'Love me or kill me���: Sarah Kane & the theatre of extremes

Monograph on the playwright Sarah Kane

'A theatre of ruins'. Edward Bond & Samuel Beckett: theatrical antagonists

The playwright Edward Bond has long made known his antagonism to dramatists allied to Martin Esslin���s Theatre of the Absurd. The work of Samuel Beckett has come in for particular criticism by Bond. Using published writings (and unpublished correspondence between myself and Bond), I hope to trace the development of this antagonism between ���Bondian��� and ���Beckettian��� views of theatre. However, this article will also set out to argue that both early work such as The Pope���s Wedding (1962), and more recent work such as Coffee (1995), make use of motifs, characters and ideas from Beckett���s theatre. The article will set out provisional reasons why Bond, despite his misgivings, is not averse to incorporating elements from Beckett���s ���theatre of ruins���, as he terms it, into his own work.

'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

Sarah Kane: Cool Britannia���s reluctant feminist

Aleks Sierz in his important survey of mid 1990s drama has identified the plays of Sarah Kane as exemplars of what he terms ���In-Yer Face��� theatre. Sierz argues that Kane and her contemporaries such as Mark Ravenhill and Judy Upton represent a break with the ideological concerns of the previous generation of playwrights such as Doug Lucie and Stephen Lowe, whose work was shaped through recognizable political concerns, often in direct opposition to Thatcherism. In contrast Sarah Kane and her generation have frequently been seen as literary embodiments of ���Thatcher���s Children���, whereby following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inertia of the Major years, their drama eschews a recognizable political position, and seems more preoccupied with the plight of individuals cut adrift from society. In the case of Sarah Kane her frequently quoted statement, ���I have no responsibility as a woman writer because I don���t believe there���s such a thing���, has compounded this perception. Moreover, its dogmatism also echoes the infamous comments attributed to Mrs Thatcher regarding the role of the individual to society. However, this article seeks to reassess Kane���s position as a woman writer and will argue that her drama is positioned somewhere between the female playwrights who emerged after 1979 such as Sarah Daniels, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Clare McIntyre, whose drama was distinguished by overtly feminist concerns, and its subsequent breakdown, best exemplified by the brief cultural moment associated with the newly elected Blair government known as ���Cool Britannia���. Drawing on a variety of sources, including Kane���s unpublished monologues, written while she was a student just after Mrs Thatcher left office, this paper will argue that far from being an exponent of post-feminism, Kane���s drama frequently revisits and is influenced by the generation of dramatists whose work was forged out the sharp ideological positions that characterized the 1980s and a direct consequence of Thatcherism.

Voice, body and the transmission of the real in documentary theatre

This article analyses how listening is used to develop performances in Alecky Blythe���s verbatim theatre. Listening includes Blythe���s use of recorded oral interviews for devising performances, and also the actors��� creation of performance by precisely imitating an interviewee���s voice. The article focuses on listening, speaking and embodiment in London Road, Blythe���s recent musical play at London���s National Theatre, which adopted and modified theatre strategies used in her other plays, especially The Girlfriend Experience and Do We look Like Refugees. The article draws on interviews with performers and with Blythe herself, in its critical analysis of how voice legitimates claims to authenticity in performance. The work on Blythe is contextualised by brief comparative analyses. One is Clio Barnard���s film The Arbor, a ���quasi-documentary��� on the playwright, Andrea Dunbar which makes use of an oral script to which the actors lip-sync. The other comparator is the Wooster Group���s Poor Theater, which attempts to recreate Grotowski's Akropolis via vocal impersonation. The article argues that voice in London Road both claims and defers authenticity and authority, inasmuch as voice signifies presence and embodied identity but the reworking of speech into song signals the absence of the real. The translation of voice into written surtitles works similarly in Do We Look Like Refugees. Blythe���s theatre, Barnard���s film and The Wooster Group���s performances are a useful framework for addressing questions of voice and identity, and authenticity and replication in documentary theatre. The article concludes by placing Blythe���s oral texts amid current debates around theatre���s textual practices.

