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“A horror so deep only ritual can contain it”:
The art of dying in the theatre of Sarah Kane
by Sara Soncini
Death is an overarching presence in Sarah Kane's theatre work, in terms of both stage action and theme. From her début play, Blasted (1995), through to Phaedra's Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998), Kane's dramatic universe is peopled by characters charging towards their death, and usually encountering it in scenes of Grand Guignol excess and grotesque violence featuring spectacular displays of torture, body mutilation and dismemberment. Here, as well as in the later plays, death is ambivalently presented as the only escape from the nightmare of living and, at the same time, as that which makes living a nightmare; as the moment of “complete sanity and humanity” wherein, as Kane herself put it, “everything suddenly connects” (Saunders 2009: 72), and as the ultimate, irrevocable and unredeemable act of self- annihilation. Following Kane's turn towards a more poetic form of drama, in her last two plays this discourse of death is handed over to the words of nameless characters (Crave, 1998) or unidentified voices (4:48 Psychosis, staged posthumously in 2000), who are likewise engaged in a long, painful quest for selfhood pivoting on the awareness of mortality and the simultaneous dread of and longing for death it engenders – a contradiction sublimely captured in 4:48 Psychosis through the ironic line “I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit
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suicide” (207). 1 This on-stage narrative is of course framed by the off-stage reality of Sarah Kane's struggle with mental illness and self-inflicted death by hanging, at the age of 28, in King's College hospital in London, where she had been admitted following a failed suicide attempt and two earlier stays at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital (Cleansed bears the dedication “to the patients and staff of ward ES3”). Perhaps inevitably, the writer's personal history of existential despair and premature death, coupled with the increasingly confessional, introspective tone of her dramatic voice, has tended to validate biographical readings of her posthumous play in particular, but also, retrospectively, of her entire opus. Kane’s theatre writing has been accordingly seen as one long, carefully crafted and lucidly planned suicide note – one which, mimicking stage convention, begins with two characters making their entrance through the door of a hotel room (Ian and Cate in Blasted) and closes with a dramatic exit (the speaker's parting directions to “watch me vanish” and then “open the curtains” at the end of 4:48 Psychosis). While not wishing to downplay the prominence of the writer’s persona in the plays and the way it affects reception, this essay aims to foreground both the ritual quality and the sheer theatricality of the death scenes and narratives that crowd Kane’s drama. Throughout her work, dying is never an easy, straightforward business, but rather a long, complicated, and at times frustrating mise en scène which also entails rehearsing a repertory of traditional rites and, once their shortcomings become apparent, devising and testing new ones. In this perspective, one should be wary of taking literally a line like “I have resigned myself to death this year” (208) in 4: Psychosis, or the countdowns featuring in the same play: as I shall be showing, throughout the whole corpus the autobiographical strain ties in with a self-reflexive probing of the theatre's ability to provide a rite that will be capable of “contain[ing]” life’s deepest “horror” (Crave: 176) by supplying a formal framework wherein to express, embody and experience death collectively. Similarly, the foregrounding of the writer's self is just one among several discursive strategies through which Sarah Kane's dramatic work engages with, at one and the same time, the paradoxes of death and the paradoxes of theatre, pointing to stage space with its inherent duplicity (real/metaphorical, objective/subjective) as an ideal arena to fathom and challenge the fate of the body.
“S ICK MURDER RITUAL [ S ]”: THE THEATRICAL WAY TO DEATH IN B LASTED
“I've shat in better places than this” (3): Ian's opening line on entering the “very expensive hotel room in Leeds”, complete with mini-bar, champagne in ice bucket and complimentary bouquet of flowers, where he and Cate will spend the night together is
(^1) All page numbers refer to the Methuen Complete Plays edition (2001). When
necessary, the titles of individual plays will also be given in brackets.
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Ian puts the gun away.
He kisses her and she comes round.
She stares at him.
Ian You back?
Cate Liar.
Ian doesn't know if this means yes or no, so he just waits.
Cate closes her eyes for a few seconds, then opens them.
Ian Cate?
