Explore the use of violence in Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted’ and ‘Cleansed’, saying to what purpose violence is being employed. Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

There is no doubt that Sarah Kane was a troubled person. Suffering from depression, she committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight, despite her success as playwright and director. Her plays share themes of extreme violence and oppression, with layered meanings, superimposing one location with another, thus forcing us as spectators/readers to draw the parallels which she saw between situations which, on the surface, are not commonly associated. ‘Blasted’ (1995) and ‘Cleansed’ (1998) are two such plays. Some could see Kane’s plays as gratuitously violent, self-indulgent and pointless, but many also view them as inspired, thought-provoking and refreshing. Kane was part of a new revolution in British Theatre, a group of writers who saw a need to push the boundaries further in an age when complacency was becoming the norm. Theatre has long strived to present life and its problems in an exaggerated form in order to emphasise, the subconscious part of our existence and help the spectator find some level of solution. Since the time of the modernist movements, theatre had evolved from pure entertainment for, in the main, the educated middle and upper classes, to a method of communicating truths with multiple meanings as has become a unifying trademark of postmodernism. With each generation, the emphasis has to grow stronger and the imagery and action with it, in order to be noticed. Kane and her contemporaries, such as Martin Crimp, Naomi Wallace, Anthony Nelson and others, have been placed together by Aleks Sierz under the umbrella of ‘In Yer Face Theatre’ in his book of the same name, which perfectly sums up its nature. Kane’s work in particular has an expressionistic and symbolic influence, which is vital in analysing it. We are forced to see beyond realism and experience the pain and suffering of the characters who are symbols themselves, through their experiences and actions. How symbolic of Sarah Kane her works are is debateable. (quote) We will never really know how much of her symbolism represented parts of herself and her own psychosis, and how much is deliberately symbolic of her perception of the outer world. When analysing the use of violence by this young female playwright, these issues must be taken in to consideration, alongside the effect on the spectator. What is the purpose of such violence and abuse? How effective is that extreme violence in making a statement, and is it really necessary to go to those lengths in order to make those points, i.e. could it be done with less shock tactics? Was Kane simply trying to be noticed, and in order to do so gratuitously wrote into her plays the most horrifying acts of cruelty? It is unlikely since Kane’s plays do not introduce violence unheard of previously in theatre. Oedipus, Macbeth, King Lear all contain brutal cruelty and bloodshed, and in mainstream film around the time of Blasted, Quentin Tarantino was popular, with his theme of violent shooting and torture. The question then is not the violence itself, but the scale and concentration of it, and the abstraction of context which makes these plays stand out.
Sarah Kane was brought up by Evangelical parents and followed their religion until early adulthood. Knowing this, we can therefore draw strong links between her plays and the bible:
“The reading I did in my formative years was the Bible, which is incredibly violent, full of rape, mutilation, war and pestilence.” What is more, it is God who seems to sanction or indeed instigate all these horrors in the Biblical pages. Nor can we say simplistically that the Old Testament is all violence and the New Testament all love: look at the Book of the Apocalypse. Sarah Kane renounced her Christianity when she left her teens, but the legacy remained with her.” (www.hullp.demon.uk)
In Blasted, Kane begins with a seemingly conventional suburban story of a seedy journalist, Ian, and an old girlfriend, Cate, whom he has taken to a grand hotel in Leeds with the aim of a one night stand. The narrative seems, at the start, to be simple: of power, the oppressor, Ian, and the oppressed, Cate, and we start to expect that this will be an exploration of personal relationships. The violence is introduced gradually into the room, first talked about in abstract terms; we learn what has happened overnight, before witnessing the act first hand. However, as the play progresses, Kane introduces a third character, the soldier, who not only represents the journalist’s mysterious past, but the war which was happening at that time in Bosnia. The action degenerates from a psychological menace into a surreal bloodbath with horrifying intensity, before ending calmly, the characters quietly resigned to their fates. The violence depicted shocks because it is intense, graphic, and just as we think it could not get any worse, it does. The degeneration to cannibalism in Ian’s eating of the baby and the soldier eating Ian’s eyes happens in front of us. The average theatre goer would not have expected this level of violence, nor the volume of brutality happening in front of them, especially at the time of the play’s inception.