The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

In their sparse and isolated spaces, Samuel Beckett's figures imagine the touch of a lost love or dream of the comfort and care that the hands of a dear one might bring. Applying philosophical writings that feature sensation, particularly touch, this study examines how Beckett's later work for stage and screen dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other. With implications for how gender and ethics can be approached within Beckett's aesthetic, this study explores the employment of haptic imagery as an alternative to certain dominant codes of visual representation.

���Getting known���: Beckett, Ireland and the creative industries

In the context of national and global trends of producing Beckett���s work, this essay will investigate recent productions of Beckett���s drama which originate in Ireland and tour internationally, examining how these relate to the concept of national identity and its marketability, as well the conceptual and material spaces provided by large-scale festival events. In the last few months, Pan Pan has toured its production of All that Fall from Dublin to the Beckett festival in Enniskillen to New York���s BAM. The Gate Theatre, always a powerhouse of Beckett productions, continues its revival of Barry McGovern���s adaptation of Watt; after the Edinburgh festival, the show will play London���s Barbican in March 2013. While originating in Ireland, these productions ��� those of the Gate in particular ��� have an international, as well as domestic, appeal. Examining these and forthcoming Gate productions, I query to what extent a theatre company���s cultural origins and international profile may create a perceived sense of authenticity or definitiveness among critical discourses at ���home��� and abroad, and how such markers of identity are utilized by the marketing strategies which surround these productions. This article will interrogate the potential convergence of the globalized branding of both Beckett���s work and Irish identity, drawing on the writings of Bourdieu to elucidate how identity may be converted into economic and cultural capital, as well as examining the role that the festival event plays in this process.

Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman

The single plays of American ex-pat playwright Howard Schuman produced for British television between 1973 and 1983 have received little critical attention. Written in a distinctly un-British madcap, non-naturalistic and often pulpy 'B movie' style, they centre around caricatured, hysterical and/or camp characters and make frequent references to popular culture. This article provides a general survey of Schuman's plays and analyses his sensibility as a screenwriter, drawing extensively on material from interviews with the writer. The article's particular focus is how and why different cultural forms including music, film and theatre are used and referred to in Schuman's plays, and how this conditions the plays' narrative content and visual and aural form. It also considers the reception of Schuman's plays and their status as non-naturalistic dramas that engage heavily with American pop culture, within the context of British drama. Finally, it explores the writer's relationship to style and aesthetics, and considers how his written works have been enhanced through creative design decisions, comparing his directions (in one of his scripts) with the realized play to reflect on the use of key devices.

A Kind of Integrity: explorations in history and drama

All of our knowledge of history is mediated in one way or another. Even the experience of first hand witnesses are, it may be argued, subject to semiotic influences such as physical and emotional position, attitudinal point of view and accuracy of recall. A great deal of historical knowledge is acquired through dramatised versions of historical events. As the characters who actually took part in historical events become the dramatis personae of re-enacted accounts, their stories are edited not only to meet dramatic necessities but the social, psychological and cultural needs of both storytellers and audience. The process of popularising history in this way thus becomes as much about the effects of events on people as the events themselves. This chapter describes and analyses the way in which four historical events have formed the basis of school based drama workshops that explore this process. The Player in Tom Stoppard���s ���Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead��� posits that actors do on stage what others are supposed to do off, which, he claims, ���is a kind of integrity.��� The chapter discusses how drama may be used to explore not only stories from history but how those stories may be mediated and so become open to multiple interpretations. The process of dramatising events from history provides opportunities to develop and exercise a critical literacy that is concerned not so much with either fact or empathy as with interrogating both why and how stories are told. Thus, the experience of exploring the symbiotic relationship between drama and history is dependent on an internal logic which may indeed be perceived as a kind of integrity.