Cate Want to go home now. (27)
Death is likewise filtered through a conventional narrative framework, and thereby distanced, in the first scene, when Ian, who is a tabloid journalist, calls his office to dictate a ghastly murder story:
A serial killer slaughtered British tourist Samantha Scrace, S – C – R – A – C – E, in a sick murder ritual comma, police revealed yesterday point new par. The bubbly nineteen year old from Leeds was among seven victims found buried in identical triangular tombs in an isolated New Zealand forest point new par. Each had been stabbed more than twenty times and placed faced down comma, hands bound behind their backs point new par. Caps up, ashes at the site showed the maniac had stayed to cook a meal, caps down point new par. […] (12)
Ian's amusing inclusion of the technicalities of spelling and punctuation in his account of Samantha's tragedy works as an estranging device that brings out the packaging of violence as a commodity, the translation of death into the hackneyed formulae of media sensationalism.^2 On the other hand, the stale journalistic phrase
(^2) Both this story and the one Ian reads to the Soldier in Scene Three were taken
“straight from The Sun” (Sarah Kane qtd. in Saunders 2009: 54.)
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“sick murder ritual”, used to fictionalise Samantha’s story, also unwittingly anticipates Ian’s actual brutalisation at the hands of the Soldier, as well as his own subsequent suicide attempts. In Scene Three, after a mortar bomb has blasted apart the hotel room, the Soldier inflicts upon Ian the same atrocities perpetrated by another soldier, in the past, upon his girlfriend: he rapes him, pushes a revolver up his anus, and finally “grips Ian's head in his hands […] puts his mouth over one of Ian's eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it”, then proceeds to do the same to the other eye (50). Through the Soldier's insane retributive logic, Kane connects the spiralling global violence of armed conflict with the mechanisms of violence inside the couple: the “large hole in one of the walls” (39) left by the explosion acts as a powerful visual symbol of Cate's violated body, marking out Ian's primal and private act of violence as the seed of the full-scale destruction of war.^3 In a more metaphorical sense Ian is also being punished for his refusal to report the Soldier's eyewitness account of the horrors of war, dismissed by the hack as an unmarketable news item and one at any rate lying outside the province of “a home journalist, for Yorkshire” (48). On yet another level, though, the Soldier's torture can be seen as a practical demonstration of the exact ritual required by killing, following his allegations that Ian – who carries a gun, apparently works in intelligence for the regime (30), wishes for a new Holocaust targeting “the queers […] wogs and fucking football fans” (19), introduces himself to the Soldier as a colleague “of sorts” (40), and claims to have killed people and disposed of bodies – is actually totally unskilled in the art of death (“You haven't got a clue”, 47). The fact that the Soldier shoots himself after completing his ferocious routine, whereas he refrains from pulling the trigger on Ian, is also significant: having ascertained the latter's unpreparedness, he denies him the privilege of dying. It should also be noted that the Soldier is simply discovered dead, revolver in hand and brain splattered, at the beginning of the following scene: the only death (and, for that matter, the only rape) shown on stage in Blasted is Ian's with its attendant simulacra. After the Soldier's demise, Ian's ordeal becomes very much a lonesome affair. His efforts to persuade Cate to stay in the room take on a far greater urgency now that he is blinded and totally dependent upon her for his survival. In the closing scene, after burying the baby she has brought back from her previous journey across the ravages of war, Cate goes out again to hunt for food. The final stage of Ian's punishment takes the form of a prolonged sequence of prevalently mute actions in which he is shown masturbating, defecating, crying – “get[ing] as low as he can get”, to put it in Sarah Kane's own words (Saunders 2009: 57). Utterly isolated and powerless, stripped down of all but the stark reality of the body with its most basic needs and drives, Ian seems at last ready to perform his parting rite. The play's finale, however, presents Ian's death as
(^3) Kane has commented on her desire to make her story about “two people in a room”
connect and resonate with the bloodshed in Bosnia at the time of the play's composition. See Saunders 2002: 39.
