owen, ‘The Inhuman, the all-too-human and the over-human’, p. 18. A discussion of
this aspect of Nietzsche’s work is beyond the scope of this chapter but it is worth pointing out, as
Owen does, that this is ‘a central topic for Nietzsche’s moral philosophy and, in particular, for his
criticism of the philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant’ (Ibid).

257
of human existence’.405 The philosophy advanced by Kant’s moral law and

dramatically articulated by Kane’s collective ‘I’ could be described as inhuman

insofar as it expresses an ideal which, by ignoring the conditions and character of

human existence, is unrealisable and unliveable. To characterize this approach as

inhuman is not, however, to dismiss it out of hand but to highlight the point that it

marks out an ideal which represents an enormous burden of responsibility on

every single human being.406 In ‘An ethics of Catastrophe’, Ken Urban argues

that Kane ‘dramatizes the quest for ethics’.407 In order to present this argument he

distinguishes between morality and ethics in the following way:

Morality is made up of ‘constraining’ rules which judge people according

to ‘transcendent values’, such as Good or Evil (Deleuze). Ethics, on the
other hand, are subject to change, even optional, emerging from specific
moments and certain modes of being. An ethics does not forsake the
difference between good and bad, but views such distinctions as
evaluations rooted in one’s specific existence, not as judgments based on
universal principles.408

Although this view clearly intends to promote an ethics based on, and related to,

specific, lived human experiences, the problem is that it potentially allows for the

justification of any acts (including the most barbaric) on the grounds that they

might be justifiable under certain circumstances. Such an approach, in my view,

does not capture the inhuman, or tragic, morality presented in Kane’s plays - and

articulated particularly strongly in the passage given above - but is more reflective

405
Owen, ‘The Inhuman, the all-too-human and the over-human’ p. 18.
406
The link I make here between Kane’s tragic theatre and Kant’s philosophy can be emphasised
further by reference to Lucien Goldmann’s description of the philosopher as a tragic thinker.
Indicating how Kant’s philosophy is tempered by subsequent thinkers, Goldmann claims that ‘the
Hegelian and, above all, the Marxist dialectic played the same role for the tragic vision of Pascal
and Kant that Socratic and Platonic rationalism played for Greek tragedy, and which modern
rationalism and empiricism had played for Shakespearian tragedy: that of going beyond the tragic
vision by showing that man is capable of achieving authentic values by his own thoughts and
actions’, Goldmann, The Hidden God, p. 46.
407
Ken Urban, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’, p. 37.
408
Ibid.

258
of the postmodern emphasis on relativity that Kane’s work sets itself in opposition

to.

The other definition of the inhuman that Owen locates in Nietzsche’s work points

to a non-human element of the world. The term, on this account:

[M]arks the sense in which the world is not made for us, nor we for the
world, the sense in which the world need not be receptive to human
interests – in sum, the sense in which human existence is fateful, bound by
chance and necessity.409

This sense is manifested formally in the play by showing the gradual separation of

self from world which is first suggested in the line ‘this is not a world in which I

wish to live’ (210), and later in the patient’s claim that ‘there’s not a drug on earth

that can make life meaningful’ (220). This claim is consistent with Nietzsche’s

emphasis on the fateful character of human existence which has, on this account,

no underlying meaning, value or purpose but is bound, instead, by chance and

necessity. The key point about this emphasis on the inhuman as non-human is

that it enables a distinction to be drawn whereby the human - or what is

considered to be human - is not conceived as a product of nature but is regarded as

historically and culturally constituted. The point, then, is not to wallow in the

meaninglessness and purposelessness of life, but to emphasise that the meaning

and value ascribed to human existence are located in culture and history and not in

nature. In nature, or in the inhuman, there is - as the patient in 4.48 Psychosis

intuits - no essential meaning or value to existence. This, as Terry Eagleton

claims:

409
Owen, ‘The Inhuman, the all-too-human and the over-human’, p. 18.

259
 [I]s the inhuman ‘barbarism’ which modernism detects at the root of
civility: and the problem is how to acknowledge this darkness without
being claimed by it, how to confess the fragility of culture without being
duped by its foes.410

The problem is how to acknowledge the inhuman – conceived as the absence of

any underlying meaning or value to existence – while still maintaining an

affirmative stance to human existence and to questions concerning this existence.

Eagleton’s point echoes the warnings of Jung about not putting too much trust in

the unconscious or inhuman: acknowledging it is one thing but ‘being claimed by

it’ entirely is a different matter which, as Jung would argue, can in some cases

lead to psychosis and suicide.

One way of acknowledging the darkness underpinning civility is through the kind

of imaginative exploration carried out in Kane’s work which, as I suggest in

chapter one, continues the legacy of the Greek tragedians by exploring the

questions that define what it is to be human on stage. Nietzsche argued that the

achievement of Attic tragedy resided in its capacity to transform ‘repulsive

thoughts about the terrible and absurd aspects of existence into representations

with which it was possible to live’.411 When the controversies surrounding the

work of Kane have subsided, her work may also be viewed as an achievement

insofar as it foregrounds disturbing and often harrowing thoughts, yet manages to

transform these into a theatrical experience which, as the playwright, claimed,

aims to ‘descend into hell imaginatively in order to avoid going there in

410
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 287.
411
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 130.

260
reality’.412 An acknowledgement of the inhuman is a complicated task with no

guarantee of positive results. If nothing else, the acknowledgement of the

inhuman – conceived as the non-human fateful character of existence - serves to

highlight the fact that consciousness is mutable and that what is now considered to

be human is equally open to change. This point can be highlighted further by

linking it to the first conception of the inhuman located in Nietzsche’s work as

designating an inhumane approach to others. Joanna Hodge identifies ‘the

elimination of otherness’ as a characteristic feature of the positive sciences which,

in favouring the accumulation of knowledge, forget or suppress the strange,

uncanny or alien.413 Highlighting the dangers of this elimination, Hodge argues

that ‘the strange, the alien, the uncanny, the monstrous all the same find a site:

they are placed by one group of human beings in other such groups’.414 Kane’s

work represents a challenge to the positivistic enterprise which, in Hodge’s view,

works implicitly to eliminate otherness by maintaining a strong sense of the

strange and the monstrous, and by undermining the oppositional logic which

would insist on a strict division between the human and inhuman.

Kane’s last play is by no means a solipsistic turn away from the world and into the

self but signals the playwright’s most developed attempt to articulate the

interrelatedness of self and world and to explore the struggle that characterises

this relationship. Representing what is considered to be reality in such a multi-

layered fashion may unsettle the audience accustomed to the stability of

naturalistic conventions but also proves to be politically subversive by

412
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 137.
413
Hodge, ‘Freedom, phusis, techne: thinking the inhuman’ in Inhuman Reflections, p. 49.
414
Ibid.

261
highlighting the point that ‘reality’ is not a fixed given and is alterable. Although,

as critics have protested, Kane’s work may lack an explicit political focus or

message, an implicit will to transform and effect change is embedded within the

work’s formal structure. The extent to which Kane believed in the positive value

of her work, and was committed to actively effecting what little change she could

through it, is expressed in the following comment: ‘I’d rather risk overdose in the

theatre than in life. And I’d rather risk defensive screams than passively become

part of a civilisation that has committed suicide’.415 The fact that Kane did

eventually commit suicide should not detract attention from the work she did and

from the important points that her plays raise. Attempting to explain her suicide,

Harold Pinter argues that ‘she felt man’s inhumanity to man so profoundly. I

believe that’s what finally killed her. She couldn’t stand the bloody thing any

more’.416 Whether Pinter’s explanation of her death is accurate or not, his point

that Kane perceived ‘man’s inhumanity to man so profoundly’ is born out by her

plays. The legacy left in her body of work represents a challenge to confront this

inhumanity in order to also consider and define what it is to be human.

