Posted by: archive
« on: August 22, 2007, 12:35:13 AM »
I've just studied Blasted with my Danish students in English literature. It's really a most fantastic drama and I would like to enter an academic discussing. Scene three is most exhilarating as form really mirrors content: Time, setting, plot and language are blasted.
Below I have listed the themes my students found interesting. If you want to discuss any of the following, please don't hesitate.
ArbejdsspĂžrgsmĂ„l til Sarah Kaneâs Blasted
Scene one Focus on the relationship between Cate and Ian.
1. The very first scenes of a play always try to catch the attention of the audience. How does scene one of the play succeed in attracting attention? 2. Pick out a few sentences that describe Ian and Cate 3. Who is controlling who? Give examples. 4. Give examples of moral unease and how it grows. 5. On which levels can you say that there are wars going on? 6. List some of the features characteristic of In-Yer-Face theatre in this scene.
Scene two Focus on the relationship between Cate and Ian and war images.
1. What has happened to the flowers? 2. Find all the hints indicating that Cate has been raped during the night. 3. Compare Ianâs dialogues in scene one with his dialogues in this scene. Any changes? Why?
Scene three Putting the blasts of form, characters, language and content of the play into perspective: dialogue, time, Iansâ blindness, war, nationality, identity, and the concept of an enemy image. The title may refer to many things which are blasted. Try to apply the title to:
1. Form: - the stage, setting 2. - dialogue 3. - time (see the very end of scene one and two) 4. - language 5. Content: - Ian 6. - Cate 7. - The soldier
Scene four Focus on atrocities carried out in different places around the world and the mediaâs handling of it. TV-viewersâ reactions.
1. Look at the picture (The cover of play showing a soldier NOT doing the V (victory) sign). How would most people react to it? 2. How are Ianâs and The Soldierâs reactions to what they have witnessed in their careers? 3. Now, characterise Cate and Ian again. 4. Does this scene offer any hope as to which mankind can avoid âblastsâ?
Scene five Focus on why atrocities happen.
1. Look at Ianâs very last remark. Is it a positive ending? 2. What is the idea of presenting Cate and Ian in a âhotel room in Leeds â the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the worldÂŽ (stage directions at the very opening of the play) and a civil war going on outside in the streets (scene three)?
Comment on some of the features characteristic of In-Yer-Face theatre: What is in-yer-face theatre? What is in-yer-face theatre about? Characteristics of the Characters Why use shock? How can theatre be so shocking? Why is in-yer-face theatre provocative? Why in-yer-face theatre is controversial? Why in-yer-face theatre is unsettling? Why show sex? Why show private and intimate situations? Why show nudity? Why violence? Why was in-yer-face theatre possible in the nineties? ? What is in-yer-face theatre? ? Theatre of sensation: ? Experiential ? Touches nerves ? Provokes alarm ? Gets under your skin ? Crossing normal boundaries
It strikes intimate subjects. IYFT forces us to look at feelings we would normally avoid because they are too painful, too frightening, too unpleasant, too acute. The audience is forced to see something close up, right in their faces. IYFT wants the audience to react, to use superlatives whether in praise or condemnation.
What is in-yer-face theatre about? ? Bad news about: ? The awful things humans are capable of ? The limits of our self-control ? The power of the irrational ? The fragility of our sense of the world ? That we canât be safe
? Central themes: ? Masculinity ? Sexual relationships ? Violence
Language: ? Blatant, filthy
Characters: ? Talk about unmentionable subjects ? Strip off their clothes ? Have sex ? Humiliate each other ? Show unpleasant emotions ? Become violent
Their actions are explicit
Why use shock? ? Wakes up the audience, have an important message ? Questions current ideas of what is normal ? Can educate the senses as well as stimulating curiosity
Shock is created when you go against audienceâs expectations. Shock disturbs the spectatorâs gaze. What seems shocking to the mainstream is seen as normal by the new wave of playwrights. (Remember they grew up when Thatcher wai in power.)
How can theatre be so shocking? ? Live ? Taboos are broken out in the open ? Others are aware of your reaction ? It is bearable to deal with unsettling subjects when you read about them in private, but put onstage it may be an electrifying experience ? Private intimate situations become overwhelming when staged in public, intimate theatres, hold only about 50 seats. ? Audience becomes complicit witness
Why is in-yer-face theatre provocative? ? New tone of voice ? Questions sensibility ? New stage images ? It departs from the conventional form of the naturalist 3 act drama
Naturalist representations of disturbing subjects are usually much easier to handle than emotionally fraught situations that are presented in an unfamiliar theatrical style
Why in-yer-face theatre is controversial? ? Walkouts ? Letters to the press ? Leader articles (âwaste of public moneyâ ? Calls for bans or cuts in funding ? Questions in Parliament ? Prosecution on charges of obscenity or blasphemy
Why in-yer-face theatre is unsettling? ? It challenges the destinctions we use to define who we are: ? Human/animal, clean/dirty, healthy/unhealthy, normal/abnormal, good/evil, true/untrue, real/unreal, right/wrong, just/unjust, art/life
It can be unsettling to question binary oppositions that are central to our worldview
Why show sex? ? Unsettles the audience because it is a reminder of our intimate feelings we desire to keep secret ? Causes anxiety because sex refers to powerful and uncontrollable things ? When sex is coupled with emotion such as neediness or loneliness the effect is disturbing
Why show private and intimate situations? ? Generates emotional charge
Why show nudity? ? Exposes human frailty ? Exposes the body beautiful ? Act of political power ? Liberation from convention
Why violence? ? Breaks the rule of debate-goes beyond word ? Feels primitive, irrational, destructive ? Enjoy violence when you are not part of it yourself ? Disturbs when we feel emotion behind the acting ? Questions titillation and gratuitous violence
Why was in-yer-face theatre possible in the nineties? ? Playwrights found artistic freedom after: ? The fall of the Berlin Wall and the exit of Margareth Thatcher. After all, changes were possible ? Postmodernism: âAnything goesâ. No ideologies, no rules, no âtasteâ ? Could be sceptical of male power without being feminist ? Could express outrage without being political correct ? New writing was needed in Britain and young people were encouraged by stage directors to write
Thatcherism provided both a climate of anger and the motivation to do something about it.
