In Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, Helen, “a pretty girl of about seventeen” (11), is the object of Cripple Billy’s desires. By the end of the play Billy wants to go walking with her, revealing that he’s never been kissed. “Of course you’ve never been kissed,” she tells him, “You’re a funny looking cripple-boy” (77). Sarah Kane’s two plays after Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed and Crave, are also plays of desire. “Although desire is endemic of the human condition,” Robert Lubin writes, “the characters in Sarah Kane’s plays suffer from overpowering, irresistible desire; one can scarcely be differed for a moment before it exerts its demands on the subject.”1
Crave opens with characters C, B, M, and A in an unnamed place:
C:
B:
C:
A:
B:
This cryptic, indirect, nihilistic dialogue continues for the remainder of the play, with the opening line, “You’re dead to me,” repeated frequently. The play’s experimental form (no identifiable characters other than a letter, and no sense of time, though it does allude to a city of some sort) suggests influences from Dada, expressionism, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the interrupted dialogue (using a slash/mark to suggest the interruption) directly from Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Beckett, and Haiku (a mode of Japanese poetry, literally meaning “starting verse”).2 It is suggested that A is an older man, B is a younger man named “David,” C is a younger woman, M an older woman, and that there are romantic, or attempted romantic relationships between characters. However, the inconsistency of “characterization” makes this play, and Kane’s final work, 4.48 Psychosis, what Christina Delgado-García calls a refusal to submit to the “conventional, liberal-humanist characterization” found in traditional drama, instead driving toward a transgression of “both hetero- and homo-normativity and the favouring of indeterminacy, fluidity, and intersubjectivity.”3 Moreover, it is a play about honesty – the attempt to find it, nurture it, understand it, and realize its unattainability. The characters “crave,” as the title suggests, a way of understanding the pain and futility of life.
Crave exists in a desolate setting; differing voices compete for attention, which might be construed as different parts of one individual. Utterances are arranged in such a way as to create intertwined and tightly related conversations. The direction of the utterances is ambiguous; each speaker could be talking to an individual or the group. There are layered references to the Bible, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot; testimonials of suffering and angst; and an elliptical structure of content suggesting trappings of psychosis. Symbolist references to numbers have mysterious, subjective meanings. The personal is dramatized over the public (“the outside world is vastly overrated”), and the hyper-subjectivity overrides naturalistic suggestivity (there is no reference to time and place). Kane, David Rabey argues, “is manifestly influenced by [Edward Bond],” particularly his “materialist demonstration of how characters are often primarily defined by a systematic degradation.” Kane, however, “explores the sexuality of violence in ways which Bond does not.” Still, she shares with Bond the desire to make “her audience choose to look differently in unusually immediate terms: faced with startling explicit physical images of abjection and attack, the audience has to choose: to look directly or to look away.”4 All of Kane’s plays are about love in one form or another, but Crave is more lyrical and high-pitched about it, or, as David Rabey contends, it is Kane’s “most searching and poetic text, with an absolutely playful sense of reversibility: the text is alternately aphoristic and desperate, associative and wryly separated, self-mockingly ironic and proudly obsessive.”5 The play is unpacking deep psychological suffering and experiential trauma, yet is couched in a wry sense of humor and ironic detachment.
