I try to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than through reality. It’s like a John Woo or a [Quintin] Tarantino scene, where the characters are doing awful things and, simultaneously, talking about everyday things in a really humorous way. There is humor in there that is straight-ahead funny and uncomfortable. It makes you laugh and think.
– Martin McDonagh1
If you want to write about extreme love, you can only write about it in an extreme way, otherwise it doesn’t mean anything
– Sarah Kane2
New Values? No thanks!
– Peter Sloterdijk3
“We Don’t Need another Hero”
– Tina Turner, from the theme song to the movie, Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome (1985)
In the opening of his book The Will to Power, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes, in reaction to encroaching modernity, that “Nihilism stands at the door.” He attributes this late nineteenth-century nihilist movement emerging not as a result of “physiological degeneration” or a crisis in cultural “distress,” but rather owing to three events: the “end of Christianity,” “skepticism regarding morality,” and ultimately “the feeling of valuelessness.”4 He goes on to say that within this nihilism is a desire for destruction, which “can be the expression of an overfull power pregnant with the future,” an idea he labels “Dionysian”; and it is also “the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, underprivileged, which destroys, has to destroy, because what exists, indeed existence itself, all being itself, enrages and provokes it.”5 For Nietzsche, all forms of the much ballyhooed modernist concept of “freedom” are, ironically, the result of a deep-rooted fear of freedom and genuine independence, which disguises and self-deludes through forms of “dependence” leading to bourgeois conformity. This slavish craving for acceptance and fear of freedom by the bourgeoisie carries the flag of “freedom” as its imprimatur, but it is, in fact, nothing but Nietzsche’s descriptive Christian reliance on liberalism, romanticism, humanism, “free-thinking” socialism, Aristotelian pathos, Platonic rationalism, and fundamentally the weakness of (Nietzsche’s pejorative term) “the slave mentality.” This outlook laid much of the groundwork for the postmodern nihilism and skepticism of the late twentieth century and, I contend, influences the postmodern dramatists in this concluding section.
To understand what I mean by this assertion, which underscores the works of the dramatists examined here, requires analyzing the link between Nietzsche’s nihilism and its postmodern follow-through. In postmodernism, the center (the totality of identity and the core of the self as a singular whole) crumbles amidst the uncertainty of the times. “Meaningfulness” is under assault in postmodernism for its romantic perfidy and humanist disingenuousness. In his essay on postmodernism, Jay Bernstein contends that for “postmodernism modernity appears as the loss of the centre.” Bernstein draws from Nietzsche’s evisceration of origination (or, as he implies, the death of God), which Nietzsche defines as “nihilism,” in order to assert that, according to Bernstein, this emptying out or void of meaning “indicates the anthropological premise of nihilistic history, namely, the conception of human beings as determined by a fundamental lack or absence.” The consequence of this lack or absence results in the “loss of the ability to believe in any values whatsoever. If the worth of actions were dependent on the values acted upon, then when those values are devalued, dissolved, then reasons for performing any actions whatsoever equally disappears.” He elaborates further:
Nihilism is a crisis of values and a crisis of values in the possibility of valuing. There is a crisis in values (relativism, subjectivism, skepticism) because values are unacknowledged precipitates and reification of the activity of valuing.… Buffering, armouring, is the mode of self-preservation of a consciousness that has no values but uses them none the less, precisely and cynically, for the sake of order and the practical.… Once the loss of the centre is recognised as a consequence of the positing of the centre, this is precisely what is involved in seeing nihilism as the history whereby the highest existence is determined by lack, absence, or need is ready for negation.6
If, as Bernstein contends, ideals collapse and the center cannot hold, what then becomes of the forces and events motivating ideals? What fills the void left by the absence of idealism? What manner of life is worth living in a reality where a central awareness of existence grounded in purpose (in meaningfulness) amidst violence and consumerism has all but evaporated?
