Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
Notes on Sarah Kane
2005-2008
Ravenhill on Kane
If at right I illustrate this post
with a book cover instead of a picture of Sarah Kane, I do so in an
attempt to draw attention to her plays rather than her life, as Mark
Ravenhill in the 12 October 2005 issue of the Guardian (UK) suggested we do.
Kane's early death has created something of a myth around Kane as a contemporary "tortured artist" in the mold of Sylvia Plath or James Dean. Said Ravenhill:
When a friend commits suicide, you're always going to feel angry with them. Any personal anger that I felt towards Sarah has long since gone, but I still feel a flash of anger that she could leave a fine body of work that can be appropriated as suicide art. Her work is far better than that.
Now there's a chance to reappraise it, with revivals of Phaedra's Love and Cleansed. They're very different plays: Phaedra's Love a blast of sardonic nihilism, Cleansed a wave of almost operatic romance in the middle of a harsh world. Kane told me she wrote Cleansed when she was in love. Neither play was written by a person who knew she would commit suicide. Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.
New Yorkers have been served both well and badly in terms of Kane's work in the past few years: we had two productions of her last "play," 4.48 Psychosis in 2005, one at St. Ann's Warehouse and another at BAM. This hallucinatory tone poem for voices is a fascinating work, but far from characteristic of Kane's plays, which are precise, Swiftian howls of pain and derision at the human animal. Rumor has it that Kane's estate is extraordinarily careful about the rights to her body of work. It's probably right, but at the same time it keeps audiences outside of London from experiencing these plays in a theater, for which they've been written.
Allow me to call attention to Iain Fisher's Web site on Sarah Kane and Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre site, which both provide a great deal of additional information. I can also recommend "Love me or kill me": Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes by Graham Saunders.
Sarah Kane's Complete Plays is available as a Methuen paperback.
"I do not feel a responsibility towards the audience or to other women. What I always do when I write is to think: how does the play affect myself? If you are very specific in what you try to achieve, and it affects yourself, then it may affect other people too. On the other hand, if you have a target group in mind, and you think, 'I want to affect the eleven million people watching ITV on Sunday,' then everything becomes bland. So for me 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."
Sarah Kane
Quoted in Johan Thielemans, Rehearsing the Future
Blasted (1995)
Katharina Schuttler as Cate in Thomas
Ostermeier's
2005 Berlin Schaubuhne production of Blasted.
Photo:
Tristram Kenton.
In a Leeds hotel room, a journalist is consummating a tryst with a woman twenty years his junior when an explosion tears the room apart, revealing that a violent coup has taken place in England. This is, in short, Sarah Kane's first play Blasted, and it's superficially cheap and sensationalistic: the violence is Jacobean in its intensity, the language deliberately spare.
But Kane is playing for high stakes; there's nothing remotely prurient or blithe about either the explicit sexual activity or the grotesque physical cruelty depicted. Blasted is the first iteration of a theme that would recur in Kane's work: the redemptive possibility of love among beings who are capable of great volitional cruelty. Ian and Cate, Blasted's doomed lovers, are cases in point: Ian is a grotesque opportunistic cad, Cate a passive masochist, and Ian becomes far more unpleasant through the first half of the play until a soldier bursts into the room and proceeds to destroy Ian's spirit. Until then, we've been uneasily, ambivalently on Cate's side, but it's impossible to remain distant from Ian's cruel fate:
IAN: Are you going to kill me?
SOLDIER: Always covering your own arse.
The Soldier grips Ian's head in his hands.
He puts his mouth over one of Ian's eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it.
He does the same to the other eye.
The Soldier is reenacting a cruelty he's seen performed before, capable of it because he's aware of its possibility. The play concludes with the Soldier, a suicide, dead; Cate burying a baby she's been protecting; and Ian waiting to die. Note this dialogue, the spare precision of which remains unsentimental but precise in its revelation of conflicting emotional states:
CATE (burying the baby): I don't know her name.
IAN: Don't matter. No one's going to visit.
CATE: I was supposed to look after her.
IAN: Can bury me next to her soon. Dance on my grave.
CATE: Don't feel no pain or know nothing you shouldn't know--
IAN: Cate?
CATE: Ssh.
IAN: What you doing?
CATE: Praying. Just in case.
IAN: Will you pray for me?