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orchestration of Ian's lengthy punishment as a progression through a series of tableaux of suffering calls to mind the Stations of the Cross, just as his death and subsequent return to life ironically hint at Christ's burial on Good Friday, descent to the underworld on the Saturday, and resurrection on Easter morning. Ian's cannibalistic assimilation of the baby and his endeavour to take her place in the comfort of the tomb/womb are also related to the envy for the prayer that Cate had devised for her, and resolutely denied him, at the scene's opening (58). With the final image of Cate nourishing Ian after she has failed to save from starvation the baby in her trust, the identification with the dead innocent appears to be complete and accepted by both: more than acknowledging his companion’s generous sharing of her meal, Ian's “thank you”, uttered when Cate has already finished feeding him and is sitting apart, “huddled for warmth” (61), could refer to her new willingness to join in the effort to work out an alternative, and this time adequate, death rite. The importance of a concerted approach to the art of dying, and the crucial function of self-devised formulae to aid and bring about the ritual process, becomes a key feature of Kane’s later verbal plays, the most striking instances in this respect being the shared litany as the characters collectively embrace the solace of death at the end of Crave, and the mantra-like repetition of the couplet “Remember the light and believe in the light / An instant of clarity before eternal night” punctuating the speaker’s (or the speakers’) journey towards annihilation in 4:48 Psychosis. In Blasted, instead, Ian’s endeavours to find a viable and shareable death rite takes on a specifically theatrical nuance. With its unspecified addressee, Ian’s final “thank you” might as well be aimed at the audience and therefore read (and play) as a performer's parting courtesy before the final curtain, a counterpart to Ian's expletive when the rain wrecks his dying act through what looks very much like an annoying technical fault (60). The impression that the alternative rituals explored in Blasted are also, to a great extent, theatrical rituals is further enhanced by the strong ties established with other dramatic representations of the art of dying, most notably those memorably offered by Shakespeare and Beckett.^6 The reliance of Blasted on Shakespeare's King Lear is easy to ascertain: Ian's journey from reality to nightmare, from sanity to madness, his joint embodiment of Gloucester's physical and Lear's mental blindness, the shocking on- stage representation of the eye-gouging, Kane’s expressionistic version of Ian’s storm scene on the 'blasted heath' are only some of the more obvious points of contact between the two plays. As Graham Saunders has noted, the stage action of Ian lowering himself into the infant's grave is a literal rendition of Lear's opening speech, where the ancient king declares that the rest of his life is but a (babyish) “crawl toward
(^6) Sarah Kane has pointed to King Lear and Waiting for Godot as the two main influences on the composition of Blasted (see Saunders 2009: 39). For an overview of Kane's use of dramatic and literary sources in Blasted see Saunders 2002: 54-60 and, specifically on the presence of King Lear in the play, Saunders 2004. Shakespeare’s ghost haunts the whole of Kane’s production: particularly Cleansed, which derives plot motifs and the central concern with travesty and shifting gender identities from Twelfth Night, and in Crave, which contains echoes of Hamlet’s suicidal musings.
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death” (I.1.40)^7 , and announces his related decision to unburden himself of the load of sovereignty by dividing the reign. Ian's ambiguous resurrection likewise resonates with Lear's belief, on awakening from a long sleep after the torment of the storm and the heart-rendering encounter with the blinded Gloucester, that he has died and is now in hell (or perhaps purgatory). The Shakespearean king's rebuke when a concerned Cordelia inquires after his health, “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave” (IV.vii.45), is far more urbane and articulate than Ian's monosyllabic “shit” (60), but expresses the very same annoyance at an untimely interference coming from the world of the living. At the same time, however, the image of an interred Ian who goes on speaking and eating notwithstanding the fact (or fiction) of his death is an unmistakable visual quotation of Winnie's resilience in the second act of Happy Days, and Kane's insistence on the impossibility of dying for Ian is just as Beckettian, reminding one of Hamm and Clov's terminal condition and concomitant failure to terminate in Endgame. The same conflation of Beckettian and Shakespearean echoes is apparent in Ian's grotesque suicide attempt in Scene Four, which Sarah Kane herself has described as a “blatant rewrite” (Saunders 2004: 75) of Gloucester's Dover scene in King Lear. Ian, blind and helpless after the Soldier's vengeance has fallen upon him, entreats Cate to help him die. She complies and hands him the gun used by the Soldier to rape him and then shoot himself, but only after she has removed the munitions and engaged in an apparently well-meaning dispute against self-inflicted death, even naively touching upon divine prohibition (“God wouldn't like it”, 55). When Ian finally sticks the gun into his mouth and fires, the gun clicks empty; he pulls the trigger again and again until, dejected, he gives up and swears. Right on cue, Cate sensibly retorts that fate, or God, have obviously ordained him to live. While confirming Ian's – and the audience's – suspicion that her real motivation is the desire to punish her abuser by prolonging his agony, Cate's specious arguments are an almost exact repeat of Edgar's attribution of his father's failed suicide to the hand of divine intervention (King Lear, IV.v.72-4). However, while Edgar's masterly pretence succeeds in duping Gloucester, who actually believes he is miraculously unhurt after falling off the non-existent “dread summit of this chalky bourn” (IV.v.57), Ian's patent fiasco bears a closer resemblance to Vladimir and Estragon's lame plans to hang themselves in Waiting for Godot – an echo further enhanced by Kane’s overall modelling of Ian and Cate’s love/hate relationship on the paradoxical bond locking together Beckett’s tramps. The specific method of self-slaughter adopted by Ian even seems to gesture towards the first major critical study of the Shakespeare/Beckett connection, namely Jan Kott’s groundbreaking essay on “King Lear, or Endgame” in Shakespeare our Contemporary (Kott 1967: 100-133). As is well known, the Polish scholar drew on the similarities between Gloucester's suicide in Lear and the tramps' botched attempts in
(^7) Quotations from King Lear are taken from the 1990 Arden edition (see Works Cited).