415
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 133.
416
Simon Hattenstone, ‘A Sad Hurrah’, in Guardian Weekend, 1 July 2000.

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 Chapter 7

Posthumanist identities in Kane

The question of the human, or of what it is to be human, underpins much of

Kane’s writing as I have illustrated throughout this thesis. For Bond, it is this

concern, and her willingness to explore it in her plays, which singles her out as the

most important playwright of her generation.417 In this final chapter I will discuss

this concern in more depth, looking at how it is developed across the plays and

showing how Kane’s theatrical experimentation relates to developments in critical

theory. I will argue that the tragic spirit which runs through her plays can be

linked with current theorising on posthumanism and shows an attempt to imagine

and articulate posthumanist identities. In this respect, and in line with the

arguments I have presented in previous chapters, I will argue that Kane puts

questions which are intrinsic to the genre of tragedy back on stage in a way which

simultaneously – and through innovative developments in form – attempts to

avoid the flaws and dangers of humanist thinking.

Kane’s approach to human identity is complex and a tension can be discerned

between the writer’s claims and developments in her plays. On the one hand her

views often display strong humanist tendencies as illustrated in her comment that:

‘I write about human beings, and since I am one, the ways in which all human

beings operate is feasibly within my understanding’.418 Her claim to be able to

understand other human beings by virtue of the fact that she herself is human does

417
See previous chapter for various references in Bond’s work, in particular his article ‘Sarah
Kane and theatre’ in Saunders, Love me or kill me, pp. 189-191.
418
Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason, p. 133.

263
not appear to take into account the extent to which her understanding is mediated

by her own social context. By claiming that the source of her understanding is

within herself, the writer is falling back on one of the main assumptions of

Cartesian humanism which maintains that an ideal human essence is located in the

capacity to reason and that it is this capacity which links all human beings. This

positive appeal to a universal humanity which assumes that ‘deep down’ all

human beings are the same in that they are endowed with reason and conscience,

is, to some extent, a precondition of social transformation. This point can be

elucidated further by reference to the Declaration of Human Rights which has as

its aim the advancement of improved rights and conditions for all human beings.

Article 1 of the Declaration states that: ‘All human beings are born free and equal

in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should

act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’.419 Neil Badmington argues

that the Declaration – a document which underpins Western approaches to

humanitarian issues – ‘reveals a fundamental Cartesian humanism at work’.420

This is most clearly visible in the assertion that all human beings are ‘endowed

with reason and conscience’. Whilst, on the one hand, the elevation of reason as

the very essence or source of humanness helps to justify the establishment of a

code intended to ensure the rights of all human beings, this elevation is

problematic in that it assumes that human reason is given prior to, or outside,

history, politics and social relations and thereby negates the significance of the

social environment in the formation of reason.

419
‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly
of the United Nations in December 1948 and made available on the internet to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the declaration in 1998, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights/html.
420
Badmington, Posthumanism, p. 4.

264
Kane appears, then, to subscribe to the humanist idea that underpins the

Declaration of Human Rights and that Jonathan Dollimore identifies and gives an

account of in Radical Tragedy: ‘The idea that “man” possesses some given,

unalterable essence which is what makes “him” human, which is the source and

essential determinant of “his” culture and its priority over conditions of

existence’.421 Critical challenges to this fundamental hypothesis of humanism

have come from such divergent fields as feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis

which, however divergent, have been grouped together under the term ‘anti-

humanist’.422 Although differing in other aspects, these ‘anti-humanist’

approaches converge on one crucial issue: they insist on challenging the humanist

assumption that the subject is pre-given in Nature. Although, as Simon Malpas

emphasises, ‘the modern subject (the “I think”) remains intact, who that subject is

becomes much more a function of the experiences generated by the environment

in which it exists than some natural or divine eternal essence or soul’.423 Malpas

highlights the point that while this is an insistent feature of contemporary,

postmodern debates it is not by any means a new debate. In the context of drama

criticism it is a question which has permeated theoretical writings on theatre and

which underpins much of Brecht’s dramaturgy. Brecht’s theoretical anti-

humanism is outlined most explicitly in the contrast he draws between Dramatic

and Epic theatre as discussed in chapter one. His rejection of Dramatic theatre

which, he claims, takes the human being as a given is driven by a Marxist

insistence that the human being ‘is alterable and able to alter’.424

421
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 250.
422
An exposition of how the terms humanist and anti-humanist emerged is provided by Kate Soper
alongside a discussion of what is at stake in the debate between these positions, Humanism and
Anti-Humanism, (London: Hutchinson, 1986).
423
Malpas, The Postmodern, (London, Routledge, 2005), p. 63.
424
Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, p. 37.

265
But if Kane does display humanist tendencies in comments made outside her work

– which are invariably made in an effort to defend her work against negative

criticism and therefore less thought-out than her carefully crafted plays – it is

worth looking at how such humanist assumptions are put to the test in her work.

Of all Kane’s work, it is her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, which offers the fullest and

most extensive exploration of questions related to subjectivity. Some of the

questions posited in this play do appear to be founded on the humanist assumption

that an essential subject precedes cultural and historical conditions.

Do you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the

wrong body?
Do you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the
wrong era?
(215)

These questions could be interpreted as a straightforward attempt to express the

speaker’s dissatisfaction with their own body or gender and the feeling of being

out of sync with the dominant attitudes and beliefs of the time they live in. But

given other developments in the play – particularly in terms of the formal

innovations - the questions posed here could also be interpreted as an attempt to

explore problems related to subjectivity in general. The idea of being born in the

‘wrong body’ or the ‘wrong era’ implies an incompatibility between the

(essential) person and the body and era in which s/he finds her/himself. However,

while the formulation of the question instigates a split between person/body and

person/era, the very possibility of such a split is what is being considered in the

question. ‘Do you think it’s possible’, asks the voice; the question is met with a

silence. What other response might there be? An anti-humanist assertion that it is

266
certainly not possible for a person to be born in the wrong body - given that the

body is one of the elements that constitutes the very personhood of that person -

can only be issued with recourse to the split with which it is at odds. Even such

an anti-humanist attempt to deny the split cannot, it seems, avoid producing a re-

formulation or reinstitution of the split. Although a theoretical departure from

humanism may be espoused by anti-humanists, a complete break away from the

former is an impossibility. Badmington argues that:

While the anti-humanists were declaring a departure from the legacy of

humanism, Derrida was patiently pointing out the difficulties of making
such a break. Precisely because Western philosophy is steeped in
humanist assumptions, he observed, the end of Man is bound to be written
in the language of Man’.425

Drawing on the work of Derrida, Badmington thus establishes a link between

poststructuralism and the emergence of posthumanism. In the same way that

poststructuralism does not signal a simple break away from structuralism but,

rather, seeks to challenge or deconstruct its structures from the inside,

posthumanism provides an opportunity to interrogate the assumptions of humanist

thought without assuming that it can just step beyond these and leave them

behind.