Two dramatists of the late 1990s illuminate this lack, absence, negation, and crisis of values: Sarah Kane (1971–99) and Martin McDonagh (1970– ). While there are other superb British, Irish, and American (English language) dramatists of the period such as Tracy Letts (Bug, Killer Joe), Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking), Jez Butterworth (Mojo), Judy Upton (Ashes and Sand, Temple), Patrick Marber (Closer), Rebecca Prichard (Essex Girls), Jim Cartwright (I Licked a Slag’s Deodorant), Doug Lucie (The Shallow End), Joe Penhall (Some Voices, Blue/Orange), Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting), and Conor McPherson (The Weir), all representing a youthful aggregate determined to épater la bourgeoisie through violent representations (though, ironically, most of their plays are supported by the middle-class theatre-going public), Kane and McDonagh emerge as the most eminent dramatists in both receiving the bulk of attention and offering some of the most enduring dramas. What I aim to examine in the conclusion are selected plays of these two dramatists, considering them as harbingers of a new dynamic in modern drama, one which, among other things, paved the way for dramas in the twenty-first century.
During her brief career (she committed suicide in 1999 at the tragically young age of 28), Kane wrote five plays – Blasted (1995), Phaedra’s Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (1999, produced posthumously in 2000) – and one film (Skin, 1997). Her contemporary, McDonagh, wrote seven plays before the twenty-first century, three referred to as the “Leenane Trilogy” because they take place in this mythic region of Ireland – The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull of Connemara (1997), and The Lonesome West (1997); another trilogy of plays – The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (written in the late 1990s and produced in 2001), and an unpublished play, The Banshees of Inisheer (McDonagh found it inadequate for production and kept it from the public); The Pillowman, written in 1994–95 (premièred in 2003); and The Behanding in Spokane, written in the twenty-first century (2011). He also wrote and directed a short film, Six Shooter (2006), and a feature, In Bruges (2008).
Kane and McDonagh are extremists who view heroism and meaningfulness as false paradigms of existence and betrayal of truth. Their nihilism centers on a crisis of values – politically, morally, and aesthetically. Their exorbitant use of violence onstage is meant, in part, as a direct threat (and attraction) to the bourgeois audiences as both revolting and enticing their guilty pleasures. While both absorb humor and love into their nihilism – McDonagh’s plays are extremely clever and funny, and Kane stresses love as a redeeming, albeit futile, value – both reject the ethics of liberalism, humanism, and collectivism. Their plays push the boundaries of bourgeois acceptability and attempt to dislodge audiences from their idées reçues. Like Nietzsche, they challenge received values such as compassion, empathy, decorum, heroics, and appropriate behavior as symbols of complacency, injustice, and the status quo. For both playwrights drama should no longer aim at revealing the ultimate context and meaning of human experience, whether it be cultural, historical, or sociological. Their plays are criticized as having little if any “meaning,” which is precisely their point. Their dramas unmask the sacrosanct foundations of authority and false emancipatory project of liberalism; their characters are thus lost souls and nihilists who nevertheless maintain perfervid hope in surviving amidst the bourgeois values they wholeheartedly reject. Extreme violence and brutality surround their characters, yet many of their characters participate as victimizers as well as victims. Ken Urban has called Kane’s work “an epic exploration of the social structures of violence,” and Ulrich Broich has called McDonagh’s work “a new dimension of verbal and physical atrocities.”7 Their coruscated dramatizations of extreme acts of violence are meant to shock, upset, evoke discomforting laughter, and ultimately call into question norms of acceptable behavior.
Their extremism, while demonstrating a taxonomy of previous dramatists such as the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights who were hardly squeamish about violence onstage, owes much to, and differs somewhat from, previous promulgators of modern violent radicalism. The most well known modernist of this ilk, Antonin Artaud, arbiter of the theatre of cruelty, established the concept of drama as a bloodbath of values. He rejected the notion of “masterpieces” – productions of “classics” recreated almost exactly as their original mountings – as shopworn and uninspiring relics of the past. He asserted instead a drama of visceral reaction and dynamic immediacy built on, among other things, what he dubbed the “plague.” This plague theatre, he says, is “a superior disease because it is an absolute crisis after which there is nothing left except death and drastic purification.”8 McDonagh and Kane share Artaud’s penchant for a superior disease (where bourgeois values are “inferior” and debunked), embracing death, mutilation, and violence while leaving drastic experientiality in its wake.
