Category Archives: Sarah Kane

From the archives: New Expressionism

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As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

From the archives: A comfortable night at the theatre with the New York Times

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Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

First published on 7 April 2011.

From Ben Brantley’s “The Joys of Feel-Bad Drama,” in today’s New York Times:

Still, more than three decades after it was written, [Wallace Shawn's] Marie and Bruce …  continues to make many people recoil. And that’s because it is the opposite of a feel-good play. It’s a feel-bad play. That means it lacks the emotionally redemptive features of other works with similarly bleak worldviews: the catharsis of classical tragedy, or the outsized, blazing pessimism of Strindberg’s plays of marital warfare or the exquisite, compassionate lyricism of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams’s melancholy dramas. …

Similarly, we still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style. If you’re going to say something nasty, or flout taboos, say it with satire or poetry or larger-than-life passion. The Book of Mormon, this season’s hot-ticket Broadway show, makes fun not just of Mormonism but pretty much all religions, and it has a relentlessly foul mouth. But it is also a classic feel-good musical. Even the dark, violent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s new play about the war in Iraq, uses the artifice of comedy to keep us at a distance.

The last show at which I sensed the kind of unease I felt among the audience of Marie and Bruce was the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted several years ago. This British drama imagines an England in the grip of an internecine, nobody-wins civil war (inspired by accounts of the Balkan wars), and everybody in it behaves about as badly as people can. Unlike Marie and Bruce, Blasted is a shocker. It features acts of rape and mutilation. But it shares with Mr. Shawn’s play a hopeless view of humanity that goes way beyond cynicism. …

At a time in the theater when anything goes (to borrow the title of an old comfort-making musical now being revived on Broadway), making audiences squirm isn’t easy — and perhaps not even desirable. …

Brantley may be offering that last clause (emphasis added by myself, by the way) as a rhetorical gesture to spur further conversation. Or perhaps not; it is hard to tell whether Brantley is speaking for himself, or if he is speaking for what he considers to be the mindset of the audience (a mindset which, to grant him the benefit of a doubt, he may not himself share).

Classical tragedy, Strindberg and Williams are all found to be “emotionally redemptive” (whatever that may mean, whoever is to be redeemed, whether it’s the characters in the play, the dramatist or the audience), but Shawn and Kane apparently fall short of this laudable goal. In this, the conservative quality of contemporary theatre is to be found: the need for catharsis far outweighs any discomfort which might be created in the spectator, lest the spectator be expected to take that discomfort home with him. Regardless of the headline on the story, there seems to be very little joy in what Brantley characterizes as “feel-bad” theatre. The catharsis of classical tragedy was a social convention as well: the haste with which so many Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies seek to tie up any loose ends bespeaks a fear that the tragedy has unleashed ungovernable energies that can’t be tied together in Aristotelian closure: the ending, the catharsis, is imposed, not organic to the dynamics of the drama.

As Mr. Brantley says, “We still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style.” Indeed; it is expected to behave with propriety, to refrain from exploration beyond those formal and topical limitations; a theatre work must be a “classic feel-good musical” or adhere to the “artifice of comedy,” however much its energies may lead it astray from these apparent virtues.

I was speaking the other day to a friend who has seen more — and written more about — theatre over the past several decades than I possibly ever could hope (if that’s the word) to do; I wager she’s also got Brantley beat by quite a few miles as well. “I don’t go to the theatre for fun,” she told me. “If I want to have fun there are plenty of other things I can do that are far more fun than the theatre. I go for a walk or I watch TV or almost anything else.” The theatre should be a place that opens us to those “undesirable” recognitions that are denied to us by the television or film or music that must appeal to a far broader audience. Its intimacy makes it the pre-eminent arena for the searing investigations that the best theatre offers. But indeed, they do not close at the end, but should remain open: open for us to bring to our homes, to consider both our selves and our place in this world. And this, it must be said, is a talent at which Kane and Shawn excel.

I’ve written in the past on both Sarah Kane (here) and Wallace Shawn (here).

From the archives: Politics and a critique of tragedy

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In response to Karen Malpede’s essay “On Being a So-Called Political Playwright” which appeared at Howlround on 29 February, I repost the below brief entry, originally published on 3 March 2010.

An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: “Write what you know.” All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.

Sarah Kane’s statement “I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself” is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry’s corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer’s conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently “know” best.

David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker’s individual body of work:

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre … which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with “theatre.” This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

“Raising Hell: Introduction”
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (13-14)
Emphasis my own.

