Revelation or Damnation? Depictions of Violence in Sarah Kane's Theatre

Text Sample:
Chapter 3, Sarah Kane s dramatic art:
3.1, Kane s writing: similarities and points of difference in her plays:
In the short period between 1993 and 1999 Sarah Kane wrote five plays which constitute her lifework. Each of them is marked by the explosive theatricality, the lyricism, the emotional power, and the bleak humour that are hallmarks of Kane s writing. Just as her models Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Kane departed from the path of (British) naturalism. Kane was a constant experimenter. Each of her plays has its own quality and develops an independent style of its own. Even though there is an evident development in her work, a red thread which (thematically) links all of her plays, different styles crystallised in the process of her writing, which allow the subdivision of Kane s theatre. The critic Ruby Cohn makes out two radically different theatre styles in Kane s work, the result of which are three violent and two linguistic plays. While Kane s first three plays, Blasted, Phaedra s Love, and Cleansed, are characterised by their excessive violence, her last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, show a language oriented dramaturgy and put emphasis on a poetically dense language. The atrocities of her first three plays are substituted in her last two works by verbal devices. The imagery thus moved from a mainly physical to a textual realisation and in her last two plays it is words, rather than action, that build the play. However, Kane s linguistic plays do not entirely renounce the poetic imagery which dominates her first three plays. In Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, language does not substitute the visual images, it rather comprises them. In each of her plays Kane employed different stylistic and linguistic techniques. Hence, enfold[ing] a different architecture, every single play is special and stands on its own as a piece of art. However, as pointed out above, there are also parallels and similarities such as a common

Lea Gutscher, M.A., was born in Stuttgart in 1979. She studied English, Italian and Political Science in Stuttgart and Berlin and also spent some time abroad in London and Parma. She currently works as an editor in the field of media and public relations and is still a connoisseur of British drama and a regular theatre-goer.