Kane’s work encapsulates the tension between a humanist and an anti-humanist

approach to identity. The writer’s willingness to posit the kind of questions

which, although foregrounded particularly strongly in 4.48 Psychosis, occur

throughout her writing, displays a refusal to give up on certain aspects of

425
Badmington, Posthumanism, p. 9.

267
humanism whilst simultaneously refusing to take its terms for granted. The

apparent oscillation which can be discerned in Kane’s work between humanism

and anti-humanism will be linked here with a theoretical movement towards

posthumanism. In the same way that the ‘post’ in postmodern does not

necessarily designate an ‘after’ or a complete break with the modern,

posthumanism announces something more like a crisis in humanism rather than,

as Badmington points out, a complete break with it. This crisis is not conceived

as something which comes, as it were, after humanism or at the end of humanism,

but as a critical flaw at the very heart of humanism. In this sense it would be

accurate to describe posthumanism as humanism in its nascent state in the same

way that François Lyotard understands postmodernism: ‘Postmodernism thus

understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is

constant’.426 Kane’s writing contains an acute awareness of this critical flaw and

of the crises generated by humanist thinking. Her attention to these crises signals

an unwillingness to renounce humanism altogether – because of what would be at

stake in such a renunciation - and a simultaneous attempt to challenge its

underlying assumptions. What would be at stake in a complete renunciation of

humanism has already been alluded to in the reference to the Declaration of

Human Rights. The advancement of human rights is, to a large extent, dependent

on the appeal to a core humanity and, as such, raises the question whether the

undermining of such a notion would lead to a coterminous undermining of human

rights. This anxiety is manifest in Kane’s first play Blasted in the exchanges

between Cate and Ian and particularly in Cate’s impotent responses to Ian’s

426
Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question What is Postmodernism’ in The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984) p. 79.

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bigoted remarks. Although Cate objects to Ian’s many prejudiced comments she

never appeals to a universal notion of humanity in her responses and responds

instead in a way which is shown to be merely reactive, without much thought and

in conformity with what she believes to be general consensus. At one point she

asks him not to say ‘wogs’ and ‘pakis’ on the grounds that ‘it’s not very nice’ (1:

5). Cate reveals an awareness of what is, and is not, ‘nice’ or correct, but is

shown to be incapable of providing any other reason beyond what she is

authorised to think by received convention.427 Cate’s inability to respond

adequately to Ian’s repeated bigotry prompts the audience to consider the

problems inherent in ‘teaching’ politically correct terms and views while

neglecting to develop the critical faculty which would enable individuals to think

ethically, but for themselves.

The ambivalence displayed in Kane’s first play contributes towards the hostility

with which her work was received. Kane is ambivalent about the situations

depicted in her plays and, as I illustrate in chapter two, about her characters. This

ambivalence and the unwillingness on Kane’s part to convey a clear political

message or agenda has led critics to regard Kane’s work as inward-looking and

politically impotent. However, and as I have argued throughout this thesis, the

ambivalence in Kane’s work signals a genuine attempt to generate thinking about

critical and political questions. This attempt also seeks to question the familiar

framework of thinking and criticism which she found herself writing in during the

1990s. The kind of reading strategies which were becoming increasingly

427
Ken Urban suggests that Kane’s generation of playwrights were writing against the background
of the ‘political correctness’ movement of the 1990s and that some of their plays ‘often critique the
conservative ideology that deems certain characters and subject matter unsuitable for art’, Urban,
‘An ethics of catastrophe’, p. 39.

269
dominant during that period are put to the test in Blasted and exposed as

insufficient.

Blasted, Edward Bond claims, ‘changed reality because it changed the means we

have of understanding ourselves’.428 In literary terms at least this understanding

was framed, to a large extent, by the emphasis on the identity categories that

preoccupied criticism during the 1990s. Following Bond, I would argue that

Blasted does ‘change the means we have of understanding ourselves’ by issuing a

challenge to dominant ways of reading which are limited by a preoccupation with

identity politics to the exclusion of other questions. This claim is supported by

Kane’s account of her own approach to writing about identity:

The problems I’m addressing are the ones we have as human beings. An
over-emphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion
from our main problem. Class, race and gender divisions are symptomatic
of societies based on violence or the threat of violence, not the cause.429

The problem Kane identifies in this interview is that an over-emphasis on identity

politics excludes from its enquiry critical questions facing human beings. From

an anti-humanist perspective her criticism of the over-emphasis on identity

politics could be interpreted as an effacement or denial of difference which

typifies the humanist assumption that all human beings, being essentially the

same, are faced with the same critical questions. The assumption that a young

educated British woman might be faced with the same questions as, for example,

a victim of the war in Bosnia is, from an anti-humanist perspective (and, no doubt,

428
Bond, ‘Afterword: Sarah Kane and theatre’ in Love me or kill me, p. 190.
429
Kane in Langridge and Stephenson, p. 134.

270
from most perspectives), highly questionable.430 Nevertheless, Kane’s work does

raise important questions about the implications of an anti-humanist drive to

assert the importance of experience and environment in the development of the

subject. The most fundamental question it highlights is whether this drive might

also function counter-effectively to suppress other critical questions facing human

beings. Kane’s attempt to go beyond identity politics in her work does not

pretend or presume that ‘we’ have somehow moved beyond such politics and that

the issues concerning such politics are now irrelevant. Instead, developments in

her plays can be seen as a radical attempt to oppose the dominant ideological

framework within which identity categories are taken to be a given. Kane’s claim

that class, race and gender divisions are not the cause of violence in society

presents a challenge to certain anti-humanist approaches which base their critiques

on such premises. While a feminist critique of patriarchy, or a Marxist critique of

the class system, may reveal injustices in society, these critiques, following

Kane’s claim, fail to expose the fundamental violence which underpins society

and which gives rise to such violent hierarchical divisions in the first place, be

they divisions based on gender, class, race or any other category. It follows from

this that an over-emphasis on certain issues diverts attention from the violence, or

the threat of violence, upon which society is based. Throughout this thesis I have

demonstrated how formal experimentation and creative developments in Kane’s

work reveal an attempt to engage with the question of violence that the playwright

identifies and is compelled to address. In chapter two, and in accordance with

430
Sierz draws attention to Kane’s ability to ‘move from scenes of private abuse to wider
humanistic issues’, Sierz, ‘A Review of Complete Plays by Sarah Kane, introduced by David
Greig’, p. 115. Whilst valorising the originality and dramatic effect of this move he does,
however, go on to question the validity of Kane’s conflation of events in Blasted as I discuss in
chapter four.

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Artaud’s proposed ‘theatre of cruelty’, I argued that Kane’s plays are violent not

just because they depict scenes of physical suffering and emotional abuse, but

because they illuminate some of the most cruel and difficult aspects of human

existence.

One difficult aspect that is explored throughout the plays is made manifest by

Kane’s comments in the early stages of writing 4.48 Psychosis when she indicates

that she is returning to a familiar theme: ‘yet another play, which is about the split

between one’s consciousness and one’s physical being’.431 Although this split

appears to be more pronounced in 4.48 Psychosis, it is not, as Kane’s comment

indicates, the first time that she engages with this theme. The question of the split

recurs throughout Kane’s writing and can be discerned from Blasted onward. The

question of a split between consciousness and being is a critical point upon which

a line of demarcation is often established between humanism and anti-humanism.

