Sentimentalism and In-Yer-Face Drama: Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Anthony Neilson

Stephen Wragg Q33406 English Studies Dissertation: Full Year

Sentimentalism and In-Yer-Face Drama: Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson

Anthony Neilson once disparaged the “In-Yer-Face” theatre movement to which

his plays have been ascribed, writing that: ‘As far as I can tell, In-Yer-

Face was all about being horrid and writing about shit and buggery. I

thought I was writing love stories.’1 Certainly, the plays now designated

as part of the “In-Yer-Face” movement were received and soon categorised in

terms of their explicit and provocative depictions of sexuality and

violence. However, the playwrights have been identified as part of a

singular movement for reasons deeper than the scatological surface-level

content of their plays.

Aleks Sierz, credited with giving a name to the wave of In-Yer-Face

playwrights, argued that the moniker was more suitable than its

alternatives, because it implies much more than the perceived misanthropy

which Neilson suggests:

If [...] you choose to call this phenomenon New Brutalism, you

are emphasising one aspect of contemporary theatre – its

brutality and violence. Since the work of Sarah Kane is as much

about tenderness and love, this label conveys entirely the

wrong impression. Kane and Ravenhill are really not brutes –

and they are not interested in brutality as such.2

1 Anthony Neilson, ‘Don’t Be So Boring’, The Guardian: Theatre Blog (21 March 2007). [18 April 2012] http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/mar/21/features11.g22 Aleks Sierz, ‘”To Recommend a Cure”: Beyond Social Realism and In-Yer-Face Theatre’, in Contemporary Drama in English: Extending the Code: New Forms of Dramatic and Theatrical Expression, vol. 11, eds. Hans-Ulrich Mohr and Kerstin Mächler(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004), pp.45-62, p.51.

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Sierz, consistently the most prominent scholar of In-Yer-Face

theatre, echoes Neilson’s complaints that the theme of love was overlooked

in his plays, which could easily be applied to Mark Ravenhill or Sarah

Kane. While Neilson exaggerates about writing traditional “love stories”,

the theme of love is reinforced by depictions of emotional intensity and

expressions of affection. In the context of the graphic extremism of the

plays, the theme of love takes strange new forms, which initial reviewers

hesitated to discuss.

In fact, many In-Yer-Face plays are embedded with sentimental

moments, as characters find ways to express love and tenderness amidst the

extreme imagery of the plays. The theme of love is treated as importantly

and with as much provocation as the violence and sexuality which attracted

attention; Sarah Kane insisted that ‘[i]f you want to write about extreme

love, you can only write about it in an extreme way’.3 This sense of

excess, when applied to emotional discourse, implies a degree of falsity, a

distortion, which is the essence of sentimentalism.4

As a literary trope, sentimentalism has been disparaged, particularly

by the modernists, such as Joyce, Brecht, and Eliot, who have been found to

“attack” the idea of sentimentalism.5 For the modernists, ‘sentimentality

was both a past to be outgrown and a present tendency to be despised’.6

Although the In-Yer-Face dramatists were frequently portrayed as 3 Sarah Kane, qtd. in Graham Saunders, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p.74.4 Mary Midgley, ‘Brutality and Sentimentalism’ in Philosophy 54 (1979), 385-9, pp.385-6.5 Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp.160-169.6 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p.2.

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unsentimental, I will argue that their treatment of characters’ emotions

can be described as a form of sentimentalism. Kane’s concept of

“experiential theatre”, which can be applied to the whole In-Yer-Face

movement, works against modernist anti-sentimentalism, because it

constitutes theatre that is ‘so powerful, so visceral, that it forces

audiences to react’.7 It demands an instinctively emotional reaction rather

than a conscious, deliberate interpretation.

Although we may broadly define sentimentalism as that which operates

emotionally rather than logically, critics have found that there is

something more specific about sentimentalism which is the target of

modernist criticism. Anthony Savile finds that ‘[s]entimentality is

properly seen as a mode of feeling or thought, not as a feeling of a

particular kind’.8 He finds that any heightened emotion can be sentimental,

that the mode ‘is typically one that idealizes its object under the

guidance of a desire for gratification and reassurance’.9 It is this

process of idealisation in love which Kane explores in Cleansed, as well as

in Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator. In

these plays, characters make gestures towards sentimentalism which are

never quite fulfilled, are obstructed, or are of questionable sincerity.

I will also argue that this focus on sentimental values is

inseparable from the social context of the plays, as there are many

responses to the socio-political climate of mid-1990s Britain within In-

7 Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p.5.8 Anthony Savile, The Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.237.9 Ibid, p.241.

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Yer-Face theatre, a time when sentimental values were being questioned, as

was evident in contemporary art. After the drastic cuts to arts funding by

the Thatcher administration, John Major (who was Prime Minister during the

emergence of In-Yer-Face), began to restore funds, and artists began to

respond to the anti-sentimental tendencies of Thatcherism. Stephen Daldry,

the then-Artistic Director at the Royal Court Theatre, recognised that

Ravenhill and Kane reflected how ‘politics became more personal’,10 that the

emotional qualities of the plays had wider resonances.