In Blasted, the violence sinks beyond the justifiable act, for example, in self defence, to a depth beyond our expectations of humanity, yet is common in warring countries. All compassionate reason is lost. Violence is the linking force between the characters and situations, and destroys them all. The theme of violation and base humanity is brought in from the start, with the domination of Ian over Cate, the overt sexual nature of the communication between them, and the references to defecation, sweating, stinking. Ian’s overt racism would sent shivers amongst the most politically correct, but it adds to his grotesqueness of character and serves to make us instantly dislike him, as he stands against the very British quality, the unspoken rule that we do not say what we mean or think if it will offend. However, as the play progresses, we come to realise that Ian is at his lowest ebb, he has had nothing to lose by being crass and explicit in expressing himself directly and manipulating in order to get his desires. He is facing death through terminal lung cancer, alcoholism, and in his profession as journalist writes about the most heinous sexual crimes. He has had a relationship with Cate previously, indicating he has no qualms about paedophilia. He has broken societal taboos and dominates to gain personal gratification, paying no regard for the other, i.e. Cate’s feelings, wishes. He says he loves her, and wants to ‘make love’ to her, but it is clear he does not really understand true love; instead it seems he uses the word to manipulate Cate into submission. Ian’s use of violence is therefore portrayed as selfish means to an end for his personal gratification. We hear the way he dictates his reports over the telephone; immunised to the true personal horrors in the stories he is telling. We are told of his first violation of Cate, the rape and bite during cunnilingus between scenes one and two, but are witness to the second rape, as he holds a gun to her head after she has fainted and simulates sex on her again. This first shocking act to which we are subjected as spectators forces us to examine the horror of rape. The shock of witnessing this act serves to conjure up further hate for Ian, and adding to that shock is Cate’s reaction, of laughing hysterically, before crying uncontrollably. Her entrapment in the relationship, the hotel room, and constant references to wanting to go home and get out add to the tension. It is easy for us to categorise her as the abused, the victim, and Ian as the abuser at this point, but Cate does show some resilience, in ripping off Ian’s jacket sleeves, and biting him at the point of ejaculation, to retaliate against him for his acts of physical, emotional and psychological violence towards her. This then poses the question of whether sometimes a violent act of cruelty can be justified.
Our hatred of Ian is thrown into question when he becomes the victim. He accepts his fate, already resigned to his terminal illness and in chronic pain, almost invoking a sense of pity for him. The arrival of the soldier blasts’ open the interpretation of the character of Ian and shifts the setting from the recognisable suburban to a war-torn surreal post-apocalyptic landscape. The violence of which the soldier speaks, and the violent acts he commits, though horrifying, are explained through the dialogue between him and Ian. Before he commits each act of violence, he talks about it, putting it in context for us. His rape of Ian is reminiscent of the anal rape of Marban by the third soldier in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, through the rape being perpetrated by the representative invader on a civilian. Through the absence of any respect or compassion, therefore, the interpretation is widened. Sarah Kane wanted to blast open the ‘fourth wall’ literally in this play, in order for the interpretation to become widened.
The pain we are shown is more than physical, it is emotional. Each of the characters is in emotional pain, and the violation of this through physical torture serves to enhance the intensity of this play. Each character is at war; with themselves, each other and the outer war of society: The soldier represents the ‘real’ war in Bosnia, and Ian’s war within himself. The use of violence by all three characters, and the acceptance of it by all three, drags us unmercilessly into their world. The transfer from victim to aggressor which occurs confuses us; there is no black and white, we are denied the instinct to judge one character as the ‘baddie’ and sympathise with another throughout this play, as sympathy and horror at the violence committed falls in turn to each character.