In the case of the former, Descartes’ (1596-1650) inauguration of modern

subjectivity - which is often given to represent the inauguration of humanism -

institutes the split between mind and being. Descartes’ deduction that ‘I think,

therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum), effects this split by separating the act of an ‘I’

thinking (cogito) from its being (sum). This split, or ‘Cartesian dualism’, is

introduced in Descartes’ Sixth Meditation:

And although possibly (or rather certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I

possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on
the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am
only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a
distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking
thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I

431
Interview with Nils Tabert in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 113.

272
 am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist
without it.432

Despite the ‘apparent intermingling of mind and body’, Descartes reaches the

conclusion that the essence, or soul, of Man is located outside the body and, as

such, could even exist independently of the body.433 Opponents to this idea of the

Cartesian Subject have objected to (among other things) the way in which this

principle sets up a hierarchy in which the body is subordinated to the mind. In a

feminist critique of Western philosophy’s lack of attention to the body, Morwenna

Griffiths traces the problem back to Descartes, whom she refers to as ‘modern

philosophy’s severed head’, and argues that Descartes’ writings have set the terms

in which the discussion [about the ‘mind-body’ problem] is conducted’.434

Extending the debate beyond philosophical argument, Griffiths argues that

assumptions concerning the mind-body problem feed into the commonly held

belief that:

[T]o be fully human you need a rational mind which is in control of a

strong body. Feelings and emotions are dangerous because they threaten
both the rationality and the control. Since women are more emotional they
are less than fully human, neither wholly rational nor wholly in control
of their bodies.435

By highlighting these assumptions, Griffiths aims to open debate concerning the

role of feelings and emotions and to contest the view that they are less important,

or less human, than rational thoughts and decisions. Griffiths also shows how

432
Rene Descartes, Key Philosophical Writings, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross,
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), p. 181.
433
Ibid, p. 183.
434
Morwenna Griffiths, ‘Feminism, Feelings and Philosophy’ in Feminist Perspectives in
Philosophy, eds. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), p.139.
435
Ibid, p. 133.

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historically these assumptions have contributed toward the subordination of

women (and other groups including ‘black people […] and the working classes’)

who have been deemed more emotional than white middle-class men and

consequently denied the same rights as them.436 Although writing from a feminist

standpoint, Griffith’s exposure of the Cartesian dualism does not just aim to

question assumptions concerning woman but attempts to challenge the classical

humanist ideal of the autonomous rational, subject by calling for a revaluation of

what it is to be ‘fully human’.

This hierarchical split between mind and body is exposed and dramatically

overturned in Kane’s first two plays, Blasted and Phaedra’s Love. The literal

blasting apart of the stage set at the end of scene two in Blasted announces more

than a challenge to naturalistic theatrical conventions. It also signals a challenge

to ‘the most basic and apparently reassuring category of the humanist aesthetic’:

the category of the individual character which represents and reinforces the idea

of the Cartesian, or humanist subject.437 Ian is presented at the outset of the play

as the main protagonist who is clearly, as evidenced by his manipulation of both

dialogue and action, in control of the situation he finds himself in and of those he

finds himself with. His gradual loss of control represents a challenge to the idea

of the ‘I’-centred subject as the locus of meaning and intent. The increasing

fragmentation from scene three onwards emphasises the split between

436
Ibid, p. 132.
437
Jonathan Dollimore presents the idea that the ‘character’ of a play represents a stable category
of the humanist aesthetic, Radical Tragedy, p. xxix. Having said that, he goes on to consider the
ways in which that which appears to be reassuring (the stable subject) is often thrown into question
by the complexities of particular characters: ‘the most compelling individual creations are the
ethically confusing ones’ (ibid). Kane’s characters – portrayed with ambivalence and ethical
ambiguity by the playwright – could sit alongside the examples Dollimore invokes from
Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

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consciousness and physical being by foregrounding the human body and bodily

practices to such an extent that the hierarchical ordering of consciousness and

being is theatrically overturned. Instead of the action being motivated by Ian’s

consciousness, it is Ian’s body that directs proceedings. The stage directions

towards the end of the final scene gradually take precedence over dialogue, and

centre increasingly on bodily functions: ‘masturbating’; ‘strangling himself with

his bare hands’; ‘shitting’; ‘laughing hysterically’; ‘having a nightmare’ (5:59).

A similar development occurs in Phaedra’s Love in which Hippolytus’s status as

an isolated, self-contained individual is presented in order to be theatrically

overcome. Unlike Ian, Hippolytus actively embraces his own fragmentation as

evinced in the last word of the play ‘if there could have been more moments like

this’ (8:103).

Although Descartes often stands accused of inaugurating the violent split between

mind and body, his writing contains an acute awareness of the problems inherent

in thinking the human.

As Descartes knew, to think the human is simultaneously to fragment and

divide the human. Thinking the human is to be aware of this fundamental
dialectic, of oneself as a ‘thinking, non-extended thing’, almost literally
inhuman, yet at the same time to be conscious of the body as an ‘extended,
non-thinking thing’, projected, objectified and extra-human.438

This passage highlights the point that Descartes already anticipated much

contemporary thought on the posthuman or inhuman condition.439 It is the very

438
Brewster, Joughin, Owen, Walker (eds.) Inhuman Reflections, p. 4.
439
Much debate surrounds the terms posthuman and inhuman. The editors of Inhuman Reflections
reject the term ‘posthuman’ on the grounds that it ‘maintains a portmanteau quality of carrying its
own conceptual baggage’, Ibid, p. 8. Although this position, which aligns itself with Lyotard’s
conception of the inhuman, might suggest an opposition to Badmington’s decision to give

275
act of thinking the human that, according to Descartes, institutes the violent

fragmentation and division of the human. To think the human is to become aware

of a fundamental (and potentially violent) dialectic whereby one becomes

conscious of ‘oneself’ as divided into both thinking, non-extended thing and

extended, non-thinking thing. As an object or projection of consciousness, the

human body (‘extended, non-thinking thing’) is thus figured as ‘extra-human’: not

as an essential feature of the human but as something more like an adjunct to the

essential self. The violent fragmentation and division of the human which is

brought about in the very act of thinking the human is manifested throughout

Kane’s work in the recurrent theme of bodily mutilation.

The violent division of self into thinking thing and non-thinking thing is made

explicit in Cleansed which conducts an experiment in overcoming the split: on

reuniting consciousness with physical being. When asked to consider what she

would change about herself Grace responds ‘My body. So it looked like it

feels./Graham outside like Graham inside’ (7:126). Grace consciously objectifies

her own, external body and finds it to be incompatible with the way she feels

inside. Descartes’ assertion that an essential ‘I’ exists independently of the

material, external body appears to be born out here. Grace’s essential self is

constructed as being oppositional to her external, material self. As Graham

Saunders highlights, the question of identity is explored using the Shakespearian

motif of cross-dressing from Twelfth Night which provides one of the literary

credence to the term posthuman (a decision influenced by Derrida), it would be misleading to

suggest a radical split between the ‘inhumanists’ and the ‘posthumanists’. Although differing in
some respects, it is also important to emphasise that both ‘sides’ of the debate are equally
committed to exploring questions of the human whilst also challenging humanist accounts which
have tended to foreclose such questions.

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sources of inspiration for the play.440 In making use of this motif Kane does,

however, develop it further in order to situate the question within an age in which

the transformation of the body has become a real possibility. Grace’s comment is

overheard by the character Tinker who takes it upon himself to grant her this

wish. The mutilation of Grace is thus shown to be not an act of random violence

but one provoked by Grace’s previous objectification of her own body. Grace’s

fate in the play illuminates Descartes’ insight that to think the human is

simultaneously to fragment and divide the human. When reflecting on herself, on

what she would change about herself, she separates herself into thinking thing and

non-thinking thing. The latter, non-thinking, bodily thing is then projected out of

herself and constituted as an object of, and for, consciousness. Once transformed

into an ‘extra-human’ or inhuman object, the body becomes the site of violence.

Having enacted the violent separation of Grace into essential self and inessential,

bodily self, the play then proceeds to explore the possibility of resolving this split.

The final scene of the play shows Grace’s transformation to be complete: ‘Grace

now looks and sounds exactly like Graham. She is wearing his clothes’ (20:149).