The plays were never overtly political, although they were certainly

intent on characterising Post-Thatcher 90s culture; plays which ‘make it

clear, through descriptions of characters by age, that […] they are by and

about “Thatcher’s children”.’11 Instead of being strident, In-Yer-Face

responded to the government in emotional terms; as Michael Billington

finds, the playwrights’ ‘poisoned social inheritance’ was ‘more often

explored through damaged personal relationships than anti-government

rhetoric’.12 It was expected that the 90s would develop into a “caring

decade” after the oppression of Thatcherism,13 and while much of 90s “Cool

Britannia” culture turned out to be the opposite of “caring”, the

disturbing and excessive images of In-Yer-Face ‘were based on a methodology

of cause and effect’.14 In other words, there was an emotional involvement

10 Stephen Daldry qtd. in Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Pilar Zozaya, British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.8.11 Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing: 1995-2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.28-9.12 Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945 (London: Faber andFaber, 2007), p.354.13 Saunders 2009, op.cit., p.15.14 Ibid.

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in theatrical imagery, rather than a sense of distance which Graham

Saunders identifies in other provocateurs in In-Yer-Face’s contemporaneous

culture.15 Behind the genuine impetus to shock the audience, there was an

emotionally-driven political engagement, which initial reviewers completely

overlooked.

The post-Thatcher generation was defined by a series of traumatic

events including the AIDS epidemic, civil war in the Balkans, and the

murder of Stephen Lawrence, all of which In-Yer-Face theatre responded to.16

Mark Ravenhill emphasises the murder of James Bulger by two children as

particularly culturally significant, writing that ‘it seemed to shift

something in the national consciousness – a re-questioning of traditional

ideas of what was good and evil and the subsequent debate surrounding

that’.17 The explorations of disaffect and apathy in Penetrator and Shopping and

Fucking reflect this shift in consciousness, as any emotional moments are

deeply problematised.

All of these factors are obliquely assimilated in the plays, as the

dramatists refracted the ‘strident, anarchic, aimless world of England

today, not in anger, or even bitterness, but with humour and a kind of

love’.18 It is this paradoxically tender approach to staging the horrors of

their contemporary society which brings the playwrights together. My essay

15 Ibid.16 Kritzer, op.cit., p.29.17 Mark Ravenhill qtd. in Peter Billingham, At the Sharp End (London: Methuen Drama, 2007), p.125.18 John Mortimer qtd. in Alex Sierz, ‘Outrage’, The Telegraph: Culture (17 February 2001). [18 April 2012] http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/mar/21/features11.g2

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will be a literary analysis of the texts of Shopping and Fucking, Cleansed, and

Penetrator.

Mark Ravenhill – Shopping and Fucking

After the uproar that surrounded Blasted, and the Bowlderisation of the

title of Ravenhill’s play,19 the Royal Court anticipated the controversy of

the 1996 debut of Shopping and Fucking. Yet oddly enough, the critical

reception was largely positive; even the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker, famously

vitriolic in his criticism of Blasted, felt compelled to ‘applaud [the

Court’s] courage’20 in staging the play. However, Ravenhill noted his

‘dismay that some young people reacted as if the whole play was meant to be

“ironic, cool, unfeeling”.’21

This blasé reaction to Shopping and Fucking was informed by the

contemporaneous “Cool Britannia” culture into which In-Yer-Face theatre was

dangerously close to being categorised. Many cultural figureheads of the

mid-90s propagated ‘images of the cruel and aberrant, often cynically

portrayed in a clinical and distanced manner that glamorised their

disturbing subject matter’.22 Graham Saunders points the finger at reality

television and Damien Hirst, but identifies the key difference:

[P]lays such [as] Blasted and Shopping and Fucking used their

imagery in order to explore societal tensions and injustices; 19 Sierz, 2001, op.cit., p.125.20 Jack Tinker, review of Shopping and Fucking: Daily Mail, 4 October 1996, Theatre Record 20 (1996), p.1244.21 Sierz, 2001, op.cit., p.129.22 Saunders, 2009, op.cit., p.15.

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here the outlandish and violent were based on a methodology of

cause and effect, rather than the effect itself as a

substitution for the rationale.23

If there is a lot of strikingly unsentimental imagery in Shopping and

Fucking, it is used primarily to explore the emotional impact on its

characters, as an extrapolation of the effects of society at large. Without

the characters’ traumatised reactions, the play would not come across as so

extreme. As Dan Rebellato remarks, ‘for such a reputedly unsentimental and

hard-nosed play, there is a surprising amount of crying’.24 There is none of

the cynicism or distance of “Cool Britannia”, and it is evident from the

play’s squalid setting that Ravenhill is avoiding glamorisation.

Shopping and Fucking begins in a flat reminiscent of the dingy apartment

of Penetrator: ‘Flat – once rather stylish, now almost entirely stripped

bare’ (S&F 3). Ravenhill is, like his major influences (Douglas Coupland,

Brett Easton-Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerey),25 concerned with

disaffect, and the idea of deterioration in this rather perfunctory staging

description conveys the idea of a decline in homely values. The setting is

not defined by contemporary styles, rather the disintegration of previous

styles; following on from these influences, he is depicting a generation’s

‘kind of moral vacuum’.26

23 Ibid.24 Dan Rebellato, ‘Introduction’ in Mark Ravenhill, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), pp.ix-xx, p.xix.25 Sierz, 2001, op.cit., p.124.26 Mark Ravenhill, qtd ibid., p.124.