Experientiality is the theatricalization of violence and human interaction enacted (represented) onstage. It posits the experiential as opposed to observing; antithetical to Brecht’s drama, their plays are meant to grab audiences viscerally rather than intellectually. Kane, inspired by a production of Jeremy Weller’s Mad in 1992, said his style of drama was for her “an unusual piece of theatre because it was totally experiential as opposed to speculatory. As an audience member I was taken to a place of extreme mental discomfort and distress and then popped out on the other end.… Mad took me to hell, and the night I saw it I made a decision about the kind of theatre I wanted to make – experiential.”9 Along similar lines McDonagh attempts to bring the theatrical experience to the emotional pitch and euphoria of a rock concert: “I think people should leave the theatre with the same feeling you get after a really good rock concert,” he contends; “A play should be a thrill.”10 Shock, surprise, and what Aristotle called the abrupt reversal of fortune (peripeteia) are components of their dramaturgy. Like Artaud, their productions demand an outpouring of blood. (The New York Times reported two productions, one by Kane and one by McDonagh, requiring directors and costume designers to think imaginatively about the bloody mess occurring onstage. Sarah Benson, director of Kane’s Blasted in 2008, said that “you want the right viciousness, the right color. People have an embedded image of what blood looks like, and it’s a very immediate, visceral reaction.” And Theresa Square, costume designer for McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore in a 2006 production, said “By the end of the show, if you walked downstairs in the theater, in the basement, you could see the blood dripping down the walls.”)11
Where they differ from Artaud is that Artaud wanted to break down the barriers of stage and spectator; the fourth wall was an obstacle for Artaud, limiting and deluding the vicissitudes of his required immediacy. The dramatists Kane and McDonagh, with a few exceptions (Kane’s later works, for example), maintain a fourth wall of mimetic illusion and adhere to realism’s tenets even while pushing the boundaries of realistic action. Theirs is a realism of extremes; their violent depictions require the certainty of an audience accepting the bloodbaths as “real,” or at least surrogates of reality. As Christopher Murray says, “The theme of The Cripple is the debunking of sentimental representations [of Ireland and the Irish] in favour of hard-nosed realism.”12 Kane insists that in Blasted, “the first half should seem incredibly real and the second half even more real.”13 Moreover, whereas Artaud’s ideas and dramas are deductive – grand schematizations that gradually work their way into specific details – McDonagh and Kane by and large think inductively, starting their plays frequently from minutiae and moving to their Grand Guignol conclusions, from intimacy to endings mimicking “splatter” films. In other words, their plays generally begin with a realistic setting and move sequentially toward violent crescendos. In McDonagh’s plays, a daughter brutally kills her mother, first pouring boiling oil on her; a grave digger suspected of murdering his wife chops up the remnants of her skull to make room for other corpses; brothers quarrel violently after the accidental fatal killing of their father; a son tries to kill his alcoholic mother with more imbibing; a crippled boy fails a screen test and loses a romantic relationship; an IRA soldier tortures a drug dealer, slashing him while he hangs upside down; he then later shoots dead two other compatriots only to be shot dead himself; animal cruelty occurs, consisting of feline torture and blinding of cows; and a child is crucified onstage while a writer is interrogated, tortured, and executed after he smothers his brother to death (the brother having murdered children). In Kane’s work, an older, bilious man rapes a naïve young girl, and he in turn is anally raped by a soldier’s rifle, the soldier then committing cannibalism (eating the man’s eyes); the raped and blinded man then eats a dead baby; oral sex occurs frequently in her first play and her next, followed by more fellatio and genital mutilation; Cleansed begins with a drug dealer shooting heroin into the eyeball of a drug addict, followed by the severing of a hand later (a notion possibly copied by McDonagh in his play The Behanding in Spokane); and in her final play, a young woman comes to grips with confinement and psychological abuses in a mental institution leading to her suicide. These episodes of violence and cruelty on stage are shocking, theatrical, messy, and choreographed realistically to elicit repulsion and attraction.
The dual repulsion–attraction theme of their plays can best be described by Susan Sontag, who maintains that “One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes,” because “Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.” This attraction to mutilation is what she calls a “perennial source of inner torment.”14 The visceral response is part of the ubiquitous history of drama (blood rituals are an international phenomenon that have attracted playwrights for centuries), but Kane and McDonagh attempt to take the discourse on cruelty to heightened extremes. If, as Ken Urban contends, the “defining feature of 1990s drama is its cruelty,”15 then McDonagh and Kane are virtuosos of cruelty and violence: presenting it, examining it, detailing it, and exploring (or exploiting) it with blunt intent. They want to bring audiences up close and personal with violence, dismantling cultural chimera and bourgeois pabulum that pass for safe discourse. Martin McDonagh’s plays are festooned with body parts, torture, cruelty, and the macabre; Kane’s dramas are the theatre of nightmare and perdition, the shadow and philosophical dissertations of dark fantasy.