The first line spoken by the double, or fused character, of Grace/Graham is ‘Body

perfect’ (20:149). The line recalls Grace’s earlier wish to change her body to

make it look like it feels: to resolve the conflict between inside and outside. The

‘body perfect’ thus signals the reconciliation of consciousness with physical

being. However, the context in which Grace/Graham speaks this line produces an

effect of grotesque irony as the ‘body perfect’ referred to is in fact disfigured and

bleeding as a result of Tinker’s ‘operation’ and is being gradually eaten away by

440
Saunders, Love me or Kill me, p. 95.

277
rats throughout the scene. Rather than resolving Grace’s identity conflict, the play

enacts the barbaric deterioration which results from her own separation of her self

into an inside and outside. Cleansed explores the mind/body split but,

significantly, does not offer up any solution to the problem. As such the play

issues a challenge to anti-humanist (or anti-Cartesian) approaches which either

promote a harmonious balance between mind and body or disavow the split

altogether. Whilst the possibility of a reconciliation of the split between

consciousness and physical body is explored, ultimately the play suggests that the

subject cannot be entirely ‘cleansed’ of this problem. Rather than purging the

Cartesian subject of its problems, the conjoining of mind and body at the end of

Cleansed signals the death of that subject. Theoretically however, and from an

anti-humanist perspective, the death of the subject is considered to be a pre-

condition of social change.441 The death, that is, of the subject conceived as locus

of meaning, as containing some innate, pre-given essence. In contrast to such an

idealist conception of subjectivity, anti-humanists emphasise the importance of

material conditions in the development of the subject. For Dollimore, the

fundamental contrast between idealist and materialist conceptions of subjectivity

constitutes the heart of the debate and division between humanists and anti-

humanists.442 If the category of the individual character is taken as ‘the most

441
Kate Soper provides a useful summary of this debate and discusses the wide-reaching
significance of such calls for the death of the subject: ‘The “dissolution” and “death of Man”, as
announced by Lévi-Strauss and Foucault in the 1960s, was to become the dominant theme of the
Structuralist movement in the 1970s, and the slogan behind which a relentless and very wide-
ranging attack was mounted against “humanist” distortions supposedly affecting not only the
reading of Marx but practically every field of human study, from psychology to historiography
from literary criticism to anthropology itself’, Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism, p. 12.
442
Dollimore argues that the whole humanist versus anti-humanist debate can be said to mask a
more fundamental point of contention: ‘probably it is pointless to try and rescue the term anti-
humanism, especially since the important issues can better be focussed by addressing a more
fundamental division – of which the humanist/anti-humanist controversy is only a manifestation –
namely, that between idealist and materialist conceptions of subjectivity’, Radical Tragedy, p. 253.

278
apparently reassuring category of the humanist aesthetic’,443 then Kane’s

experimentation with character, or dissolution of character, signals a challenge to

humanist principles of subjectivity by destabilising the idea of the ‘I’-centred

subject. Nevertheless, formal experimentation in Kane’s next play Crave, along

with her comments on certain features of it, illuminates the problems of merely

substituting an idealist conception of subjectivity for a materialist one.

In Crave, Kane resists the forces of a new humanism (which, paradoxically,

emerges out of anti-humanism) whereby a fixed essence or meaning is still

located in the human, albeit in material categories such as skin colour, sex, or

genetic make-up rather than in the human mind. Kane’s strategic use of letters to

denote archetypes rather than fixed, embodied characters serves to undermine

such material determinism.444 Despite the initial indeterminateness of ‘characters’

C, M, B and A, their specificity as individual characters grows, both through the

unfolding of the different narratives and as a result of their being embodied in the

four actors chosen to enact each part. The choice of actors is, however, left open

by the indeterminate nature of the stage directions. Although C, M, B and A are

the bearers of specific meanings for Kane - which also indicate their likely age

and gender - the formal absence of specificity testifies to the playwright’s

aversion to the very notion of fixed identity and recalls her criticism of the over-

emphasis on identity politics and her concern that a writing based on such an

443
Dollimore, Ibid, p. xxix.
444
Saunders claims that ‘Kane’s “voices” are […] gender specific, both in the writing itself and
subsequently through performance of each actor embodying an individual character’, Saunders,
Love me or kill me, p. 105. This point is, however, debatable and it could be argued that the extent
to which we read the characters as gender specific is indicative of the assumptions that are made
about gender roles. Kane comments that she thought the characters’ lines made their gender
identity clear. However, whilst some of Kane’s examples of this may be biologically convincing
(for example her suggestion that it would be strange for a man to talk about his periods), other
remarks are more indicative of stereotypical attitudes to gender; such as the comment that ‘it
would […] be very strange if a man kept talking about how much he wanted a baby’ (ibid).

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emphasis merely reproduces and reinforces the prevalent social categories already

in circulation at the time. If the body has become the new object of criticism, the

marker of identity so to speak, then Kane’s refusal to provide any directions as to

bodily specificities reveals an effort to escape such determinations. Her

explanation that she did not want to disclose the meanings she associated with

characters C, M, B and A because she ‘thought they’d get fixed in those things

forever and nothing would ever change’,445 indicates that she is not only

experimenting with theatrical conventions but also attempting to open up a space

in which identity can be thought differently - outside boundaries of current

thinking in which identity may already be prescribed by, or inscribed on, the

body.

Following on from the formal innovations in Crave, 4.48 Psychosis dispenses

altogether with individual characters. As in Crave, this does not mean that

characters do not emerge in the play. Although a cast of three performed the first

production, the number of actors and the specificities of the actors (such as age,

gender, race) is not delimited by the play. This point is significant as the play is

not ‘about’ a specific character but, as already indicated in the title, more about a

state of mind. On the one hand the play foregrounds the isolated nature of this

mind. ‘Do you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the/wrong body?’

asks the voice (215). The ‘person’, or ‘I’, in this instance is hypothetically cut off,

or separated, from the body. The separation described here is emphasised toward

the beginning of the play through the monologues which express the voice’s

desperation in lines that indicate estrangement from both self and others: ‘I cannot

445
Kane interview with Rebellato, ‘Brief Encounter’ cited in Saunders, Love me or kill me, p. 104
and discussed previously in chapter five.

280
be alone/I cannot be with others’ (207). At the same time that the split between

consciousness and being is foregrounded, it is simultaneously called into question

by other elements of the play. The mind’s implicit claim to absolute autonomy is

shown to be an illusion through the multiple discourses in the play. The

monologues of the isolated mind are interwoven in the play with other forms of

expression such as doctor/patient conversations, medical records, fictional and

biblical references. Instead of standing outside these discourses, the mind is

shown, instead, to be formed within, and in relation to, these discourses.

Although 4.48 Psychosis is ostensibly about the retreat of a mind from the world,

it is a play which, through the interweaving of these multiple discourses,

simultaneously emphasises the mind’s inter-relatedness to the world.

The penultimate line of 4.48 Psychosis testifies to the absolute self-alienation felt

by the suicidal mind. Given the fact that Kane committed suicide shortly after

writing this play, it is easy to read this line as the ‘final word’ of the playwright.446

The violent splitting of the self which has been enacted throughout the piece is

evoked one last time: ‘it is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the

underside of my mind’ (245). The ‘myself I have never met’ is, however, shown

to be constituted by the very ‘I’ that speaks. It is the voice of the mind, in other

words, that produces the split or creates its own other. The paradoxical

relationship between this other and the self that produces it is visualised by

imagining the ‘other’ as a face ‘pasted on the underside of my mind’. This image

captures the essential feature of consciousness as something which simultaneously

relates to and distinguishes itself from something else. Spatially this is presented
446
The tendency to read Kane’s work biographically and, retrospectively, in view of her suicide is
discussed in chapter five.