Photo gallery: Sarah Kane in Victory

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Though she did not seem to flourish particularly well at university, Sarah Kane said that her performance in a University of Bristol production of Howard Barker’s Victory was “an unusually brilliant experience,” and later would acknowledge Barker as a central influence on her own work. “In a few hundred years Howard will be like Shakespeare. No one will really understand what Howard Barker’s done until he’s been dead for a long time,” she noted in a later interview. Herewith a few rare photos of Kane as the widow Bradshaw in that 1989 production (staged when Kane was 19, five years before the premiere of Blasted) at the Glynne Wickham Studio Theatre, directed by Harriet Braun and Stephen Melville; I believe they are published here for the first time. I wrote about a recent PTP/NYC production of Victory here, more generally about the play here, and more about Kane here.

Left to right: Simon Pegg, Sarah Kane, and David Greig.

Graham Eatough and Sarah Kane.

Sarah Kane

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Sarah Kane.

Only time will tell whether the extraordinarily small number of plays by Sarah Kane (1971-1999) will have as great an influence on drama as those of Georg Büchner. Certainly their influence on British drama over the past twenty years has far outstripped what might be expected from a slim volume of only 268 pages. But the unquestionable power of the plays, and their deconstruction of realism and naturalism in the service of a hallucinogenic version of a post-catastrophic world, derives from their emergence from contemporary history and the cri de coeur of the author, which necessarily foregoes a distancing irony for a more devastating coldness of perception.

Kane’s best-known and most controversial play is most probably her first, Blasted (1995), which was directly inspired by the war in Yugoslavia, a multicultural jerry-rigged nation which consumed itself in civil-war violence. It was Kane’s insight that disclosed that many of the same historical influences which led to this violence — and the same human capacity for the aggression and destruction one individual could wage upon another — were just as present in the streets of Leeds as they were in the streets of Srebrenica. The same influences led Kane to destroy the domestic drama of the late 20th century, blowing up a hotel room to reveal the empty city behind it.

The conclusion of Blasted suggests, however, a singular capacity for compassion and love, even in a landscape seemingly devoid of hope. What is even more surprising, in the work of this eighth and final dramatist of the new Theatre of Revolt, is that the depiction of physical acts of compassion and love can be just as extreme as those of aggression and violence. It is the human urge to the administrative state, to drive the rivers of desire and irrational love into rational and socially malleable forms, that ultimately cripples the self that explores meaning in love with another. Kane’s third play, Cleansed (1998), to my mind the best play of her career, relinquishes subtext and metaphor for a series of extraordinary stage images of the protean capacity of love, desire, and social control to transform the human body itself. The play is wryly set on a university campus; Tinker, a psychiatrist, performs a series of experiments on a small group of men and women to establish the outer boundaries of love and cruelty. Assuming that such a play can be staged at all naturalistically, it is the darkest and most violent contemplation of the human body at extremes; and when death is no salvation (a conclusion that Blasted reaches as well), the human urge to compassion and love acquires an extraordinary new significance.

Having followed her darkest perceptions of the outer world to their extremes, Kane necessarily turned inward for her final two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. It is as if Kane turned from the expression itself to the personal source of that expression. In these texts, gone is any reference to a specific place and time; no more hotel rooms or college campuses; these are voices echoing in a tortured, solitary mind, more reminiscent of the novels of Samuel Beckett (especially The Unnamable and How It Is) than any of his plays. What might be most disturbing about both of these plays is that they indicate an end of theatre and drama itself, the form and genre dissolving, the collaborative nature of theatre undermined in the fearless self-consciousness of the individual. The hostility and viciousness with which her work has been greeted demonstrate the validity of Brustein’s picture of the dramatist of the theatre of revolt as described in the first chapter of his book:

[I]magine a perfectly level plain in a desolate land. In the foreground, an uneasy crowd of citizens huddled together on the ruins of an ancient temple. Beyond them, a broken altar, bristling with artifacts. Beyond that, empty space. An emaciated priest in disreputable garments stand before the ruined altar, level with the crowd, glancing into a distorting mirror. He cavorts grotesquely before it, inspecting his own image in several outlandish postures. The crowd mutters ominously and partially disperses. The priest turns the mirror on those who remain to reflect them sitting stupidly on rubble. They gaze at their images for a moment, painfully transfixed; then, horror-struck, they turn away, hurling stones at the altar and angry imprecations at the priest. The priest, shaking with anger, futility, and irony, turns the mirror on the void. He is alone in the void. [1]

It may be asked, after Kane’s inimitable example of this theatre, what might the theatre and drama be left to do in the 21st century. Each dramatist — and each critic, and each theatregoer — must answer the question on his own.

The standard edition is Sarah Kane: Complete Plays from Methuen, with an introduction by David Greig. The extent to which Kane’s first play, Blasted, has been taken as her most important work (an opinion from which I dissent; see above) is indicated by the fact that there is already one monograph by Helen Iball on the play as well as a critical edition of Blasted by Ken Urban. There is as yet no formal life, but two books by Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes and About Kane, collect a great deal of material about both her life and career.

My own previous writings on Kane’s work can be found here.

Footnotes
  1. Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt, pp. 3-4. [↩]