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Much of the plot revolves around Lulu’s dealings with Brian, the drug

dealer who gives her 300 ecstasy tablets, the ‘most frightening person’27 in

the play. Brian balances the contrasting characteristics of being a devoted

father and an antagonistic criminal; he was oxymoronically described as

‘odiously sentimental’28 by the Daily Telegraph, highlighting Ravenhill’s

subversion of the idea of family values.

When we first see Brian, he is describing to Lulu the plot of the

Disney film The Lion King, focusing on the emotional force of the play. He

describes his reactions: ‘you feel the sorrow welling up in you’ (S&F 8);

‘It takes you right here. Your throat tightens’ (S&F 9); before the

emotional connection is revealed to be more disturbing: ‘He knows who it is

he has to kill. And that’s the moment. That’s our favourite bit’ (S&F 9).

This is, of course, a misreading of the children’s film: Brian views it as

a ‘parable of family life, filial bonding and moral values’,29 but the fact

he hones in on a scene and imbues it with a patriarchal sense of violence

and dominance (exposing a dark streak within the most heartwarming, family-

oriented landmarks of 1990s culture) marks the “odious” nature of his

sentimentalism. Brian is using his emotional connection as a means of

belittling Lulu, reacting with disbelief when she second-guesses the

clichés of the film: ‘You’ve never seen this?’ (S&F 9). He associates his

superiority with his sentimentalism, gauging Lulu’s personality by how far

she responds to his empty maxims: ‘So many today are lost. Isn’t that so?’

27 Ian Herbert, ‘Prompt Corner’ in Theatre Record 20 (1996), 1219-20, p.1219.28 Charles Spencer, review of Shopping and Fucking: Daily Telegraph 3 October 1996,Theatre Record 20 (1996), pp.1246-1247, p.1247.29 Billingham, op.cit., p.137.

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(S&F 10). He assumes that Lulu has no sentimental side, although his own

emotional connections seem void, outbalanced by his aggression.

For Ian Herbert, Brian represents ‘a figure from the flickering

shadows of our old values’.30 Although he is the oldest character in the

play, he does not necessarily stand for a previous generation; his role is

a distortion of traditional values. (The idea of this generational gap is

taken further in Some Explicit Polaroids, as Nick returns from prison and is

disgusted at the other characters’ moral deficit, and their political

complacency). We see Brian act with genuine emotional expression over the

video of his son playing the cello (S&F 43), and he frequently incorporates

religion into his moralism. However, his most forceful message is his

central, overpowering rule: ‘Get. The. Money. First.’ (S&F 87). In mixing

aggression and romanticism, Brian represents a wider social form of

oppression, a paradoxical socially-inherited morality which the

protagonists cannot assimilate. Jack Tinker praised the play for its honest

depiction of Mark, Lulu, and Robbie, as ‘at the mercy of a world which

brutalises and blinds them to any moral imperative’,31 and this

brutalisation is largely enacted directly through Brian. I am arguing that

the reason he is so terrifying is because he is a representation of the

impossible moral expectations of contemporary capitalist society.

He is not an abstractly constructed form of “evil”, as Ravenhill has

protested: ‘Look at the way my plays happen within a specific world of late

capitalism. This is not a world of metaphysical absolutes’.32 These are 30 Herbert, op.cit., p.1219.31 Tinker, op.cit., p.1244.32 Mark Ravenhill, ‘A Tear in the Fabric: the James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the ‘Nineties’, New Theatre Quarterly 20 (2004), 305-314,

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entirely social pressures, of which Brian is a victim and perpetuator.

Ravenhill’s overall message is summed up neatly by Liz Tomlin: ‘The fear

that global capitalism’s commodification of human life and emotion is

endangering the human potential of love’.33 Ravenhill’s other characters are

immature, unable to adequately express their emotional potential, and this

is perhaps because of their society’s overbearing prioritisation of capital

over individuality.

The scene in which Robbie admits he gave away the 300 tablets of

ecstasy illustrates this theme to the point of didacticism. Robbie makes a

direct connection between his disregard for capital and his happiness: ‘I

felt good, I felt amazing, just from giving’ (S&F 38). It is this moment in

which Caridad Svich finds ‘that the carefully orchestrated chaos of the

play’s structure, the randomness and brutality of its violence and sexual

encounters, falls apart to reveal a suspiciously bourgeois sentimentalism

beating all-too-heartily at its core’.34 It is a straightforward parable of

a character who forgets the brutality of capitalism and experiences a brief

joy, before being physically beaten for his transgression and left having

to repay the money he has wasted: a neatly packaged, illustration of the

‘old-fashioned moral theme […] that money […] is at the root of all evil’,35

which would come across as sentimental were it not for the tale’s violent

ending.

p.313.33 Liz Tomlin, ‘English theatre in the 1990s and beyond’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre Since 1895: Volume 3, ed. Baz Kershaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.498-512, p.503.34 Caridad Svich, ‘Commerce and Morality in the Theatre of Mark Ravenhill’, Contemporary Theatre Review 13 (2003), 81-95.35 Spencer, op.cit., p.1247.