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through the image of the face which is both related to the mind by being pasted on

to it, yet is distinguished from it by being on its underside. On the one hand, by

distinguishing itself, consciousness posits its own autonomy. Yet, at the same

time, in positing its own autonomy it subjects itself to a violent splitting. The

question of the splitting of the subject is discussed at length by Hegel in the

Phenomenology of Spirit where he describes the process of this split as both

violent and inevitable: ‘consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it

spoils its own limited satisfaction’.447 In other words, to reflect on consciousness,

to assert the freedom of human consciousness, is not just a liberating process but

also brings with it a sense of being constantly estranged from one’s true self

(however illusory this ‘true self’ may be). Rather than reading the penultimate

line as a lament, or as the playwright’s final words, I would like to re-consider it

in the light of the first words spoken by the tormented mind at the beginning of

the play:

I had a night in which everything was revealed to me.

How can I speak again?
(205)

Although whatever has been revealed has rendered the voice doubtful as to

whether it can speak again, the fact is that it does speak again. What the voice

speaks throughout the play can, bearing this initial doubt in mind, be read as an

attempt to articulate that which renders the voice almost incapable of speech: the
447
Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 51. Hegel’s place in the humanist/anti-humanist debate is worthy of
note here. Because the Phenomenology is primarily concerned with working through or
uncovering the truth of consciousness, Hegel’s ‘humanism’ is one which is not based on a
predetermined notion of human essence. It is for this reason that Soper argues that ‘we must
appreciate his influence upon the development of the humanisms associated with Marxism and
existentialism, both of which attempt to think humanistically within a framework that is critical of
essentialist metaphysics’, Humanism and Anti-Humanism, p. 29.

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untruth upon which society is grounded. The untruth, that is, of the notion of

‘mankind’ as a fully autonomous, free-thinking agent. Acknowledgement of this

untruth does not, however, announce an end to thinking. On the contrary, it

announces a call to autonomous thinking, but one which simultaneously

acknowledges its inter-relatedness to and dependency on the world and on others

in the world. The hesitancy underlining the question ‘How can I speak again?’

expresses the paradox inherent in this endeavour to continue speaking in the face

of such knowledge. How can I speak once everything - even my own ‘I-ness’ -

has been revealed to be an illusion? In other words, how can I speak knowing the

very autonomy which (allegedly) grounds my speech is an illusion? Yet how can

I continue to speak unless I accept (to some extent) this illusion? The power of

Kane’s work is that it does not attempt to overcome this paradox but, instead,

illuminates it. If the emphasis is placed on her desire to ask ‘how’ – ‘how can I

speak again’ - then her work can be seen as the radical attempt to engage with the

problems of being human which she hoped it would be.

Throughout this chapter I have shown how Kane’s work is consistent with a

theoretical movement towards posthumanism insofar as it is underpinned by a

concern to address questions of the human/inhuman whilst remaining acutely

aware of the potential problems of humanist thinking. Donna Haraway’s ‘A

Cyborg Manifesto’ is often cited as a seminal text in the conceptualisation of

posthumanism and sometimes, misleadingly, is given to represent a mere

celebratory or affirmative response to developments in techno-science.448 Such

448
An introduction to her text suggests that: ‘Donna Haraway’s manifesto sits dead-center within
cultural studies in its radical, pleasure-seeking affirmation of an often maligned and feared feature
of the contemporary world – technologization’, Simon During (ed.), A Cultural Studies Reader,
(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 271.

283
readings present Haraway as an apologist not only for the perceived failures and

dangers of technological developments but also, by extension, for the injustices of

late capitalist society. However, what Haraway draws attention to in the

Manifesto is the potential for blurring boundaries or dichotomies such as

mind/body, human/machine, which arises with the figure of the cyborg. For

Haraway, such boundaries constitute the organising principles of Western

thinking and, as such, underpin the kinds of injustices which she identifies in the

final sections of the essay (‘The “homework economy” outside “the home”’ and

‘Women in the integrated circuit’). The blurring of these boundaries, which is

facilitated by the confusion generated by the figure of the cyborg, is thus seen as a

precondition of any challenge to such injustices. By emphasising an affinity

between the human and the cyborg - or by stating, as she does, that we are already

cyborgs - Haraway is not offering a simple celebration of cybernetics but is

seeking a radical break with humanist thinking which is structured according to

strict, and exclusive, identity categories. Her Manifesto issues a call for a politics

formulated not on the basis of natural identification but ‘only on the basis of

conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship’.449 The term ‘political

kinship’ here is significant as it marks out a distinction between kinship based on

biological characteristics (such as gender or race), and points toward a

relationship founded on political affinity or on the basis of the kind of goal

intended by the Declaration of Human Rights with regards to the advancement of

human rights for all human beings. One of the problems of a politics based on

natural identification is that, apart from naturalising a belief in ‘essential’ unity -

the idea that all women are united on account of being women for example – it

449
Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in A Cultural Studies Reader, p. 277.

284
reinforces exclusive and oppositional categories and structures of thought. By

contrast, a politics based on ‘conscious coalition’ points more to a ‘self-

consciously constructed space’ which refuses to base itself on natural

identification and, instead, ‘constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of

otherness, difference, and specificity’.450 The figure of the cyborg, which

Haraway describes as, ‘a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern

collective and personal self’ thus provides a ‘code’ or a prototype for a different

conception of identity based not on natural characteristics or notions of wholeness

and taking into account the intrinsic link between the individual and the

collective.451 For a writer renowned as a post-humanist, Haraway’s Manifesto has

strong humanist undertones insofar as it implicitly attempts to harness a notion of

collective humanity in order to advance a politics of progression as indicated in

the comment that ‘I do not know of any other time in history when there was

greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of “race”,

“gender”, “sexuality”, and “class”’.452 What distinguishes it from humanism,

however, is its refusal to subscribe to a predetermined notion of human essence

and, instead, to base a notion of collectivity on political grounds rather than on

terms located within the human. In terms which recall Kane’s criticism of the

over-emphasis on sexual, racial and class politics, Haraway calls for a move

beyond identity politics which, nevertheless, acknowledges the historical

conditions which engendered such politics:

With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution,

gender, race and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential
unity’. […] Gender, race or class consciousness is an achievement forced
450
Ibid.
451
Ibid, p. 283.
452
Ibid, p. 278.

285
 on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social
realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.453

Like Kane, Haraway, sees gender, race and class divisions as symptomatic of

violent societies rather than the cause of violence. Focusing on the root of the

problem, Haraway harnesses the confusion generated by the figure of the cyborg

in an attempt to break with the oppositional logic which structures and limits

Western thinking. Throughout this thesis I have shown how Kane’s plays also

work to undermine oppositional structures of thought whilst retaining a strong

notion of value. This approach, I suggest, represents a challenge to dominant

logic and a refusal to buy into the either/or logic whereby one is either happy or

wretched, good or bad, human or inhuman – a logic which justifies the continued

demonisation and oppression of certain groups of human beings by other human

beings. It represents, instead, a tragic turn which recognises and affirms the

necessity of both sides of the oppositional coin

While Haraway’s explicitly political Manifesto centres around the figure of the

cyborg, Kane’s less explicit, but still politically-oriented, work returns to the

figure of the human. On this basis alone Kane’s seemingly humanistic stance

would, at first sight, appear to be in conflict with Haraway’s post-humanist

approach. However, although Kane’s writing is fundamentally concerned with

questions of the human, the formal presentation and thematic exploration of these

questions avoids reinstating an essential human at its centre. Instead of being

taken as a given, the question of what it is to be human is constantly explored in

her writing. At the same time, this exploration illuminates the point that to think
453
Ibid, p. 276.

286
the human is simultaneously to think the inhuman. By refusing the oppositional

logic which would insist on a strict division between the human and the inhuman,

and by affirming the tragic element of human existence, Kane’s work opens up a

space in which posthumanist identities and affinities can be imagined.