Remarks by critics of these dramatists could frequently be interchangeable. Karen Vandevelde asserts, for instance, that in McDonagh,
The fusion of a grotesque style, inspired by Tarantino, and a melodramatic mood reminiscent of many contemporary soap operas bring about an unusual juxtaposition of opposite emotions, actions and temperaments: mercilessness and tenderness, love and hatred, dreams and depressions. McDonagh’s strength lies in the subversion of these dichotomies and blurring of their boundaries, thus transforming the village of Leenane into a place of gothic horror/small town melodrama.16
While Sarah Kane doesn’t consider her work remakes of Tarantino movies, she, too, presents a mash-up of tenderness and mercilessness, gothic horror and intimate melodrama. Sarah Kane’s friend and contemporary fellow dramatist, Mark Ravenhill, asserts that in Kane’s play Blasted, “The first few pages – a young woman and an abusive older man locked in a hotel room – were driven by some of the sharpest, most sardonic dialogue I had ever read, underpinning a mounting sense of claustrophobic violence. The second half [of the play], in which a solder bursts into the room, tears the structure of the play apart. The play escalates through a series of grim images – part Goya, part Beckett.”17 McDonagh’s dramas, too, can be envisioned as sharp, sardonic dialogue, as well as emerging from Goya’s war-torn illustrations; Kane’s grotesquery and McDonagh’s dire images share similarities to Goya’s (or, for a more modern comparison, Francis Bacon’s) brutal landscapes of cannibalism and dismemberment. Tom Sellar contends that “what makes Blasted’s violence shocking is its almost matter-of-fact tone, its simple and immediate presence.”18 Exactly the same “tone” exists in McDonagh’s plays, where violence is cavalierly presented such that the juxtaposition of the extreme act and mundane reality evokes laughter. When Marion Castleberry writes that while he “is certainly not the first writer to explore the crueler side of Ireland, McDonagh’s dramatic voice is unquestionably the strongest and freshest of the postmodern era,” Kane, too, is not the first to explore the violent nature of power and its dynamic, but she is certainly one of the first to put a semi-feminist-British template upon it.19 Castleberry writes that McDonagh’s characters “make up a gallery of rogues and miscreants unrivaled in the Irish canon. His Ireland is populated with evil mothers, bored daughters, warring brothers, and belligerent neighbors.”20 This observation could well be referring to Kane in the English canon, too.
For all the praise lavished upon Kane and McDonagh for their Dostoevskian dark landscapes, they have equally been derided (at least at the beginning of their careers) for their melodramatic heavy-handedness, over-the-top brutality, shock-for-shock sake values, and plays promoting nihilism. For both, their weaknesses are their virtues: their angst is overwhelming, their unrelenting violent melodrama amplifies to the point of ludicrousness, their insistence on honesty smacks of Catcher in the Rye-like juvenilia, and their brutality can be construed as puerile attempts to challenge bourgeois acceptability – but that is their point. They are prescient in that their works have ushered in violence in the dramas of the early twentieth-first century not merely in theatre but television, movies, and especially video games as well. The première productions of their dramas during the mid-1990s created a kerfuffle – most of which, given the escalated level of violence in media entertainment, seems now quaint and passé. American television series such as The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, or the plethora of vampire movies and gruesome video games, to cite just a few of many examples, depict episodes of blood-splattering scenes, cannibalism, rape, deviancy, and cruelty not unlike the works of Kane and McDonagh. If nothing else, their plays can be appreciated as anticipating the forthcoming saturation of violence and mayhem in popular culture – TV, movies, video games – that are taken for granted as the mainstay of twentieth-first century drama and performance. They anticipate the central themes of many other dramatists arising in the twenty-first century: small casts, intimate stories, mixture of humor and agitation, and a penchant for violent acts. They herald a philosophical style, some of which are: the suspension of moral judgment; the brutalization of relationships; and a search for authenticity. Their quest for authenticity meant shunning artifice and convention. Their condemnation of bourgeois respectability, decorum, and polite behavior embraced their youth culture’s emphasis on body, flesh, and nihilism.
