'Out Vile Jelly': Sarah Kane's 'Blasted' & Shakespeare's 'King Lear'

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond

Rejection thresholds (RjT) of sweet likers and dislikers

Sweetness is generally a desirable taste, however consumers can be grouped into sweet likers and dislikers according to optimally preferred sucrose concentrations. Understanding the levels of sweetness in products that are acceptable and unacceptable to both consumer groups is important to product development and for influencing dietary habits. The concentrations at which sucrose decreases liking (the rejection threshold; RjT) in liquid and semi-solid matrices were investigated in this study. Thirty six consumers rated their liking of 5 sucrose aqueous solutions; this identified 36% sweet likers (SL) whose liking ratings increased with increasing sucrose and 64% sweet dislikers (SD) whose liking ratings decreased above 6% (w/v) sucrose. We hypothesized that SL and SD would have different RjT for sucrose in products. This was tested by preparing 8 levels of sucrose in orange juice and orange jelly and presenting each against the lowest level in forced choice preference tests. In orange juice, as sucrose increased from 33g/L to 75g/L the proportion of people preferring the sweeter sample increased in both groups. However, at higher sucrose levels, the proportion of consumers preferring the sweet sample decreased. For SD, a RjT was reached at 380 g/L, whereas a significant RjT for SL was not reached. RjT in jelly were not reached as the sweetness in orange jelly was significantly lower than for orange juice (p<0.001). Despite statistically significant differences in rated sweetness between SL and SD (p=0.019), the extent of difference between the two groups was minor. The results implied that sweet liker status was not substantially related to differences in sweetness perception. Self-reported dietary intake of carbohydrate, sugars and sucrose were not significantly affected by sweet liker status. However the failure to find an effect may be due to the small sample size and future studies within a larger, more representative population sample are justifiable from the results of this study.