287
 Bibliography

Works by Sarah Kane

Blasted, in Frontline Intelligence 2: New Plays for the Nineties, (London:

Methuen, 1994)
Blasted, in Blasted/Phaedra’s Love, (London: Methuen, 1996)
Blasted, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001)

Phaedra’s Love, in Blasted/Phaedra’s Love, (London: Methuen, 1996)

Phaedra’s Love, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001)

Cleansed, (London: Methuen, 1998)

Cleansed, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001)

Crave, (London: Methuen, 1998)

Crave, in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001)

4:48 Psychosis, (London: Methuen, 2000)

4:48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001)

General Secondary Texts

Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton, (London:

Routledge, 1973)

Adorno, Theodor W., Notes to Literature, Vol 2, trans. by Shierry Weber

Nicholson,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by C. Lenhardt, (London: Routledge, 1970)

Aristotle, Rhetoric and On Poetics, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram

Bywater (Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library: 1981)

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis, Hackett

Publishing Company: 1985)

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by Kenneth McLeish, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998)

Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and its Double, trans. by Victor Corti, (London:
Calder and Boyars, 1970)

288
Aston, Elaine and Reinelt, Janelle (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern
British Women Playwrights, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000)

Badmington, Neil, (ed.), Posthumanism, (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000)

Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory,

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Barker, Howard, Arguments for a Theatre, (London: John Calder, 1989)

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen
Heath, (London: Fontana, 1977)

Barthes, Roland, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard,

(London: Penguin Books, 1990)

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers, (London: Vintage, 1993)

Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy, (London: Methuen, 1985)

Beistegui, Miguel and Simon Sparks, Philosophy and Tragedy, (London:

Routledge, 2000)

Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans by. John Osbourne,
(London: N.L.B., 1977)

Bond, Edward, The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State, (London:
Methuen, 2000)

Bouchard, L., ‘On Contingency and Culpability: Is the Postmodern Post-tragic?’,

Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics, (London: Routledge,
2001)

Brecht, Bertolt, ‘A Dialogue about Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, Brecht on Theatre,

ed. & trans. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 26-29

_____ ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, pp 33-42

_____ ‘Indirect Impact of the Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 57-62

_____ ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 69-
77

_____ ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 77-81

_____ ‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 84-90

_____ ‘Conversation about Being Forced into Empathy’, Brecht on Theatre, pp.
270- 271

289
Brewster, Scott, John Joughin, David Owen & Richard Walker (eds.), Inhuman
Reflections, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

Buse, Peter, Drama + Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)

Critchley, Simon, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature,

(London: Routledge, 1997)

Descartes, René, Key Philosophical Writings, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and

G.R.T. Ross, (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997)

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass,

(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982)

Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’,

Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001)

Dollimore, Jonathan, ‘Art in time of War’, The New Aestheticism, ed. by John
Joughin and Simon Malpas, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2003)

Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy, 3rd edn., (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2004)

Dromgoole, Dominic, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting,

(London: Methuen, 2000)

During, Simon, (ed.), A Cultural Studies Reader, (London: Routledge, 1999)

Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003)

Fackenheim, Emil L., ‘Kant and Radical Evil’, University of Toronto Quarterly,
Vol. XXIII, (1953-54)

Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of

Reason, trans. R. Howard, (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973)

Glicksberg, Charles I., The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century Literature,

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963)

Goldmann, Lucien, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in The Pensées of
Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. by Philip Thody, (London:
Routledge, 1964)

Gottlieb, Vera, ‘Theatre Today – the “new realism”’, Contemporary Theatre

Review, February (2003), pp. 5-14

290
Griffiths, Morwenna, ‘Feminism, Feelings and Philosophy’ in Feminist
Perspectives in Philosophy, eds. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)

Hapgood, Robert, ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The artistry of Franco Zeffirelli’,

Shakespeare, The Movie, eds. Lynda Boose and Richard Burt, (London:
Routledge, 1997)

Haraway, Donna, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon

During, (London: Routledge, 1999)

Hauke, Chistopher, Jung and the Postmodern, (London: Routledge, 2000)

Hegel, Georg W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1977)

Hodge, Joanna, ‘Freedom, phusis, techne: thinking the inhuman’, Inhuman

Reflections, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002

_____ (ed.) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, (London: Routledge, 2000)

Jarvis, Simon, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)

Joughin, John and Simon Malpas (eds.) The New Aestheticism, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003

Jung, C. G., Collected Works, ed. and trans. by Sir Herbert Read and others,
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953-78

_____ ‘The Aims of Psychotherapy’, Collected Works 16: 36-52, (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)

_____ ‘The Function of the Unconscious’, Collected Works 7: 173-187, (London:

Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1966)

_____ ‘Appendix: The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy’, Collected Works 16:

327-337, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)

_____ ‘Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype’, Collected Works 9i: 75-
110, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

_____ ‘Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation’, Collected Works 9i: 275-

289, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

_____ ‘The Transcendent Function’, Collected Works 8: 67-91, (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)

291
_____ ‘Psychological Factors Determining Human Behaviour’, Collected Works
8: 114-125, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)

_____ ‘General Description of the Types’, Collected Works 6: 330-407,

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)

_____ ‘Definitions’, Collected Works 6: 408-486, (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1971)

_____ Jung Letters, Vol. 1, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)

_____ ‘The Tavistock Lectures: Lecture V’, Collected Works 18: 135-182,
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)

Kant, Immanuel, The Moral Law. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans.
by H. J. Paton, London: Routledge, 1991.

Langridge, Natasha and Heidi Stephenson, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights
on Playwriting, (London: Methuen, 1997)

Lear, Jonathan, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988)

Leavis, F.R., ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’, A Critical and Cultural
Theory Reader, ed. by A. Easthope and K. McGowan, (Buckingham:
University Press, 1992)

Lechte, John, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to

Postmodernity, (London: Routledge, 1994)

Leech, Clifford, Tragedy, (London: Methuen, 1969)

Lewis, C.S., The Silver Chair, (Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, 1965)

Lippitt, John and Jim Urpeth, (eds.), Nietzsche and the Divine, (Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2000)

Lukács, Georg, Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, (London: Merlin
Press,1974)

Lucy, Niall, (ed.) Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology, (Oxford: Blackwell

Publishers, 2000)

Lyotard, François, ‘Answering the Question What is Postmodernism’, The

Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1984)

_____ The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and

Rachel Bowlby, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)

292
Malpas, Simon, The Postmodern, (London, Routledge, 2005)

Marx, Karl, ‘Preface to A Critique of Political Economy’, The Thought of Karl

Marx, ed. by David McLellan, (London: Macmillan, 1971)

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Penguin
Books, 1985)

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert D. Richardso and Anne
E. O’Byrne, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)

Nietzsche, Friederich, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. by Ronald
Speirs, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Nussbaum, Martha, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature,

(New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1990)

_____ The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics,

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),

_____ The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

O’Connor Brian, The Adorno Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)

Owen, David, ‘The Inhuman, the all-too-human and the over-human: Nietzsche,
ethics and Enlightenment’, Inhuman Reflections, ed. by Scott Brewster,
John Joughin, David Owen & Richard Walker, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000)

Page, Adrian, ‘Introduction: The Death of the Playwright?’ in The Death of the
Playwright, ed. Clive Bloom, (London: Macmillan Press, 1992)

Plato, The Republic, trans. by A. D. Lindsay, (London: J.M. Dent& Sons, 1935)

_____ The Symposium, trans. by Walter Hamilton, (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1951)

Rebellato, Dan, ‘“And I Will Reach Out My Hand With A Kind Of Infinite
Slowness And Say The Perfect Thing”: The Utopian Theatre of Suspect
Culture’, Contemporary Theatre Review, (February 2003), pp. 61-80