CATE: No.
IAN: When I'm dead, not now.
CATE: No point when you're dead.
IAN: You're praying for her.
CATE: She's baby.
IAN: So?
CATE: Innocent.
IAN: Can't you forgive me?
CATE: Don't see bad things or go bad places --
IAN: She's dead, Cate.
CATE: Or meet anyone who'll do bad things.
IAN: She won't, Cate, she's dead.
CATE: Amen.
The Beckettian tone here in the literally "blasted" landscape of the play verges on the sentimental (a sentimentality countered a few minutes later when Ian, starving, tries to eat the corpse of the baby), but Blasted never seems to strive to shock; its attitude towards the violence it depicts is too laconic, the violence itself too figurative. On the stage, violence and cruelty of this excessive nature can't possibly be staged literally; the knowledge that we're in a theater, watching actors, renders it instantly figurative, thereby imbuing it with something other than representational, naturalistic significance: an objective correlative for the motiveless cruelty that Cate and Ian enact in their early, predatory romantic relationship in the first part of the play.
Phaedra's Love (1996)
Hippolytus (Laurence Penry-Jones) and
Strophe (Alexandra Moen) in the 2005
Bristol Old Vic production of Phaedra's Love,
directed
by Anne Tipton. Photo: Manuel Harlan.
Self-satisfaction is a contradiction in terms. -- Phaedra's Love
Such romantic relationships are at the center of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, a revision of the Greek myth that posits Phaedra as, again, a masochist and Hippolytus as a poxed-up but sexually attractive layabout. Kane's technique is just beginning to broaden here -- the scenes between Phaedra and her daughter Strophe are tense with warning and recrimination, and Kane is less likely to end scenes with, say, arbitrary eye-munchings. But the ending, which finds the stage bathed with the blood of all four main characters (in itself quite Jacobean), doesn't quite come off: not the violence but its excess seems stuck on.
Phaedra's Love also demonstrates one of the faults of Kane's plays: as noted, its characterizations seem less than three-dimensional. In neither Cate nor Phaedra's case, we don't get the visceral grasp of the character that we do in the depiction of Ian. And despite the laconicism of the presentation of violence, the plays don't yet demonstrate a confidence in the poeticism of their dialogue (though such confidence would be well-founded). When one can trace the playwright's urge to shock under the play, the playwright hasn't been covering her tracks well enough.
Even so, contrast Kane's use of violence as a playwright with the attitude towards violence expressed, instead, by directors like Quentin Tarantino. Kane's utilization of violence is earned because it is an expression of emotional devastation: unlike the case of Kill Bill, the violence of Blasted is more effective because it is deeply, unequivocally earned: love is at stake, and for Kane love is everything; in Tarantino films and in Titus Andronicus, nothing is at stake except a desire for vengeance, and there are limits to the poeticism of vengeance. Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's less successful plays because its violence is not equal to its content.
Cleansed (1998)
 Krzysztof Warlikowski's 2002 production of Cleansed at the Avignon Festival. Photo: Marc Enguerand |
Cleansed is, perhaps, Kane's most optimistic play: it ends with "It stops raining. The sun comes out," and one of the (dead) characters smiling beatifically on the beaten survivors. (It's also interesting to note here that the sound of rain underscored most of the action in Kane's earlier Blasted.) More to the point, the scenes of cruelty (of which there are many, including a drug addict being injected through the eyeball) are tempered by several scenes of remarkable gentleness between the three pairs of lovers in the play.
In the world Kane depicts, it's love that's transgressive, not violence; violence and rationalistic cruelty are the norm. There are several nude scenes in the play that begin and end with the lovers contemplating each other's bodies, these scenes central to the play and new in Kane's dramaturgical method. They constitute a theatrical version of Georges Bataille's discussion of nakedness in his book Erotism:
Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. [Emphasis mine.]
In the play, physicality is almost always a site of violence and disfigurement; only those who have transcended this physicality in an act of compassion or forgiveness are vouchsafed the possibility of love; even the cruel rationalist Tinker, stage-managing his scientific study of desire, discovers this by the end of Cleansed.
"If we can experience something through art, then we might be able to change our future, because experience engraves lessons on our hearts through suffering, whereas speculation leaves us untouched. ... It's crucial to chronicle and commit to memory events never experienced -- in order to avoid them happening. I'd rather risk overdose in the theatre than in life."