In virtually every play and film their guiding motif is not merely violence, but extreme violence, brutality, cruelty, and sadism; yet for both there is more to it than mere sensationalism. In response to his plays, McDonagh said: “We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We’re all extreme in one way or another at times, and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn’t just that, though, or I’ve failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something life-affirming even in the most twisted character.”21 Much of this life affirmation is based on veracity: both playwrights put stock in the virtue of honesty. In Kane’s play Cleansed, for instance, Rod professes his love with what Dan Rebellato calls “the most genuinely romantic speech in contemporary British playwriting”:22
I’m with you now.
I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you.
Now.
That’s it. No more. Don’t make me lie to you.23
McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan shares the theme of authenticity and honesty. In this play the rural island of Inishmaan becomes the locale for a Hollywood film titled Man of Aran in 1934 in which a casting call seeks “authentic” Irish actors (the actual film Man of Aran by Robert Flaherty filmed on the island of Inis Mór). The cripple character, Billy, laments the disingenuousness of the film after being invited to Hollywood for a screen test:
I’d hoped I’d disappear forever in America. And I would’ve too, if they’d wanted me there. If they’d wanted me for the filming. But they didn’t want me. A blond lad from Fort Lauderdale they hired instead of me. He wasn’t crippled at all, but the Yank said, “Ah, better to get a normal fella who can act crippled than a crippled fella who can’t fecking act at all.” Except he said it ruder.24
Both dramatists attempt to portray nihilism that dismantles all forms of meaning for the sake of Dionysian emotional honesty amidst grim reality; following Nietzsche, their Dionysian characters are the antithesis of the rational, Apollonian creatures demanding thoughtful reflection and restraint. Rather than affirm the status quo, their characters delight instead in the uninhibited expression of their honest beliefs – however venal or repugnant. Whereas Apollo offers structure and individualism, the Dionysian (at least as McDonagh and Kane frame it) is a consuming Freudian id, voraciously searching for the innermost heart of things yet skeptical of this neediness as well. Their characters are a product of what Karen Carr calls the “banalization” of nihilism that earmarks the late twentieth century. Rather than the existentialist, angst-ridden nihilism that typified the first half of the twentieth century, the postmodern age considers these “tortured souls” of modernism’s existential outlook as dated and comical “in their intensity and self-seriousness.” This new nihilism has become, according to Carr, “a relatively innocuous characterization of the radically interpretative character of human life.”25 For Kane and McDonagh, dramas are not “meaningful” in the sense of advancing political or aesthetic values, but are instead innocuous relationships of intimacies gone array. Rather than the depths of seriousness depicted in the works of Sartre, Camus, and other existential nihilists, theirs rides the surface of life through humor and a longing for sincerity in human relationships.
Nihilism, from the Latin root nihil meaning “nothing,” describes a condition of nothingness, hopelessness, and negation; conceptually it indicates a disconnection between the ideals of life (aims, goals, and purposes) and a cynical acceptance of the bankruptcy of such ideals. While this position represents Kane and McDonagh, theirs is a nihilism with a caveat; they embrace the nihilistic worldview, yet do not entirely abandon a theatricality that absorbs gallows humor, striving for love and sincerity, or what Jean Baudrillard calls a nihilism of “transparency,” making it “more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it.”26 For Baudrillard, this new, postmodern epoch of nihilism annihilates meaning, collapsing the existentialist dark despair modernism sought to promulgate and, by contrast, demonstrates how existentialism has overextended itself. Existentialism is now a mere self-parody, a risible and curious observation of its prior seriousness. If Jimmy Porter in the mid-twentieth-century play Look Back in Anger were to reemerge in the late twentieth century and written by Kane or McDonagh, likely he would hardly take his existential, mordant angst seriously; instead, he might mock the self-centeredness of his rage. Postmodern nihilism, Ashley Woodward contends, is “no longer dark – where darkness represents the failure of light of reason to penetrate the deepest mysteries of existence – but over-lit, leaving nothing concealed.” Borrowing from Baudrillard’s concept of transparency, Woodward suggests that this new nihilism means that “no secret depths remains in any corner of the postmodern world,” yielding not a mood of “anguish or existential panic, but of melancholic fascination with the disappearance of meaning.”27
