Wherever the transgressive might still exist in our culture, it’s certainly not in the theater. Brecht, Artaud, Genet, and Beckett. These artists are gone, and where their spirits reverberate and ghosts haunt is certainly not in the modern theater. Have you seen a Broadway show recently? The last one I watched was a steaming pile of woke, misery-ridden drivel starring Adam Driver and Keri Russell from that not-so-bad Russian spy/lite porno series The Americans. It was insufferable. As a casual observer, it often appears like whatever shred of originality, danger and bold vision that still existed within the theater industry died with British playwright Sarah Kane, when she hanged herself just two days after overdosing on pills in 1999. She was only 28-years-old.
Why does our theater feel so disconnected from modernism? Throughout history,, the theater was just as important an aspect of an avant-garde project as was literature, painting, or filmmaking. What changed? Though I’m merely speculating, I suspect that it’s because the theater has grown disconnected from that very history. It was Frederic Jameson who defined the postmodern condition as one mired in generational inability to think historically. Kane’s greatest subversion then was thinking historically, and creating a postmodern theater aware of its place in a lineage of transgressive theater and performance.
Theater history is steeped in polarities of extremity: joy and pain, love and war, sex and death, tears and laughter. The Jacobean Tragedy, the comedy of errors. To revel in the theater is to revel in an excessive mirror of the world in all its contradictions and harsh realities. I don’t want theater to just validate the narrow, bourgeoise-accepted moralism of today. I want to luxuriate in degradation. I want death, and betrayal, and ghosts, and blood, and excess, and sadism, and ecstasy. Theater has died a slow dead as its lost touch with these multitudes. Theater has diminished because “it has broken away from the truly anarchic spirit that is the basis of all poetry,” to quote Artaud.
Anarchy pulsated in Kane’s plays. The anarchic impulse could drive her work right to the brink of sanity. Her plays assaulted her viewers with the horror of existence, and the humor of horror. Artaud wrote about 17th Century playwright John Ford’s play ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore as a work of theater that “disturbs the senses’ repose” that frees the repressed desires of the audience’s unconscious mind. “From the moment the curtain rises,” writes Artaud, “We see to our utter stupefaction a creature flung into an insolent vindication of incest, exerting all the vigor of his youthful consciousness to proclaim and justify it.”
Sarah Kane resurrected the debauched spirit of Jacobean theater for Fukuyama’s end of history. When the Soviet Union met its violent end, and liberal capitalism was declared the victor of the historical ideological battle, Kane’s plays screamed “not so fast” in response to the arrogance of a generation that thought it had solved the problem of history. Kane’s work demonstrated to the post-digital late capitalist, mostly war-less and upwardly mobile Generation X that their world was as mired in sexual anxiety, rape, incest, murder, torture and death as was the world inhabited by the Jacobeans, from Ford to Marlowe to Shakespeare. The postmodern West wasn’t devoid of the savagery of previous epochs, but the savagery of the postmodern West was merely veiled beneath the luxuries of a technologically enhanced society. Kane ripped the mask of sanity from the face of an entire generation. Kane used the form of classic theatrical tragedy to expose the underbelly of society’s forward progression: sadism, degradation, and bloodshed. Violence is history’s one immovable pillar, immune to technological or cultural progress, her plays suggested.
In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a theater director stages a production of a lost Jacobean tragedy that is essential to the novel’s narrative. When asked by the novel’s protagonist about an incomprehensible word spoken by one of his actors in the play, he dismisses the idea that any meaning can be extrapolated from a play’s text. “I’m the projector at the planetarium,” he says. “All the closed little universes visible in the circle of that stage are coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices as well.” Sarah Kane’s work utterly negated this notion: all her work’s physicality and intensity is alive and breathing within her text. And yet, she left room for much directorial decisions in her writings in her complicated and visceral stage directions. This lends productions of Kane’s work an enduringly unhinged and spontaneous quality. “Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, then it was possible to represent it,” writes Scottish dramatist and Kane colleague David Grieg. Kane used brutal language within her plays to unlock the expressive potential of her directors by demanding they adhere to the cruelty of her texts. How to represent violence? How to represent rape? The greatest playwrights leave potentialities within texts that can unlock the collective unconscious. Kane’s work is like a demon passed from director to director, unleashing the maniacal vision within. To direct a Sarah Kane play is to become the Deleuzian body-without-organs, in a sense.
As Umberto Eco noted in On Ugliness, definitions of “ugliness”are culturally relative (Eco cites the example of an African tribal mask, which is perceived as an abject object in the West and an object of beauty and nobility within the tribes). Kane then basks in what can only be understood as an eternal ugliness. She puts what we don’t discuss, nigh, what we even like to think about, right on stage, plainly visible. Often associated with what is arguably the last great 20th Century transgressive theater movement - “In-Yer-Face” theater was a label applied to nineties playwrights ranging from Kane to Mark Ravenhill to Anthony Neilson - her work still stands apart from her contemporaries for its singular horror and lingering impact on the psyche. Reading Kane or watching her plays has a similar effect to reading Lovecraft or watching a Beckett production for the first time: it radically redefines your understanding of the power of text and the possibilities of theater.
A production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Kane’s first play Blasted debuted in 1995. It follows a journalist named Ian, portrayed as virulently crass, misogynistic and homophobic, who brings a young girl named Cate to a hotel room against an unnamed but illustratively brutal war. Midway through the third act, a despairing soldier enters the hotel after Cate has left to fetch some food. The soldier recounts to Ian the atrocities he has committed: rape, murder and genocide. Every act of cruelty, the soldiers says, was perpetrated in the name of symbolic revenge for the soldier’s murdered girlfriend.