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On the other hand, Lulu (justifiably) associates Robbie’s elation at

his generosity with the ecstasy he took, thus breaking ‘[r]ule number one’

(S&F 38); however, this does not mean that his sentiments can be dismissed.

Although Tomlin believes that ‘[h]uman feelings and emotions are reduced to

chemical effects’,36 Ravenhill’s implication that drugs stimulate the

strongest emotions is not a symbol of characters’ depravity; it is more

that he depicts characters who find society so spiritually deadening that

they must strive to deviate and alter reality. Robbie uses drugs in order

to feel valid emotions which he cannot ordinarily find, not to invent

invalid feelings.

David Alderson is also sceptical about the ‘synthetic feelings’37 of

ecstasy, contradicting Svich’s view. He find that the episode ‘attest[s] to

the vagueness and banality of Robbie’s aspirations’38 rather than displaying

sentimentalism. If his sentiments are “vague” it is because the force which

oppresses him is so insurmountable and all-encompassing that to direct his

aspirations at anything specific would be impossible. Max Stafford-Clark,

the Artistic Director of the Royal Court from 1979-1993, finds that this

lack of direction is a defining feature of the politics of In-Yer-Face

drama. He finds that after the end of Thatcher’s terms as prime minister,

there was ‘no common enemy any more, no clear political agenda’.39 He is

echoing the notion that during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s principles

constituted a definitive ideological point of opposition for the political

36 Ibid., p.504.37 David Alderson, ‘Postgay Drama: sexuality, narration and history in the plays of Mark Ravenhill’, Textual Practice 24 (2010), 863-882, p.865.38 Ibid., p.865.39 Max Stafford-Clark qtd. in Aragay, et al., op.cit., p.35.

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left, and that John Major and his successive government, lacking her

stridence, dissimulated these principles; In-Yer-Face was also about coming

to terms with the ways in which ‘politics had turned personal’.40 Episodes

such as this should therefore not be dismissed as “banal”: Ravenhill is

depicting the way Thatcher’s libertarianism continued to marginalise

individuals who do not fit into the capitalist model, and their emotional

reactions to this position. In-Yer-Face highlighted such reactions because

‘[a] sense of striving to find out or a sense of confusion is often better

than knowing exactly what is wrong and knowing exactly what you are going

to find.’41 Ravenhill accepts this confusion, which emphasises the futility

of his characters’ emotional gestures at the oppression of a society beyond

their understanding.

This confusion is also manifested in what Robbie describes as a lack

of ‘big stories’ (S&F 66). The play is full of short stories of questionable

truth (for instance, Mark’s Fergie and Diana story), constantly reiterated

to the point of meaninglessness (as in Mark’s ‘shopping story’ (S&F 4),

which Mark repeats despite the fact that Robbie and Lulu demonstrably know

it inside-out (S&F 5).) Robbie eventually realises that ‘we all need

stories, we make up stories so that we can get by’ (S&F 66), stating plainly

his sentimental attachment to constructed realities. But the problem is the

lack of “grand narratives”: ‘they all died or the world grew up or grew

senile or forgot them, so now we’re all making up our own stories. Little

stories’ (S&F 66). Rebellato recognises that this means that ‘progress has

been discredited, [that this] makes resistance to the grand story of

40 Max Stafford-Clark qtd. in ibid., p.35.41 Max Stafford-Clark qtd. in ibid., p.35.

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globalisation impossible. It makes our experience of reality impossible to

share’.42 Nonetheless, Brian’s use of the Lion King story is an attempt to

share his individually sentimental interpretation. As I stated earlier, it

is a misreading: Brian is as confused by the moral expectations of post-

Thatcher British society as the central characters, and the difference is

that he perpetuates this confusion by enacting it upon others. Because the

characters’ stories are small and self-contained, with mere personal

significance, they offer no opportunity to develop into anything larger.

Rebellato links this to Thatcherism, that “shared reality” was particularly

diminished by ‘the privatisation of public knowledge’43 enacted by her

government.

Rebellato writes that Robbie’s speech has a broader significance

within modern culture, as ‘a fairly accurate summary of Jean-François

Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition’.44 Ravenhill has expressed scepticism over

the principles of postmodernism, stating that ‘I would like to challenge

that liberal, postmodern consensus of either, “There are no moral values”

or “Oh, we’re not quite sure if we’ve got any”.’45 He is dismissing

relativism rather than postmodernism as a whole, and his play incorporates

this tension. The lack of “grand narrative” makes it difficult for his

characters to develop morality, because they have no examples to live by,

but Ravenhill has been adamant that: ‘I want audiences to make moral

choices’.46 He presents characters who have not developed moral compasses,

42 Rebellato, op.cit., p.xv.43 Ibid., p.xvi.44 Ibid., p.xiv.45 Mark Ravenhill qtd. in Billingham, op.cit., p.126.46 Ravenhill 2004, op.cit., p.313.