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“D EAD REAL ”: BODY AND NARRATIVE IN KANE’S LATER PLAYS
Sarah Kane’s last two plays mark a radical formal departure in her production. Crave has four characters, named only A, B, C and M, no stage directions, and no stage action apart from the actors speaking lines made up of fragmentary impressions, dislocated memories, snatches of conversation, and quotations from a variety of literary and non-literary sources. 8 Although they intersect and resonate with each other, ultimately building up a shared discourse pivoting on the common topic of death, the ensuing narrative bears little resemblance to traditional dialogue and is rather orchestrated according to poetic patterns of sound and rhythm. The performance text of 4:48 Psychosis is even more open in that Kane gives no indication as to the number of speakers and the attribution of lines: the play could be performed (as has often been the case) as a monologue inhabited by different voices and containing sections of internalised dialogue, or, at the other extreme, as a choral piece potentially involving as many actors as the lines to be spoken.^9 Whereas in the earlier plays the representation of death and dying, of pain inflicted on or felt through the body, had been mainly and increasingly visual, in Kane’s later work these images and concerns persist but they are totally subsumed in language. Consequently, the connected ambiguities of death and theatre transfer from the scenic dimension onto the body of the text and of the language, taking on an even more explicit self-reflexive quality. Whether expressed physically or verbally, Kane’s dramatic and postdramatic works^10 share the same aesthetics of extreme, excessive violence, and the same tendency towards self-conscious acknowledgement of its implications. To get an idea of the diversity of approach and underlying consonance of intents one can compare the staging of Hippolytus’ death at the end of Phaedra’s Love with an instance of narrated suicide in 4:48 Psychosis. Kane, for whom one of the main attractions about rewriting Seneca’s tragedy was the possibility of subverting the classical convention of bloody deeds happening off-stage (see Saunders 2009: 68), presents the Athenian prince’s killing at the hands of an angry mob as a scene of Grand Guignol verging on the grotesque. The actions prescribed by her stage directions include the cutting off of Hippolytus’ genitals, which are grilled on a barbecue and then thrown to a dog; the protagonist’s disembowelment, with kindred culinary fate of his entrails; and, finally, a more orthodox stoning seasoned with savage kicking and spitting (99-100). One instant before his much coveted demise, on spotting the vultures circling above his head and about to feast on his corpse, Hippolytus cracks a smile and observes: “If there could have been more moments like this” (103). Kane’s protagonist – a radical
(^8) On the heterogeneity of intertextual references in Kane’s work see Saunders 2002: 54
and, specifically on the web of citations in Crave, Pankratz 2004: 70-1. (^9) In James Macdonald’s first production at the Royal Court, the narrative task was
divided between three performers (two female and one male). (^10) For a penetrating analysis of 4:48 Psychosis in the light of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
concept of postdramatic theatre, see Barnett 2008.
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incarnation of the typical puritan mistrust of all figures of authority with their empty formulae to cure body and soul – expresses satisfaction at the spectacularly non- canonical death rite that has just been performed, and which stands in stark opposition to the conventional funeral pyre lit by Theseus at Phaedra’s burial. His line, however, also sounds as a tongue-in-cheek metatheatrical commentary on Kane’s dogged determination to confront her audience with an overdose of violence in order to push theatrical representation to its limits and thereby make its conventions transparent. The suicides prefigured or described in 4:48 Psychosis display the same hyperbolic fury against the body and the same ironical overtones, almost a self- mockery of the “in-yer-face” sensibility that had become the trademark of Kane’s work:
- Have you made any plans?
- Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself.
- All those things together?
- It couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.
(Silence.)
- It wouldn’t work.
- Of course it would.
- It wouldn’t work. You’d start to feel sleepy from the overdose and wouldn’t have the energy to cut your wrists.
(Silence.)