In Cleansed, we are brought in to a what is written as a university, but much more representative of a concentration-type camp run by the dictatorial sadist ‘Tinker’ (named after the theatre critic Jack Tinker who had dismissed Blasted as ‘a disgusting piece of filth’). It is an institution designed to remove those considered ‘undesirable’ by society. We see the inmates, a young woman, Grace, and her imagined dead brother, Graham perform incest, a gay couple, Rod and Carl, a disturbed boy, Robin, and a peepshow dancer, named Woman, trying to save themselves through love. The spotlight is on those marginalised and outcast by society, through their difference. They suffer under authority, controlled through acts of violence, but always they hold on to their love. Despite mutilation and rape, Tinker cannot remove their hope that they will be saved through love. He himself is saved at the end of the play through sex with the Woman. The play is made graphic through the clarity of the language and the imagery. The presence of Tinker is quickly set as the one in control, watching over the inmates. He behaves as drug pushers do, creating the need in people so they depend on him, become helpless, and resigned to horrible things happening to them.
It is interesting that Kane removes the perpetrators of the beatings, we assume, lackeys of Tinker, from the stage, and we are left with the victims (Carl, scene four and Grace, scene ten). The impact is made stronger through this device, as the focus is purely given to the receivers and their suffering. The dismembered voices give the impression of powerlessness on the part of Carl and Grace, and the complete lowering of status. The gradual dismemberment – tongue, hands, feet, penis – of Carl throughout the play, and his refusal to give in demonstrates that pride and hope can survive:
“Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you. Tinker made a man bite off another man’s testicles. Can take away your life but not give you death instead.” (Rod to Carl: Scene 13:136)
Grace’s final mutilated transformation into her brother through the removal of her breasts and addition of Carl’s penis is initially horrifying. We see a woman whose femininity has been destroyed and yet, she accepts this change in her oppressed state and finds she can still love, and now that she looks and sounds exactly like her dead brother, she and he have become one. This makes us question what it is to be human, and brings us to the base line of love.
War is a theme linking both Blasted and Cleansed. In Blasted it is the Bosnian/Serbian War, happening at the time of the play’s inception and premiere. In Cleansed, the University is deliberately compared to a concentration camp. In war, we know there are casualties amongst the fighting soldiers, but there are also savage acts of brutality towards civilians, trying to live out their everyday lives. Ethnic cleansing, rape, murder, shooting, maiming, and imprisonment: these are the realities of war and are largely unreported in the mainstream media. We in Britain are cosily protected from such atrocities. Perhaps Kane was, in her depressive state, acutely aware of this hypocrisy in our society, and saw subtle parodies in our society and war-torn countries, linking our lives today with such happenings. “..the seeds of a full-scale war can always be found in peacetime civilisation and I think the wall between so-called civilisation and what happened in central Europe is very, very thin and it can get torn down at any time.” (Kane, S, cited in Sierz, A:200:101) Perhaps she felt an acute responsibility and an association through guilt about the gulf between her own comfortable life and the suffering of others, which may have triggered her depression, with writing becoming her creative outpouring of this mixture of her psychosis.
Sarah Kane did not merely want to be noticed through showing graphic violence on stage. She did not put scenes on stage which have never been seen before. Since the days of Greek Tragedy, horrifying acts of incest, rape, mutilation, murder and more have been seen. Kane was not alone in her desire to wake up the British Theatre scene of the 1990’s, but her work attracted probably the most media attention at that time. The key to analysing Kane’s work is to look at the whole play, not one aspect. As with Greek plays, the worst of the action happens off stage, and is talked about, although what happens on stage is gruesome. In both Blasted and Cleansed, we see aggressor and victim in most of the characters, and are therefore unable able to place judgements on them as either good or bad. Instead we find ourselves ‘bond’ with them on a humane level. Horrifying acts of violence do happen around the world every day, and Kane brings this to our attention through her innovative writing. Parallels can also be drawn with ourselves, and we are forced to become aware of the dark side of our nature and the base line of humanity, and of the choices we make each day in our behaviour. This is the purpose of violence in these plays, not to shock or titillate, but to wake up and examine ourselves in full and truly be aware that we are alive. In the words of David Grieg, Editor of Sarah Kane: The Complete Plays:
“To read these plays for what they tell us about the author is, to my mind, a pointlessly forensic act. The work’s true completion comes when the plays are read for what they tell us about ourselves.” (2002: xviii)
And in the words of Sarah herself:
“If a play is good, it breathes its own air and has a life and voice of its own. What you take that voice to be saying is no concern of mine. It is what it is. Take it or leave it.”(www.inyerface-theatre.com