“Three men and four women. Called the others. They held the men while I fucked the women. Youngest was 12. Didn’t cry. Just lay there. Turned her over and - then she cried. Made her lick me clean. Closed my eyes and thought of - shot her in the mouth. Brothers shouted. Hung them for the ceiling by the testicles.”
In disturbingly monotone delivery, the soldier and Ian then converse about the various evils they’ve committed. When Ian says he’s not gay, that he’s never been with a man, the solider cracks him over the head with a gun and rapes him, all while uncontrollably sobbing. At the end of the assault, he gouges out Ian’s eyes, and then kills himself. Kane’s text imbues much ambiguity into the soldier’s character; in many ways he’s vastly less reprehensible than Ian. Most productions of the play depict the soldier anguished, far from at piece with what he’s done and what he does, to Ian
And this is the play’s stroke of genius. It’s only after Ian’s survival of the attack that he becomes anything resembling empathetic. When Cate arrives home, she brings with her a baby that she has rescued. In the final scene of the play, Ian, desperately hungry, eats the remains of that child. This act would have been laced with evil had this been the vulgar and brutish Ian of the beginning of the play, but Kane depicts this crime as perversely… redemptive.
Only when one has endured violence can they understand the violence that they have wrought, she suggests. Cate arrives back to the scene bleeding from her vagina; the text implies that she has traded her sex for a meal with a pack of soldiers. In the play’s final moments, Cate feeds the broken Ian; he is worthy of Cate’s tenderness. In the morally grey universe of Sarah Kane, he is saved.
When Blasted first premiered, her work was decimated by horrified British critics who wrote the young playwright off as a mere shock merchant. The Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, for instance, admitted that his initial reaction to her work was impulsive and wrong, conceding that Kane was indeed a poet. As is so often the case with transgressive artists, Kane’s work was defended by the renegades of her craft: Martin Crimp, Harold Pinter and Edward Bond were all early fans of Kane’s work. What those British theater critics overlooked in Kane’s work, what bourgeois liberal critics seem to always overlook in criticism of hyper-explicit work, is that they failed to internalize the inherent moralism and humanism at the core of it. Michel Houllebecq, for instance, is often derided by liberal feminist critics for his right wing politics, his misogyny, and his islamophobia (all true to one degree or another), but those same critics miss the elementally beautiful and profound question at the core of his literature: is love possible in late capitalism?
A production of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love
Kane too is a moralist. Despite all the plays’ rapes and defecations and cannibalisms, they locate the redemptive forces that ennoble humanity in the face of a brutal and unforgiving world. Her play Phaedra’s Love - a modern rendition of Seneca’s Phaedra and the only direct homage to the classical tragedies that Kane implicitly referenced in all of her plays - was described by Kane as “her comedy.” In it, Queen Phaedra, wife of King Theseus, falls in love with her lazy stepson Hippolytus. The plot is convoluted, as Greek tragedies are wont to be, but it involves an abundance of murder, suicide, and incest. Eventually, Hippolytus is jailed by Theseus after Phaedra has heartbrokenly killed herself herself after finding out that Strophe, Hippolytus’ step-sister and Theseus’ daughter, also slept with Hippolytus, implying in a note addressed to Strophe that Hippolytus raped her. At his hearing, Strophe tries to defend Hippolytus, claiming that he did not rape his step-mother. In response to Strophe’s defense of her brother, Theseus rapes and kills her, and Hipploytus is then torn to shreds and disemboweled by an angry mob. When Theseus realizes he’s murdered his own daughter, he laments: “God forgive me I didn’t know.” The haphazard nature of the text lends the otherwise brutal and ugly story an unnerving sentimentality. A tenderness, even. The play is like a romantic comedy: ill-fated lovers, driven by their desire and love, behaving incoherently and self-destructively. Kane’s work diagnoses the dual nature of the world: where there is violence there is often passion, where there is cruelty there is often love.
Kane’s work was radical, but in some important ways, it was also conservative. When critics dismissed her, they, by extension, dismissed the entirety of theatrical history. Though her narratives were often set in a seemingly contemporary world, they were set within the confines of the form of classical theater. Kane ingeniously exploited the traditional narrative devices of Jacobean drama; murder, revenge, betrayal, rape, cannibalism, bodily fluids; and smeared them on the faces of a politically correct, bourgeoise, liberal, nineties audience. Her work forced viewers to confront how wildly out of touch they had become with the violent nature of mankind and the brutality that had carried history and still occurred every day beneath the slick veneer of liberal capitalism.
Kane’s life itself was a Jacobean tragedy. She was undeniably the most interesting playwright to come to prominence in the nineties, but like so many geniuses before her, she was written off as an amateurish provocateur. She wasn’t. Houellebecq once wrote about poetry, claiming that the sonnet was the most powerful form of poetry and that no innovation in form could improve it. Houellebcq suggested that rigorously staying within the boundaries of a predefined form allowed one’s flaws to slowly emerge within the work, sculpting a style. This is the functioning of Kane’s work: it stayed within the confines of classical forms and slowly gave birth to a new style of storytelling.
What Kane was interested in was love, and as Roland Barthes tell us, “When one is in love is in Dachau.” Kane was in love with theater, in love with text, and performance, and violence, and cruelty. She was incredibly close to the work she created. She once told an interviewer that “to create something beautiful about despair is to me the most life-affirming thing a person can do.” Can you imagine creating something that affirmed the very nature of your existence, only to have it soundly rejected? It must have been like a young mother cradling her newborn child, basking in the glow of motherhood and so full of love, who realizes from her friends’ wincing expressions that they think her baby is ugly or gruesome. An existential gut punch. Sarah Kane wanted us to see what she saw: beauty, perfection, honesty. But her contemporaneous critics could only see the ugly.