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but Robbie wishes he could find a sense of direction, instead ‘making

necessary compromises with the materialism of the time’,47 by creating

sentimental attachments to Mark’s smaller, inconsequential stories;

Ravenhill trusts that his audience have developed a sense of morality and

can attempt to examine how and why the characters have failed. Mark’s final

story is of hope, a surreal variation of the “shopping story” in which the

narrator buys and frees a ‘mutant’ (S&F 90) slave. Mark’s narrative is

bizarre but therefore original and meaningful, and Lulu approves: ‘I like

that ending’ (S&F 90). There is a suggestion that this acceptance of the

story might entail a reconsideration of the idea of sex as a transaction,

and by the end, the ready meals are being shared, as the characters make a

small defiance against the confines of consumerism.

However, it is perhaps misrepresentative to argue that there were no

longer any ‘big stories’ (S&F 66), because the post-Thatcher generation

witnessed a huge number of ‘[t]raumatic events’48 which were unavoidable in

the media, seemingly incompatible with a sentimental worldview. Rather than

positive, moralistic tales, disturbing news stories dominated the media,

such as the murder of James Bulger by two schoolchildren in February 1993.

This particular event was highlighted by Ravenhill as prompting a shift in

consciousness, a sign of a need for change that he believes ‘played a

part’49 in the fall of John Major’s government. He finds many parallels with

the incident throughout his plays, that ‘[s]hops, videos, children killed

by children’50 are found in all of his first three plays; but he claims that

47 Billington, op.cit., p.361.48 Kritzer, op.cit., p.29.49 Ravenhill 2004, op.cit., p.309.50 Ibid., p.311.

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the connection was not conscious, that the incident was integrated with

‘all feeling, little fact’.51 He describes how his ‘own personal grief

became intertwined with the story of James Bulger’.52 If we are to take

sentimentalism to mean an anti-rational manifestation of strong emotion, we

might describe this mode of writing as sentimental.

The parallels to the Bulger case are found in, for instance, Lulu

speaking to a man masturbating to a CCTV recording (S&F 61) of the earlier

incident when she was in a Seven-Eleven, and a clerk was stabbed (S&F 29).

Lulu witnesses the publicity of violence, the callousness with which people

can react to this. The man on the telephone is much more desensitised than

the play’s central characters; the truly unsentimental characters remain

off-stage. But nonetheless, Lulu questions how she did not prevent the

violence, unable to understand: ‘It’s like it’s not really happening there

[…] you just watch.’ (S&F 29). One thing people found particularly shocking

about the Bulger case was that none of the 38 witnesses at their trial did

anything to stop them.53 Ravenhill presents a comparable case of bystander

non-intervention, presenting it as a source of turmoil for Lulu. She takes

the opportunity to steal chocolate while fully aware of the immorality of

her actions. She recognises an opportunity for survival by stealing, as she

is unable to pay for food; because she is in a position to fight for

survival she must ignore her morality.

51 Ibid., p.307.52 Ibid., p.308.53 Mark R. Levine, ‘Rethinking Bystander Non-Intervention: social categorisation and the evidence of witnesses at the James Bulger murder trial’, Human Relations 52 (1999), 1133-1155.

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In spite of all of this, Ravenhill is writing about characters who

believe in and are attempting to locate their emotional cores. If they are

unsuccessful, it is not because they are unfeeling, but because their

gestures towards sentimentalism are unfulfilled: they lack outlets for

sentimentality because the society in which they operate as outsiders does

not offer any means of a shared reality to them. They are unable to develop

moral ideologies because instead of “big stories”, they are living in the

shadow of callous violence and Brian’s flatly unmetaphysical rule of “Get.

The. Money. First.”

Sarah Kane - Cleansed

Cleansed differs so much from the dramatic mode of Shopping and Fucking that

many critics questioned the validity of the two plays being ascribed to the

same movement. It is the antithesis of the realism of Shopping and Fucking:

inspired by Büchner’s Woyzeck, Kane strips away ‘anything remotely

extraneous or explanatory [leaving only] moments of extremely high drama’.54

The effect allows Kane to explore the theme of love in its purest form,

using intense and near-impossible stage directions.

The setting of the university is an ambiguous space which allows Kane

to explore the reactions of characters to extreme cruelty, enacted by

Tinker, whose role is also ambiguous, and by the anonymous, invisible

“Voices”. The idea of defining love in terms of cruelty is directly

54 Sarah Kane qtd. in Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p.87.

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influenced by A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes,55 a text in which he

delineates the tropes of the “lover” figure as found in literature which

explores the theme of love; Kane particularly extrapolates from Barthes’

controversial suggestion that a lover experiencing “catastrophe” is in a

“panic situation” that is comparable to an inmate of Dachau.56 This is

aesthetically quintessential In-Yer-Face drama, an example of how the

playwrights were ‘trying to push the boundaries of what is acceptable’,57

with the purpose of showing ‘what it means to be human’.58

Many initial critics sustained the famously vitriolic reception of

Kane’s Blasted in reviews of Cleansed (although the reviews were far more

open-minded this time); negative reviewers overlooked the theme of love,

overpowered by the play’s violent content, interpreting it as nihilistic:

for instance, the Independent found that Cleansed ‘painstakingly charts the

descent into the brutality of a world which seeks to deny the power of

positive emotion’,59 and the Express missed the point profoundly by declaring

that ‘love has been entirely banished’60 in the play. This reading of the

play contrasts with Barthes’ assertions that what lovers experience is

defined by extremity, which is what Kane is symbolising in the play. She

has stated that: ‘Cleansed, more than any of my other plays, uses violence

as a metaphor’.61 Kane is transferring Barthes’ alignment of emotions to

55 Saunders, ibid., p.93.56 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York,NY: The Noonday Press, 1978), p.49.57 Sierz 2001, op.cit., p.5.58 Ibid., p.5.59 David Benedict, review of Cleansed: Independent 9 May 1998, Theatre Record 9 (1998), p.564.60 Robert Gore Langton, review of Cleansed: Express 10 May 1998, Theatre Record 9 (1998), p.563.61 Sarah Kane qtd. in Saunders 2009, op.cit., p.74.

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physical experiences to the stage, forcing her audience to empathise with a

mixture of physical and emotional trauma.

The effect has similarities with literature which has previously been

termed “sentimental”. Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s reading of 19th-century

American sentimental fiction is that it ‘relies on the body as the

privileged site of communication’,62 incorporating descriptions of physical

expressions of emotion (for instance, crying), and thus encouraging the

reader to parallel this emotional reaction while reading. However,

Elizabeth Barnes disagrees:

More often than not, the autonomous body represents an obstacle

to sympathy, denoting as it does the physical limits of

sentimental union. By evoking and circulating feeling,

sentimental fiction strives to move beyond the material limits

of both the body and the page to participate in the

representation of selfhood.63

Barnes and Sanchez-Eppler’s criticisms are of novels: Kane’s dramatic

medium allows her to incorporate both effects, within her concept of

powerful, intellectually and emotionally provocative ‘experiential

theatre’.64 She is conscious of the visceral, physical reactions to not just

the violence on stage, but for instance, Robin’s suffering when Tinker

forces him to eat all of the chocolates he bought for Grace (C 139-140), a

scene which was consciously prolonged (by adding another tray of

62 (paraphrased in) Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997), p.95.63 Ibid., p.95.64 Sierz 2001, op.cit., p.92.

18


chocolates) to emphasise the audience’s discomfort, attempting to replicate

Robin’s pain.65 There are also scenes which go beyond what is physically

possible. For instance, when Grace makes love to Graham, (a scene which in

itself is ambiguously representative of her love for a projection of her

dead brother), Kane’s stage directions are wildly fantastic: ‘A sunflower

bursts through the floor and grows above their heads’ (C 120). She presents

their sexual union as a means of love, and then attempts to remove the

“obstacle” of the limitations of physical bondage, with the sense of growth

and beauty represented by the flowers, and in this sense, the play

encourages multiple facets of a sentimental reaction. Moreover, by using

highly metaphorical violence, her play fits Barnes’ archetype of the

sentimental mode: ‘bodies are treated as primarily affective rather than

material’.66

While these physical expressions are important, Barthes’ text

primarily explores the feelings of the lover by analysing sentimental

discourse, which he finds is ‘ignored, disparaged, or derided’67 by the rest

of language, despite being ‘spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects’.68

Kane often evokes feelings which resemble distinct “fragments” in Barthes’

text, but she problematises sentimental expression, because her characters

are the victims of types of cruelty which deny verbal and non-verbal

expression.

This is displayed when Carl’s love is proved to be insincere: he is

the lover who loves love itself and thus ‘manages to annul the loved 65 Saunders 2009, op.cit., p.30.66 Barnes, op.cit., p.96.67 Ibid., p.1.68 Ibid., p.1.

19


object’,69 to use Barthes’ terms; he promises Rod ‘I’ll never betray you’ (C

110) and when pushed to the brink of death, begs Tinker ‘Rod not me’ (C

117). Tinker attempts to disallow any further romantic expression by

removing Carl’s tongue, then hands, then feet, but each time Carl discovers

ways to express his love, in ways which resemble discourse less and less,

and as such seem purer and purer. Finally, when there is little of Carl

left to be dismembered (although Tinker finally removes Carl’s genitals,

because of his final expression of sexual love (C 145)), Rod is put in the

same position, and does not betray Carl, and is killed by Tinker. Rod’s

love reaches its purest form, and as such, his sense of self no longer

matters, he gives himself up for Carl.

Rod and Carl’s purpose in the play is their search for an honest form

of sentimental discourse. Carl’s unfulfilled sentiments contrast with Rod’s

honesty: ‘I love you now. I’m with you now. I’ll do my best, moment to

moment, not to betray you.’ (C 111). Rod’s pragmatism was described as

‘austere’70 by David Grieg, but his honesty, while at first seeming austere,

is later revealed as more valuable than any sort of artificial, clichéd

sentimentality. While their exchange of rings is informed by traditional

marriage vows, Rod ‘fills the traditional Christian formula with a new

language that he finds is more appropriate for him’.71 This form of

sentimental discourse is not distorted by impersonal social values, and is

therefore almost the opposite of austere, his tentativeness strengthening

69 Ibid., p.31.70 David Grieg, ‘Introduction’ in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), pp.ix-xviii, p.xii.71 Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, ‘Cruelty, violence, and rituals in Sarah Kane’s plays’, in Sarah Kane in Context, eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp.80-87, p.85.