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‘psychiatric patient’ consciousness), and at the curse of being trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth/restart. Because the stories keeping the characters in the grip of the text are, to a considerable extent, made up of fragments or facets of Kane’s biography, it is easy to associate the writer’s persona with the plight of her speaking selves – a reading corroborated, to some degree, by the writer’s own appearance in Crave in the role of C, who has been diagnosed with depression and seems to be or to have been in treatment in an institution (“They switch on my light every hour to check I’m still breathing”, 188).^11 The speakers’ perception of their textual existence as a form of punishment, however, also pinpoints the author as a figure of oppression. On expounding the multiple identifications behind the nameless characters in Crave, Kane has described A as “the author and abuser, because they’re the same thing; Aleister as in Aleister Crowley, […] and the Anti-Christ” (Saunders 2009: 79). The older male character with the one long speech in the play, A offers advice on the rules of poetry while simultaneously embracing Crowley’s alleged satanism and quoting the fundamental tenet of his occultist philosophy, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” (199) – a rule of conduct that could well apply to the author’s tyranny over the text. C’s subsequent plea to “kill me”, followed by a beat and by the conclusive litany announcing a collective “free-falling / into the light” (200), seems to acknowledge precisely the writer’s arbitrary power of life and death over his characters. Cast in the split role of victim and victimiser, the author’s persona in Crave and 4:48 Psychosis comes across as a verbal reincarnation of earlier figures of authority and authorship, such as Ian wielding his pen and penis on the abused female body (Samantha’s and Cate’s) and, most importantly, Tinker with his cruel experiments in bodily modification and soul engineering throughout Cleansed.^12 The identification of the author in the text with the author of the text is made manifest in 4:48 Psychosis, most notably in the section (231-14) where the subject of enunciation not only presents him/herself as a writer, but goes on to mention some of the formal features of the play s/he inhabits – such as the breakdown of textual boundaries as a way of embodying the psychotic condition, the practice of borrowing from other sources, the predominantly verbal quality^13 –, and even quotes
(^11) Sarah Kane played the role of C for five performances during the play’s tour to
Maastricht, in September 1998. Earlier that year, Kane had appeared on stage as Grace in the final three performances of Cleansed at the Royal Court, following an injury of the original actress, Suzan Sylvester. (^12) As is well known, the doctor/torturer in Cleansed owes his name to the Daily Mail
drama critic, Jack Tinker, who penned the most venomous critical onslaught against Blasted, dubbing the play a “disgusting feast of filth”. This again creates an association with the writing profession, as well as evoking the character’s ruthless and rather clumsy experiments in moulding and remoulding “tinkering with” his patients/characters. (^13) “How can I return to form now my formal thought has gone?”; “Last in a long line of
literary kleptomaniacs / (a time honoured tradition)”; “Just a word on the page and there is the drama” (213).
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unfavourable criticism of Kane’s own previous theatre work (the speaker calls him/herself an “expressionist nag”, a phrase taken from Alastair Macaulay’s review of Cleansed in the Financial Times). The play’s ending, staging both the death of its speaking ‘I’ and the death of its author, is apparently a typical instance of Kane’s terminal epiphanies in which “everything suddenly connects” (see above) and the subject experiences an instant of wholeness in the face of permanent obliteration. In the script, the page is increasingly taken up by the blank space of non-being as the printed words invite the reader to
watch me vanish
watch me
vanish
watch me
watch me
watch (244)
The final page contains only two lines floating, as it were, in the void of self- extinction. The last words of the Kane corpus, placed at the bottom of an almost totally white sheet, are an instruction to “please open the curtains” (245), followed by the customary five centred dashes indicating the end of a section (and, so far, the beginning of a new one). In performance, this textual open-endedness does not come across, but other kinds of ambiguity become apparent instead. In the original Royal Court production in June 2000, the closing line functioned as a spoken stage direction, prompting the three actors to open the shutters inside the cramped Theatre Upstairs to let in the evening sunlight and the noise of people and traffic on the London street outside – a relieving, redeeming gesture that Graham Saunders likens to “the closing off of a funeral ritual [...] a laying to rest of the dead person’s spirit” (2009: 36). The scenic
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Wallace C., 2004, “Dramas of Radical Alterity: Sarah Kane and Codes of Trauma for a Postmodern Age”, in H.-U. Mohr, K. Mächler (eds.), Extending the Code: New Forms of Dramatic and Theatrical Expression, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier, pp. 117-30.
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Sara Soncini is a lecturer and researcher in English Literature at the University of Pisa. Her main areas of interest are modern and contemporary theatre culture, and stage and screen translation. She is the author of a volume on late XX century rewrites of Restoration theatre, Playing with(in) the Restoration (1999), and co-editor of Shakespeare Graffiti: Il Cigno di Avon nella cultura di massa (2002), Conflict Zones: Actions Languages Mediations (2004), Myths of Europe (2007), Crossing Time and Space: Shakespeare translations in present-day Europe (2008). She is currently writing a book on the representation of war in contemporary British and Irish drama.
s.soncini@angl.unipi.it