McDonagh’s The Pillowman is also inchoate as to location and time, though it has more reference points than Crave. The play examines the interrogation of a popular writer, Katurian Katurian Katurian (KKK), whose short stories appear to be the inspiration fora series of violent murders of children. He, along with his mentally impaired brother, Michal, have been detained by two police officers, Tupolski and Ariel, both of whom appear to enjoy sadistically brutalizing Katurian. The murder of children is especially provocative, as such crimes instantly evoke a horribile dicta in audiences – revolting yet compelling themes exploited in films repeatedly ever since Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M. According to Eamonn Jordan, the “past and the acting out of narratives are accommodated in The Pillowman through a sort of monstrous and transgressive, almost carnivalesque, summation in a way that casts aside any notion of verisimilitude in favour of the grotesque, inhumane, cartoon-heightened style.”6
Kane’s final play creates a sour, existential fear of a hostile environment, when things that are supposed to arouse security and safety, like mental institutions, seem porous and ineffective, evoking menace rather than comfort. As a result, skepticism of authority turns into corrosive cynicism, which in turn provokes a cycle of fear. The fog of fear envelops the protagonist, who is left to improvise her sense of sanity without an anchor to grasp. The play is written in fragments, spotted with phrases of despair, recrimination, vitriol, and specific dosage numbers for prescription narcotics used in the treatment of depression. Kane:
I’m writing a play called 4.48 Psychosis and it’s got similarities with Crave, but it’s different. It’s about psychotic breakdown and what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear, so that you no longer know the difference between your waking life and your dream life. And also you no longer know where you stop, and the world starts.7
The resistance to order, clarity, and certainty defines the final play. This drama can appear kerygmatic and shrill; but it is also lyrical, poetic, and melancholic, addressing layers of fear, remorse, guilt, rage, and self-destructive reflection. According to Karoline Gritzner, “Kane’s later work moves beyond drama in the sense that it eschews a direct relationship between character and the created illusion of a stage fiction. Here we have plays for voices rather than characters, language ‘scapes’ or layers that do not immediately signify recognizable realities.” Still, “it would be misleading to assume that for this reason subjectivity is erased within the theatrical space that is transfigured by language; rather, one is confronted with the challenging proposition that the self is no longer a direct agent of, or vessel for, meaning, but is constituted as an effect of language, space and movement.”8 The physical and verbal space is encoded with a “postmodern hyperspace,” what Fredric Jameson describes as a space which “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.”9 The play opens with a voice, probably repeating the words of consolation, “But you have friends,” followed by a long silence. Then, as if answering to oneself, the voice says “What do you offer” these friends?: “a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord body no longer expellant as the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever utters [ending without punctuation]” (205).
The inscrutability of Kane’s final works in general and the incongruous barrage of her words, with their run-on lists and cryptic references, speak articulately while simultaneously dodging the impact of clarity like a matador. We observe her plays without quite fathoming the points they belabor. Suspending the audience in a state of half-knowing, of mysteriousness within familiarity, requires an analysis that resists summation. In Kane’s dramas, we are in a calculated incoherence, calibrating the mystery of what meaning-laden ought to mean but refuses to be grasped. In Kane we have a spectacle of nihilism short of aspiration, rage without sanctimony, and dispiritedness shorn of petulance. Her vitriol can relate to the anti-Oedipal theories of postmodernist and post-Freudian feminists who view patriarchal authority structures as reflected and illustrated in the wounded yet heroic characterizations of the schizophrenic. Kane implies that the human condition is suffering and the aim of drama is to depict what happens when ethical impulses collide with the monster within us. Mundane values are irrelevant; virtue is meaningless; and coherence the domain of the delusional. Artists such as Sylvia Plath and Francis Bacon, Maggie Nelson writes, “aim to access ‘the brutality of fact’ without providing any narrative to house it, and yet without courting abstraction.” The same can be said of Sarah Kane; art, Nelson says,
which aims to extinguish the story behind the suffering and focus on the suffering itself partakes in a different, more insidious cruelty – that of depoliticization, of stripping cruelties from their contexts so that they seem pitiable, sensational, or inevitable, rather than contingent, avoidable, or explicable.… And if one suggests that the thing that cannot change is the very thing that is causing suffering, the indoctrination can be all the more toxic.10
The construction of her dialogue involves fragmentation, desensitizing humor, and the ritualization of psychotic behavior. She uses insignia of polite discourse – “Dr. this and that” – to shed irony on her shattered world. Frequently she envisages hallucinatory cultural denotation in which she is both narrator and participant. Her acuity regarding mental illness mounts a searing social critique, exposing the fraudulent and profligate world in the cases of mental disorder.