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his final affirmation of love. Much sentimentalist art and thought

simplifies morality to idealistic good/evil binaries,72 but Rod first

rejects Carl’s idealism and thus love is represented with ‘a more profound

form of optimism than a blind embracing of love as all-powerful’.73

Robin is also prevented from expressing himself with sentimental

discourse, and from declaring his love for Grace. His attempts at

expression can again be found in Barthes’ fragments: he buys her chocolates

(C 139), Barthes’ ‘dedication’,74 but is forced to eat them (C 139-140); he

wants to write her a love letter (C 123), Barthes’ ‘letter’,75 but he is

illiterate, and Tinker burns his attempt at drawing her a symbolic picture

(C 129). Moreover, his attempts at expressing love are unconvincingly

naïve, and so he is never recognised by Grace. His lack of education

prevents him from expressing himself with any eloquence, but he also

displays an acute innocence when he views Tinker’s peep-show window: ‘Robin

watches – at first innocently eager, then bemused, then distressed. […]

Robin sits and cries his heart out’ (C 134). His reactions to the display

of sexuality suggests an asexual, platonic form of love, emphasising his

sentimentalism (in a traditional sense), entailing the sentimentalist’s

imposition of ‘qualities of innocence’76 upon the subject. Yet it also makes

it impossible for him to be taken seriously amidst characters whose

sexuality is so pronounced. Robin’s story ends with him committing suicide

72 Mark Jefferson, ‘What is Wrong with Sentimentality?’, Mind 92 (1983), 519-529, p.527.73 Robert I. Lublin, ‘”I love you now”: time and desire in the plays of Sarah Kane’, in Sarah Kane in Context, eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp.115-125, p.121.74 Barthes, op.cit., p.75.75 Ibid., p.157.76 Jefferson, op.cit., p.527.

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when he realises how long he has to remain in the institution, and it is

perhaps the only form of self-expression that is effective. Suicidal

tendencies are another of Barthes’ fragments,77 and the only characteristic

of the cultural figure of the lover that Robin can fulfil. Grace, however,

is unconcerned, and her projection of Graham ‘wraps his arms around Robin’s

legs and pulls’ (C 144).

Grace’s love for Graham has by this point taken her over. She dresses

in his old clothes (C 113), and soon ‘takes on the masculinity of his

movement, his facial expression’ (C 119), a means of giving herself up in

terms of identity. Whereas Rod loses his life as a symbol of devotion,

Grace literally turns into Graham, and by the end, after her sexual organs

are swapped with Carl’s, she has completed her transition: ‘Grace now looks

and sounds exactly like Graham’ (C 149). This is where Kane was most

influenced by Barthes, and the reference to Dachau. She finds that love is

‘about a loss of self. […] it’s actually a kind of madness’.78 Far from the

sentimental expression that characterises Robin, Rod, and Carl’s love,

Grace’s self-expression diminishes until she loses her identity. Annabelle

Singer writes that ‘Grace and Graham have identical physical reactions,

they deduce that they are sharing the same experience of pain, and thus

collapsing the boundaries between self and other’.79 They go beyond the

physically possible and thus transcend an empathic response to pain:

‘Graham presses his hands onto Grace and her clothes turn red where he

touches, blood seeping through. Simultaneously, his own body begins to

77 Barthes, op.cit., p.218.78 Sarah Kane, qtd. in Saunders 2009, op.cit., p.76.79 Annabelle Singer, ‘Don’t Want to Be This: The Elusive Sarah Kane’, TDR 48(2004), 139-171, p.154.

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bleed in the same places’ (C 132). Graham enables Grace to overcome this

metaphorical, invisible violence; love is a powerful force, but it comes at

the expense of self, and this is also true of Robin, Carl, and Rod, in more

physical ways.

Tinker is an even more conflicted character, capable of both powerful

love and extreme cruelty. Laurens De Vos finds that ‘[h]e is literally

incapable of looking at the signs of human vulnerability, affection,

friendliness, or sexuality’.80 Tinker appears to be devoid of compassion in

the moment of enacting cruelty, but I would argue that he is capable of a

form of tenderness, as he is very gentle towards his subjects, for

instance: ‘He kisses Carl’s face gently’ (C 116) before threatening him

with impaling, and when he subdues Grace he ‘strokes her hair’ (C 113).

Similarly to Brian in Shopping and Fucking, he couples sentimentalism with

aggression, as an assertion of authority. De Vos argues that these gestures

are repressed,81 that ‘a more human contact might threaten his control and

power’;82 he goes as far as to suggest that Tinker’s violence against Carl

is as a means of suppressing his own comparable feelings of love for

Grace.83 Tinker’s character is an exploration of the politics of tyranny, as

Kane is showing how people who are in control have to hide their emotional

sides, and Tinker channels his as a sort of threat. In the scenes with

other characters, he only hints towards his deeper emotional life, but Kane

80 Laurens De Vos, Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theatre: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett (Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), p.130.81 Ibid., p.129.82 Ibid., p.130.83 Ibid., p.137.

23


ultimately fulfils this side of him with his relationship with the other

“Grace”, the peep-show dancer.