Sarah Kane
Cited in Langridge and Stephenson, Rage and Reason
Crave
Crave by Sarah Kane. Directed by Cheryl Faraone. Sound design
by Ben Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by
Mark Evancho. Costume design by Franny Bohar. With Adam Ludwig (A),
Stephanie Janssen (M), Rishabh Kashyap (B) and Stephanie Strohm (C).
Running time: 45 minutes. Performed on a double-
A quartet of voices explores the craving for love unto death in Sarah Kane's play.
Adam Ludwig, Stephanie Janssen, Rishabh Kashyap
and Stephanie Strohm in Crave
(Photo: Stan Barouh)
Crave (1998) marked a substantial formal departure from Sarah Kane's first three physically frenetic and explicit plays. She writes here for four seated performers who do not move from their chairs for the duration of the work; in this, she draws entire attention to the language of two couples, an older woman (M) and a younger man (B) in an illicit relationship, and an older man (A) and young girl (C) engaged in an abusive tryst that threatens to destroy both of them. But the ease of identity is not that simple as the play progresses; not only the roles of abuser/abused and exploiter/exploited (and each has their own definitions of abuse and exploitation), but family roles as well (are the older man and older woman also related in some way?) are under constant redefinition; the pedophile is granted the most eloquent paean to love in the entire play. Morality and judgment, then, slip out from under the lyrical dialogue in Kane's effort to present, on the stage, the impossible cravings and desires that emerge from love.
Ninian Smart, in her article about Buddhism for Macmillan's Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, sums up four doctrines of Buddhist philosophy. "They affirm that (1) life is permeated by suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha); (2) the origin of suffering lies in craving or grasping (tanha); (3) the cessation of suffering is possible, through the cessation of craving ..." These Buddhist ideas seem central to Crave, which refers throughout to a variety of other texts (among them Eliot's The Waste Land and Beckett's Waiting for Godot) as well as both local and apparently (though not necessarily, this being unknowable) autobiographical references; the language and references permeate and render timeless and complex the everyday gestures of both love and abhorrence that the characters verbalise. For her characters, however, the fourth tenet of Buddhism – that "the way to [the cessation of craving] is the Noble Eightfold Path," as Smart has it – remains a dogma beyond their reach. In the end, the craving for love is revealed as a craving for death and oneness, a spectacular realisation that transcends emotion and simple good/bad, optimism/pessimism dichotomies without a vision of an afterlife; instead, in an ecstatic final vision, their individual lives beyond the world become pure undifferentiated light and energy; until then, they are trapped in their individuated, special, personal darkness.
The act of craving speaks through each character individually, an act which is mirrored in Cheryl Faraone's insightful and solid production (a difficult thing in an ambivalent play of shifting surfaces such as this) by the simple set design by Mark Evancho. Though there are four chairs, each is quite different from the other, individuated instances which refer back to some Ideal "chair," as the characters' unique cravings each refer back to a primal undifferentiated craving.
The four performers bring an appropriate sensual passion to the language, though I sensed something vaguely lacking. Because Crave is a language piece for four voices, these voices are ideally differentiated as the different timbres of the instruments common to a string quartet. Not to question the age-specificity of the performers here, who all seem to be around the same age and become deeply enrapt in the play's obsessions as the play progresses, but the range of the play's linguistic and musical tonality suffered from the lack of a deeper, more weathered voice – the viola or cello, if you will, of the quartet. Adam Ludwig, as the older man and the abuser of a schoolgirl (perhaps his daughter), is affecting in his role and delivers the central monologue of the evening with a tightly controlled passion and anxiety. But as written (and as played in other productions of Crave), the role is for an older, more weathered voice, a timbre which would have contrasted with the higher registers of the voices of the women and the younger man, rendering to the play a wider tonal spectrum. Another minor problem with the production is in its costume design; in dressing the younger woman in a schoolgirl's jumper, the production stacks the deck against a properly ambivalent reading of the play; instead, we're drawn into a vaguely conventional consideration of abuser/abused and guilt/innocence which the play works hard to mitigate against. It's not pity that Kane is after, at least not exclusively; it's the recognition that the nature of craving is, beyond individuation, the same for all four.