The results of this transparency and disappearance of meaning establish a dual condition: one of violence and skepticism on the one hand, but also one of humor on the other. If there is nothing to hide, no modernist “core” lying concealed for audiences to unpack as they pursue “meaning,” what remains then is a kind of “nihilistic incongruity,” a term coined by John Marmysz in his book Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism, which illustrates contradictions or incongruities between the brutal and the comic. Kane, and especially McDonagh, juxtapose violence with banality; the actions and reactions to the violent episodes are matched with the quotidian, the cavalier, or the banal. Joseph Feeney contends that in McDonagh’s plays a man who likely murdered his wife “lovingly kisses his wife’s skull; a sympathetic young parishioner consoles Father Welsh; Father Welsh himself suffers and dies hoping to reconcile the Connor brothers; Cripple Billy gently wants happiness. Yet many of McDonagh’s people remain angry, desperate, unforgiving, and woeful in their personal relationships.”28 The combination of rage, discontent, and skepticism is matched with the everyday mundane of realistic life. Dominic Cavendish has observed that Sarah Kane “is boldly lowering the theatre’s drawbridge and letting the barbarous world in,”29 yet her characters simultaneously cling to a desperate neediness or lethargy that accepts their inevitable demise. In his excellent study of the era from a dramaturgical vantage point, Ken Urban defines the nihilism of these and other dramatists as “Verwindung,” a term coined by Martin Heidegger, where nihilism is simultaneously embraced (or entered into its essence) and then overcome. He cites Sarah Kane’s play Phaedra’s Love as a drama that uses “humour to reveal how ridiculous it is that Hippolytus can only experience a life-loving sensation through self-destruction.”30
What both dramatists (as well as others of this epoch) are ultimately concerned with is the experience of living in a rapidly changing world where traditional certainties, established loyalties, and former alliances have lost their moorings as paradigms of virtue, value, and guideposts to life. What remains is the struggle of those left behind, losers trying, in their awkward and ineffectual way, to arise from the debris of life and move toward something – anything – resembling human signification. In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a woman of 40 who has spent time in a mental institution attempts to find romance; in Blasted, an epileptic woman tries to find some connectedness with her former lover, however much he has brutalized and raped her; in The Cripple of Inishmaan, a deformed boy seeks love; and so forth. At the same time, Kane and McDonagh eschew sentimentality, syrupy emotionalism, or maudlin appeals for sympathy; their examination of love remains grounded in realistic expectations. Within the stark reality of their dramas’ circumstances these playwrights avoid the circumspect one-dimensionality found in soap operas while remaining sympathetic yet unsparingly harsh toward their characters’ plight.
Both dramatists work within a perceived theatrical tradition; they are not averse to borrowing from their predecessors (Kane calls it “Last in a long line of literary kleptomaniacs” [4.48 Psychosis, 213]). For McDonagh it is the Irish dramatic tradition of O’Casey, Synge, and Brendan Behan;31 for Kane, it is the English theatre of Pinter and Bond, as well as the Jacobean dramas of the sixteenth century. “The grotesquery, the intertextuality, the parody and pastiche of McDonagh plays all align themselves with the postmodern politics of representation,” Sara Keating writes; “McDonagh deliberately invites audiences to view his plays through the lens of the Irish theatrical tradition, but, by exaggeration and satirizing the characters, language and forms of the tradition, he removes the very (anti/post-colonial) moral and ethical value on which that tradition cultivated and which it espoused.”32 Kane says that her plays “certainly exist within a theatrical tradition, though not many people would agree with that. I’m at the extreme end of the theatrical tradition.… On the whole they [the plays] are about love and about survival and about hope, and to me that is an extremely difficult thing.”33 They both absorb and transcend the traditions they inherited, writing dramas as a “pasticheur,” Dominic Dromgoole’s term for McDonagh’s ability to “produce perfect forgeries” of past writers with postmodern irony.34