When Terry Eagleton wrote that “Tragic Man is he who is brave enough to endorse the beauty and necessity of illusion, in the teeth of the Platonists who would peer peremptorily behind it, but also he who risks gazing into the abyss of the Real and dancing on the edge without being turned to stone, reading what the scholars decorously call history as a squalid genealogy of blood, toil and terror,”11 he may well have been speaking of Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis. This lyrically written drama is without character; it is a stream of consciousness that reflects, among several things, Kane’s final years under the duress of mental illness. The title is described in the play as the precise moment “At 4.48/when sanity visits/for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind” (229). Although her work is usually characterized as exemplary of the British “in-yer-face” movement, confining Kane to this genre misses many of her nuances. If her dialogue is raw and personal, it is also unaccountable, while her contemporaries generally were lucid in their anger. The incongruous progress of her dialogue, with its inchoate rage and elliptical iconography, stands as a culmination of postmodern sensibilities. She explored the unconscious, the primitive, and the insanity of life – much like Strindberg – for aesthetic purposes, but also in a Freudian sense, to view the impenetrable humanity deeply imbedded beneath culture, history, and polite society. An analysis of symbols and signs in her work will only lead to superficial gains, luring any analysis away from her opacity and oneiric abstractions. Kane isn’t dispensing with coded messages, but rather is abandoning purpose and meaning. She expresses her work articulately while avoiding the fullness of clarity. We can observe her plays – their words, images, bursts of anguish, and construction – but cannot fathom the point they construe. Keeping us in this state of half-knowing and mystery is the core of her dramas. Hers is a calculated incoherence, calibrating the inchoate through a passionate creativity that cannot easily make sense to herself, much less to us. Kane’s language is an ecstatic overdose of emotion and anguish.
Like Georg Büchner more than a century and a half before her, Kane can sound apocalyptic; still, like Büchner, her plays address reverberations replete with self-destructive reflection and rage. Büchner’s protagonist Woyzeck and Kane’s nameless protagonist in 4.48 Psychosis are trapped in a psychic world that fails to comprehend their longing for understanding, compassion, and love. These two brilliant and decadent playwrights, both of whom died at tragically young ages, used drama to reveal themselves fully to others as the embodiment of their inexorable decay. They thereby contribute to the appreciation for the overriding ethos of their epochs by setting forth an incarnate critique of the very modernism they embody. They expose the blind spots, shortcomings, and failures of a self-satisfied world, pursuing a transfiguration of the limits of experiences by dint of immersion into the very mortality of experiences. If any playwright appropriately brings to an end the twentieth century, it is Sarah Kane. Her consummate contribution, however singular, is the culmination of extremes in an age that sought to shield itself from its brutality.
Kane and McDonagh are proponents of an artistic tension fostering an existential denunciation, a reflection on the human condition of their times that propels audiences into the abyss of a nervous breakdown. They dramatize a systematic desacralization of sacrosanct images, choosing a deviant gestural and verbal dimension perceived as rebelliously necessary for the overthrow of bourgeois complacency. Their plays depict a traumatic, disturbing, and aggressive representation of a civilization that suffers from exhaustion, self-satisfaction, and consumer overload; they transform painful wounds and thwarted desires without the hope or promise of healing and salvation. Instead their works become compelling and often humorous grounds for observing our behavior. In their individual ways, they both attempt to draw spectators into their centrifugal space that incorporates paranoia, neurosis, deviant sexuality, extreme violence, and humor. As a result, they close the chapter of modern drama in the twentieth century, almost presciently aware of a twenty-first century that would make the violence in their plays appear sedate by comparison. Sarah Kane chose not to remain for a forthcoming century inaugurated by 9/11 terrorism and massive conflagrations; sadly, we will miss the opportunity to hear what she might have said about a world that has taken violence she and McDonagh superbly understood to a whole new level.