From Aleks Sierz, in In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 237-240 (Faber and Faber, 2001), (3,2 ns)
âOne way of understanding the point of view of a young writer is to do a thought experiment. Imagine being born in 1970. You're nine years old when Margaret Thatcher comes to power; for the next eighteen years - just as you're growing up intellectually and emotionally - the only people you see in power in Britain are Tories. Nothing changes; politics stagnate. Then, some time in the late eighties, you discover Ecstasy and dance culture. Sexually, you're less hung up about differences between gays and straights than your older brothers and sisters. You also realize that if you want to protest, or make music, shoot a film or put on an exhibition, you have to do it yourself. In 1989, the Berlin Wall falls and the old ideological certainties disappear into the dustbin of history. And you're still not even twenty. In the nineties, media images of Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda haunt your mind. Political idealism - you remember Tiananmen Square and know people who are roads protesters - is mixed with cynicism - your friends don't vote and you think all politicians are corrupt. This is the world you write about.â
âŠ
âIn the nineties, stage-of-the-nation plays fell out of favour, but most young writers did paint a vivid picture of contemporary life. Accepted pieties about what it meant to be British were not merely questioned, they were interrogated. Britain was seen as a bleak place where families were dysfunctional, individuals rootless and relationships acutely prob-lematic, a place where loners drifted from bedsits to shabby flats. Here, you were more likely to bump into a rent boy than a factory worker, a girl gang than a suburban birthday party, a group of petty thieves than a couple buying their first house. Foul-mouthed and irreverent, wildly gleeful and often hip, these were also troubled people. Despite their bravado, there was helplessness and anxiety: sexual, moral, existential. Such vividly drawn characters inhabited episodic stories rather than three-act plots, metaphor-rich situations rather than well-made plays. But amid the confusion, the nihilism and the pain, there were often faint rays of hope shining through the dark of the urban jungle. No one suggests that the majority of the British people were rent boys, smack addicts or abuse victims; social surveys showed that most young people wanted a job and a stable family. But many young writers used extreme characters to redefine the image of Britain. No more cosy suburban life, no more country nostalgia. Instead, as dramatist John Mortimer put it, new writing reflected the âstrident, anarchic, aimless world of England today, not in anger, or even bitterness, but with humour and a kind of loveâ. This imaginary Britain was a far darker place than that experienced on a daily basis by most of its audiences. And while it could be read as an example of the 'young country' that New Labour - with its attempts to rebrand Britain - tried to promote, it was much more raw, savage and critical than the platitudinous ideas thrown up by the Cool Britannia phenomenon. New writing's Britain was a netherscape that forcefully reminded audiences that not every-thing in the garden was rosy. The metaphors typical of nineties drama - summed up by stage images of abuse, anal rape and addiction - could be criticized for being literal images of horror, but their context often represented an advance on eighties drama because it saw the world in a more complex light. The best plays of the decade were most provocative when they viewed terri-ble acts as psychological states, usually characterized by complicity and collusion. Although the urgency of in-yer-face drama, with its com-pelling new aesthetic of experiential theatre, reached out and dragged audiences through ugly scenes and deeply disturbing situations, its motives were not to titillate but to spread the knowledge of what humans are capable of. Experiential theatre aimed to wake up audiences and tell them about extreme experiences, often in order to immunize them to those events in real life. As Sarah Kane once said, âIt is important to commit to memory events which have never happened - so that they never happen. I'd rather risk overdose in the theatre than in life.ââ
âŠ
âApart from their emphasis on masculinity, what were the politics of cutting-edge new plays? It is symptomatic of the nineties that traditional categories of left and right politics didn't seem to fit any more. While in-yer-face theatre was certainly anti-middle class - in the sense of affronting social conventions and being sceptical about the values of Middle England - it is much harder to argue that it was pro-working class. Behind the violence of these plays, lies anger and confusion - a typical response to the difficulties of living in a post-Christian, post--Marxist, postfeminist and postmodern society. For most writers, both the politics of consumer society and the traditional leftist opposition were equally suspect. But if the proletariat was no longer God, com-modity capitalism was still Satanic.â
Archive 2-12-2002