There are differences between them: McDonagh is influenced by Quentin Tarantino’s films in depicting violence with humor, and the bloodshed appears much like a video game. He juxtaposes the grotesque with the ordinary, where mundane palaver and sardonic discourse occur during extremities of brutality. The juxtaposition is the core feature of his humor. Kane’s dramas, while humorous at times, push the limits of violence and longing while suggesting that characters can contain compassion even under brutalizing circumstances. Her characters are uncompromising in their desire for love, affection, and intimacy; they are “needy” to the point of discomfort. Mary Luckhurst asserts that McDonagh “recognized the flavor of the theatrical times after Sarah Kane’s Blasted, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore does seem a rather obvious attempt to outdo her for blood and guts. But whereas Kane’s aesthetic agenda was serious and uncompromising in terms of her refusal to accept limits on naturalistic representation, McDonagh has responded with comic strip violence.”35 On the contrary, Kane’s first three dramas are quite naturalistic, and while her final two dramas lean toward expressionism and stream of consciousness, the shock value of her plays is located in the realistic depiction of horror. Furthermore, Maria Doyle takes exception to Luckhhurst’s view, arguing that the difference Luckhurst defines “can alternately be described as one of intimacy: in Kane’s play, violence as an assertion of power is never far removed from violence as an expression of need, and this distorted need manifests itself as an assault on one body on another, sometimes with the aid of a gun, but never with a gun by itself.”36
Their differences notwithstanding, Kane and McDonagh share a place in the history of drama during the latter half of 1990s, having been dubbed by critics as “The New Brutalists,” “The Young Savages,” and purveyors of “in-yer-face” drama. Aleks Sierz, whose book coined the genre term “in-yer-face,” describes their plays and the plays of their contemporaries as “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: it jolts both actors and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking alarm.” Drama under this rubric questions “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.” Rather than speculative and contemplative, this theatre is “experiential.”37 Kane and McDonagh are situated squarely as being of this ilk.
Both dramatists amplify dramatic language and dialogue that is cryptic, circular, staccato, and blunt,38 and both pay particular attention to the human body. McDonagh, called an “extraordinary writer of dialogue” by Garry Hynes,39 admires Harold Pinter and David Mamet for their “truth of dialogue.” Although both use stylized language, their texts, as McDonagh puts it, are “very close to the way people really speak to each other. Most people, I think, speak in strange sentences, with pauses and hesitations and repetitions.”40 Kane began writing realistically, moved away from it to a stylized, Joycean language in her later plays, but remained influenced by Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (a play she directed), a play that uses terse language that she describes as eviscerating “anything remotely extraneous or explanatory,” yielding “moments of extremely high drama.”41 Moreover, Kane and McDonagh create dramas that want the audience to experience what life is like in extremes – particularly how extreme conditions affect bodies: how we perceive them, inhabit them, and endure them even when bodies are abused, torn, shredded, raped, tortured, and mutilated. Like iconoclastic dramatists such as Bond or Kroetz – or even Shakespeare and the macabre Jacobeans, all of whom are, in many ways, their antecedents – Kane and McDonagh are uncompromising with their depictions of bodies, voices, sex, food, and digestion – all entities of which are their artistic fodder – and especially emphasizing the body in pain. Their characters are often gripped by pain resulting from violent acts; yet their dramas rarely delve into detail about the painful depictions. Perhaps this is because, as Elaine Scarry points out, pain resists description; it “does not simply resist language,” but actually destroys it, “bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”42 For these playwrights the body’s pain is inarticulate, visceral, and theatrical. In McDonagh’s plays, ghoulish behavior is juxtaposed with the banal, such that an IRA militant is torturing a drug dealer while carrying out a mundane conversation with his father. McDonagh eviscerates values, such that a daughter tortures then murders her mothers. Similarly Kane’s works, like Georg Buchner’s before her, are shot through with non-traditional approaches jettisoning bourgeois values and embracing nihilism.