My reservation about vocal tonality aside, the four performers here
– Ludwig, Rishabh Kashyap as the younger man, Stephanie Strohm as the
schoolgirl, and especially Stephanie Janssen, who brings a brittle
hardness to her role as the older woman – are fully vested in Kane's
language and absorbing in their presence; in effectively restricting their
movements in a tight space through this passionate 45-
The Potomac Theatre Project offers here a fine production of one of Kane's most mature, elusive and complex plays. I only wish that the program wasn't burdened by the anonymous dramaturg's note for Crave – the note doesn't detract from the power of this production or the play itself, nor do I mean any slight against the dramaturg who wrote it, but because I feel strongly opposed to the sentiments it expresses I must argue with it. The note begins with the phrase "Art is autobiography" (is it really? And if it is, in what sense? Is that the whole or even the most significant dimension of it?) and unfortunately ends with the observation that "Kane hung herself with a shoelace some months after writing the play, a necessary part to the completion of it," an irresponsible statement that flies straight in the face of Mark Ravenhill's 2005 essay in the Guardian, commenting on his friendship with Kane:
When a friend commits suicide, you're always going to feel angry with them. Any personal anger that I felt towards Sarah has long since gone, but I still feel a flash of anger that she could leave a fine body of work that can be appropriated as suicide art. Her work is far better than that. ... Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.
A play is not an obituary. Crave is not about the sufferings of Sarah Kane through her experience of craving; as this production ironically suggests, it is about the sufferings of each individual audience member as they experience the cravings of passion and love as well. To characterise it as an extended aestheticised suicide note is not only inaccurate, but in bad taste, denigrating the status of Kane's plays as a poetry that has the potential to speak personally to every individual; the biographical context is utterly irrelevant. It also makes the assumption that any person's final catastrophic act is ultimately knowable and explicable. It isn't. She and her plays deserve more.
4.48 psychose (1999/2000)
Isabelle Huppert in Claude Regy's production of 4.48 psychose at BAM, 2005. Photo: Pascal Victor.
John Branch has generously allowed me to post his thoughts on the Claude Régy production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychose, performed by Isabelle Huppert (in French), which ran at BAM's Next Wave Festival in 2005. Said John:
Claude Régy is the director of 4.48 Psychose, the French-language version of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis that's currently running at BAM. Merely to name him is to touch on the formal essence of this play; if I'm not mistaken, the French word for director is "regie," and so he immediately reminds us of the role of words in the theater. (Of course there are words in the theater? Not always. Nor when they're present are they always the only thing.) The issue is everywhere: the matter of correct labels (4.48 Psychose, he writes in a program note, is "not a play, no characters, no storyline, no action"); the remarks I heard after last night's performance, most of which turned on the language we'd heard; the show itself, which consists not of the "two planks and a passion" of a traditional definition of theater but of two actors and a text, the actors almost immobile, the text flowing out to us like music; a moment in that text, which tells us "Just one word on a page and there is theater"; and even in a discussion that Régy will lead next week, which is titled "On Sarah Kane: In Search of a Theatricality Inherent to Language."
To begin by talking about the formal essence of the play is to ignore the question of what it's about, and I think if I were reviewing it (at times like this I wish that were still my job) I'd begin instead by saying that the script reads somewhat like a suicide note and that the obvious approach, which other productions I know of have avoided, is to take it as one. This is what Régy has done with Isabelle Huppert (who stands on the forestage and barely moves as she delivers this testament) and Gérard Watkins (who appears now and then behind a scrim to deliver lines as the doctor and/or lover one hears in the script). No one who knows Huppert's work will be surprised that her performance is one of the remarkable things about seeing this show. She has a quality of daring that I've seen in only one other performer I can think of, the New York-based actress Elizabeth Marvel (who sadly is currently working in TV), and I left BAM nearly shocked by what Huppert did on the stage. But I'll have to leave it to others to describe this.
Since my day job awaits me, I have time only to mention the other surprise of this production: the connection I saw with the French neoclassical theater of Racine and Corneille. In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner wrote: "All that happens, happens inside language. That is the special narrowness and grandeur of the French classic manner. ... As nothing of the content of Phèdre is exterior to the expressive form, to the language, the words come very near the condition of music, where content and form are identical." It's an austere and terrible music one can hear at BAM this week and the next, but music nonetheless.