Redfield, James M., Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The tragedy of Hector,
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994)

Ricœur, Paul Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and
David Pellauer, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1984)

Rowland, Susan, Jung: A Feminist Revision, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)

293
Sarup, Madan, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism,
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)

Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin,

(Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974)

Schmidt, Dennis J., On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life,
(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001)

Schneidman, Edwin S., ‘Suicide, Lethality, and the psychological autopsy’,

Aspects of Depression, ed. by E. S. Schneidman and M. J. Ortega, (London:
Little, Brown & Company, pp. 1969)

Sierz, Aleks, ‘Cool Britannia?’ “In-yer-Face” Writing in the British Theatre

Today’, New Theatre Quarterly, 56 (1998), pp. 324-33

Sierz, Alex, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, (London: Faber and
Faber, 2001)

Siles-Borràs, Joaquim, ‘Evil, Freedom and Responsibility: An essay on Kant’s

Moral Philosophy’, The Richmond Journal of Philosophy, Issue 4, (Summer
2003), pp. 39-45

Soper, Kate, Humanism and Anti-Humanism, (London: Hutchinson, 1986)

Steiner, George, The Death of Tragedy, (London: Faber and Faber, 1961)

Tobin, R.W., Racine and Seneca, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1971)

Tookey, Helen, Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity, (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003)

Vellacott, Philip, ‘Introduction to Euripides’ Hippolytus’, Euripides: Three Plays,

trans. by Philip Vellacott, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953)

Wright, Elizabeth, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, (London: Routledge,

1989)

Works on Sarah Kane

Aston, Elaine and Janelle Reinelt (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern
British Women Playwrights, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000). Contains a section on Kane.

Bond, Edward, ‘Afterword: Sarah Kane and theatre’, in Graham Saunders, Love
me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002)

294
Brusberg-Kiermeier, Stefani, ‘Re-Writing Seneca: Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love,’
ed. by Bernard Reitz and Alyce von Rothkirch, Crossing Borders:
Intercultural Drama and Theatre at the turn of the Millennium, Contemporary
Drama in English 8 (Trier, 2001)

Buse, Peter, Drama + Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

Contains a chapter on Kane and Shoshana Felman (Trauma Theory).

Carney, Sean, ‘The Tragedy of History in Sarah Kane’s Blasted’, Theatre Survey,
46:2, (November 2005), pp. 275-296

Dromgoole, Dominic, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting,

(London: Methuen, 2000). Contains a section on Kane.

Greig, David, ‘Introduction’, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, (London: Metheuen,

2001)

Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002. Contains a section on Kane.

Langridge, Natasha and Heidi Stephenson, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights
on Playwriting, (London: Methuen, 1997). Contains a section on Kane.

Morris, Peter, ‘The Brand of Kane’, Arete, 4 (2000), pp. 143-152

Rebellato, Dan, ‘Sarah Kane: An Appreciation’, New Theatre Quarterly, 59

(1999), 280-281

Saunders, Graham, Love me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)

_____ ‘The Apocalyptic Theatre of Sarah Kane’, Anglistik &

Englischunterricht, 64, (Heidelelberg: University of Heidelberg, 2002)

_____ Graham ‘“Out Vile Jelly”: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King
Lear’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20:1, (February 2004), pp. 69-78

Sellar, Tom, ‘“Truth and Dare”: Sarah Kane’s Blasted’, Theater (1996), pp 29-34

Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, (London: Faber and
Faber, 2001). Contains a chapter on Kane.

_____ ‘A Review of Complete Plays by Sarah Kane, introduced by David Greig’,

Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 115-117

Urban, Ken, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
– PAJ 69, Vol. 23, No. 3, (September 2001), pp. 36-46

295
Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, ‘Sarah Kane, a Late Modernist: Intertextuality and
Montage in the Broken Images of Crave’, in Bernhard Reitz and Heiko Stuhl
(eds.)
What Revels are in Hand?: Assessments of Contemporary Drama in
English in Honour of Wolfgang Lippke (CDE Studies 7. Trier, 2001)

Zimmerman, Heiner, ‘Theatrical Transgression in Totalitarian and Democratic

Societies: Shakespeare as a Trojan Horse and the Scandal of Sarah Kane’,
Crossing Borders: Intercultural Drama and Theatre at the turn of the
Millenium, Contemporary Drama in English 8 (Trier, 2001)

Newspaper Articles

Armistead, Claire, ‘No Pain, no Kane’, Guardian, 29 April 1998

Bayley, Clare, ‘A Very Angry Young Woman’, Independent, 23 January 1995.

Benedict, David, ‘Disgusting Violence? Actually it’s Quite a Peaceful Play’,

Independent on Sunday, 23 January 1995

Brenton, Howard, ‘Freedom in chaos’, Guardian Weekend, 21 September 2002

Gardner, Lyn ‘Obituary’, Guardian, 23 February 1999

Hattenstone, Simon, ‘A Sad Hurrah’, Guardian Weekend, 1 July 2000

Macdonald, James, ‘They Never Got Her’, Observer Review, 2 February 1999

Mountford, Fiona, Theatre review of Crave, ‘Off West End’, Evening Standard
Metro, (Feb 2004) p. 20

Ravenhill, Mark, ‘Obituary’ Independent, 23 February 1999

_____ ‘Suicide art? She’s better than that’, Guardian Weekend, 12 October
2005

Internet Resources

Anon. ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, adopted and proclaimed by the

General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948 and made
available on the internet to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration
in 1998, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights/html

Fisher, Iain, Sarah Kane, http://www.ianfisher.com/kane.html

Jongh, Nicholas de, ‘Force Fed horror at gross banquet of cruelties’,

http://www.nigeledwards.dial.pipex.com/cleansed.htm, 18 May 2004, p. 2.

296
Morrow, Martin, ‘Love as a form of torture’, FFWD Weekly, 26 Feb 2004,
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/2004/0226/the3.htm 2, p. 2.

Sanders, Justin, ‘Phaedra’s Love’, The Portland Mercury: ‘Theater’ (01/17/02).

Review of defunct theatre’s production at the Back Door Theater,
http://www.portlandmercury.com/2002-01-17/theater.html.

Sharp, Daryl, Jung Lexicon, http://cgjungpage.org/jplexiscon.html, (1991)

Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face-Theatre, http://www.inyerface-theatre.html

Urban, Ken, ‘Cleansed’, nytheatre voices, 1 Feb 2004,

http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/voiceweb/v-urban.htm, p. 2

Plays by other Playwrights

Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works,

(London: Faber and Faber, 1986)

Bond, Edward, Saved, (London: Methuen Modern Plays, 2000)

Büchner, Georg, Woyzeck in The Plays of Georg Büchner, trans. by Victor Price,
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971)

Crimp, Martin, Attempts on Her Life, (London: Faber and Faber, 1997)

Ensler, Eve, The Vagina Monologues, The Official Script for the V-Day 2006
Worldwide and College Campaigns, (New York: Dramatists Play Service,
Inc. 2006)

Euripides, Hippolytus, in Euripides: Alcestis and other plays , trans. by Philip

Vellacott, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953)

Racine, Jean, Phaedra in Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, trans. by John Cairncross,

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963)

Seneca, The Phaedra, in An Anthology of Roman Drama, ed. by Philip Whaley

Harsh and trans. by Ella Isabel Harris (New York: Holt Rinehard and Winston,
1960)

Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night, ed. by J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, Arden

Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, (London: Methuen, 2003)

Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in William

Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988

Strindberg, August, Miss Julie in Plays One, trans. by Michael Meyer, (London:
Methuen, 1964)

297
 Strindberg, August, The Ghost Sonata in Plays: One, trans. by Michael Meyer,
(London: Methuen, 1987)

298

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