“Nihilism equals Christianity,” the philosopher Gianni Vattimo contends,
because Jesus came into the world not to demonstrate what the “natural” order was but to demolish it in the name of charity. Loving one’s enemies is not exactly what nature prescribes, and more than that it isn’t what “naturally” happens. So when the Church defends the natural order of the monogamous reproductive family against any act of charity whatsoever towards (naturally) gay persons or bars women from the priesthood (once again because women are supposed to have different natural vocation), it shows its preference for the God of the natural order over the message of Jesus.43
So, too, with Kane and McDonagh, whose dramas aim to unhinge the natural order of things. The 1990s in general ushered in a wave of nihilism in drama, film, and the arts that looked to demolish the comfort zones of a self-satisfied capitalism. On the one hand, it was a period of contentment and peace, denoted by affable but uninspiring Prime Minister John Major and competent but scandal-prone President Bill Clinton. Communism had been by and large defeated in 1989 (the exceptions being Cuba, North Korea, and a few other nations), leaving capitalism, the United States in particular but also the United Kingdom and Ireland, to relish its victory lap in a near-orgy of consumerism, opportunism, and insatiable quest for wealth. On the other hand, it was a period dubbed “Cruel Britannia” by Ken Urban and others, where the plays of Kane, Ravenhill, and I would add McDonagh, established an “ethical nihilism” which “challenged the cynicism and opportunism of the historical moment.”44
Kane’s female protagonist Cate in Blasted and McDonagh’s Maureen in Beauty Queen might comprehend women as blinded by years of following routines and behaviors meant to direct women into a passively sexual, sheepish state – and who attempt to resist playing the “natural” (nature) woman defined by “culture.” Maureen and Cate seek a way to carve out a semblance of poetry in their narrowly constricted lives. They also, following Nietzsche, find the anguished condition empowering, humorous, and poetic. According to Charles Isherwood’s review of Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, although the play “is an expression of intense suffering, and is full of blunt confession of rage and anguish, the text is arranged in linguistic patterns and arrayed on the page in the published version with an artful precision that transforms unvarnished despair into arresting modern poetry.”45 Kane was, in fact, one of her generation’s most eloquent cartographers of nihilism. In her five plays, some of which are extended monologues, she mapped this new sense of “in-yer-face” theatre, addressing a youth dissatisfied with the consumerism, overstimulation, and boredom – information overload and emotional numbness. She charts the absurdities, brutalities, and sadness of life in a world of hype and hyperbole and she did so with incandescent prose that is as lyrical as it is elastic. She could be self-indulgent and hyperbolic, dwelling excessively on the moribund and grotesque ad infinitum, but she was also passionate, creating metastasizing narratives of characters trapped in asylums, both literally and figuratively. Her baroquely detailed descriptions of violence represented her effort to locate the increasingly incomprehensible reality with nuance and precision.
Kane and McDonagh also share the representation of the “loser” at the end of the twentieth century. Their characters have fallen off the map, have disappeared under the barrage of success of others, and have missed opportunities for the heroic in mainstream media. They are outliers who survive along the margins of success, people who have failed to enjoy or celebrate the end of communism and the rise – indeed sole possession of – unfettered capitalist-neoliberal democracy. The 1990s represented for the most part prosperity in the English-speaking world: stock markets rose, housing became more lucrative, and the general victory of capitalism over communism took root. The economic development in Ireland known as the “Celtic Tiger” began in the early 1990s, and, according to Victor Merriman, “continues to define Irish society some ten years later.”46 Yet, as Alwyn Turner points out in his book A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, “Among those left behind were substantial numbers eking out an existence on the fringes of cultural industries. With success having passed by on the other side, and with regular employment in short supply, there developed a celebration of underachievement, as though there were virtue in spurning mass popularity.”47 The characters in the plays of Kane and McDonagh share this penchant for rebelliousness, slackers who long for a way out of their conditions but unwilling to disembark from the commitment to their honesty and lackluster way of life. Instead, they represent characters whose rage bubbles beneath the surface, emerging when provoked. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes this newfound rage as a modern aversion to the Greek thymos, where individuals, instead of relishing pride, have detached themselves from the source of pride and impulsive sensation in heroic figures. For postmodernism, people on the sidelines of life peer into windows of the super-successful, building up a rage of jealousy and resentment. Sports, for example, have for Sloterdijk become “indispensable as an expansive system of winning and becoming famous, of stimulating and channeling postmodern excess of ambition.” While the ancient world had slaves and serfs, “the bearers of unhappy consciousness of their time,” modernity “has invented the loser. This figure, which one meets halfway between yesterday’s exploited and today’s and tomorrow’s superfluous, is the misunderstood product of the power games of democracies.” Their resentfulness turns “not just against the winners but also against the rules of the game. When the loser who loses too often calls into question the game as such by means of violence, this makes conspicuous the state of emergency of a politics after the end of history.”48 The first two plays of these dramatists bear comparison in their similar depictions of postmodern losers.