In the scenes in which he visits the peep-show booth, he experiences

turbulently contrasting emotions, despite the unsentimental sexual practice

of distanced masturbation. He projects Grace’s personality onto the Woman’s

sexualised body, approaching her differently every time; first he coyly

asks her ‘Can we be friends?’ (C 122), later he is aggressive: ‘TOUCH

FUCKING TOUCH’ (C 137), but this is a façade; he is (ambiguously)

dissociating himself from her, using his aggression as an attempt to deny

his love, while the Woman implores him ‘love me, fucking love me’ (C 138).

He forcibly disallows the emotional expressions of the other characters,

while he is unable to find his own means of sentimental expression.

But finally, he does begin to express himself, and the Woman reveals

that her name is Grace, thus unifying his platonic love for Grace and his

lust for the dancer; Tinker is given a happy ending. In the scene just

after he has mutilated Carl and Grace, the Woman leaves the booth and

breaks the physical boundary between them. When they have sex, Tinker is

placated, and finally exhibits a newfound self-consciousness and a desire

to fulfil her needs: he asks her ‘[d]oes it hurt do you want me to stop?’

(C 148), apologising for ejaculating prematurely (C 148). Their sexual

intercourse is by no means idealised, whereas Grace and Graham ‘come

together’ (C 120), their union emphasised further by Kane’s surrealist

stage directions. Tinker is showing humanity for the first time, so Kane

depicts their love-making realistically, like a physical version of Rod’s

initial speech to Carl. The Woman accepts that Tinker will grow and change:

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‘I love you. Plenty of time’ (C 148). It is a comforting resolution; in

spite of the atrocities Tinker commits, there is a strong sense that his

newfound love has transformed him, that now that he is free of repression,

he might no longer commit monstrous evil.

Because the events of the play are so highly metaphorical, and the

setting so ambiguous, it is perhaps difficult to apply the themes of

Cleansed directly to Kane’s socio-political background (in contrast to

Shopping and Fucking). This was one of the more considered early criticisms of

Blasted, as Michael Billington concluded, ‘there is no sense of external

reality’;84 expressing the idea that the social aims of Kane’s work, much

like the frustration of Robbie in Shopping and Fucking, were unfocused.

Billington identifies this as a quality of Cleansed too: in contrast to the

governmental institutions Orwell’s 1984 and Pinter’s The Hothouse (both of

which are strong inspirations for Cleansed), ‘you never learn who or what

lies behind Kane’s hermetic chamber of horrors’.85 Her lack of didactic

political references encourages a purely emotional, “experiential”

interpretation.

Yet Kane does suggest life beyond Tinker’s institution, indicating

‘[t]he sound of a cricket match in progress’ (C 109) at the beginning of

Scene Two. Kane’s university fits somewhere within a normal real-life

world, and this stage direction encourages the audience to acknowledge this

in their interpretation of the play. As such, Amelia Howe Kritzer’s reading

of the play locates it as a product of the post-Thatcher generation, of a

84 Michael Billington, qtd. in Sierz 2001, op.cit., p.96.85 Michael Billington, review of Cleansed, Guardian 7 May 1998, Theatre Record 9 (1998), p.566.

25


society which bred disillusionment. She finds that Grace ‘overcomes

victimization and expresses the full dimensions of her unique love despite

confinement within an institution that constrains the young within

arbitrary boundaries and uses torture to enforce its norms’86. Kritzer sees

the institution as a characteristically In-Yer-Face exaggeration of the

anti-invidualism of Thatcher’s government. Kritzer accords with the view

that ‘politics became personal’87 after Thatcher’s terms as prime minister,

that Grace’s purer form of love at the expense of cruelty transcends the

utilitarian institution. If Cleansed can be described as political, it is

because Kane takes a completely sentimental (as opposed to logical)

approach to structures of power and their effect on citizens’ emotional

lives.

Cleansed displays a defininte hopefulness, even sentimentality, as

‘the desire to express love proves more powerful than the need to escape

the pain’.88 Love remains, even at the expense of identity and in the face

of death. Whereas in Blasted, ‘the expression of love becomes an empty

ritual, because it is used as emotional blackmail’,89 expressions of love in

Cleansed have the potential to stand for something immutable and beautiful.

Anthony Neilson - Penetrator

86 Kritzer, op.cit., p.38.87 Stephen Daldry qtd. in Aragay et al., op.cit., p.8.88 Kritzer, op.cit., p.37.89 Brusberg-Kiermeier, op.cit., p.80.

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Anthony Neilson completes the trio of playwrights whom Alex Sierz proposes

as the core of the In-Yer-Face movement,90 yet Neilson’s drama is again

hugely different from Kane and Ravenhill’s. For the most part, Penetrator is

the most naturalistic of the three plays, until the arrival of the

dehumanised ex-military sociopath Tadge disrupts the friendship of Max and

Alan, forcing them to explore their sentimental sides.

The sentimental force of the play is built in to its structure. It

begins with Max’s strongly unsentimental pornographic fantasy, with its

explicit sexual language: ‘She hitched up her tiny skirt to revel her gash,

spreading the lips of her fuck-hole like some filthy tart’ (P 61). Neilson

prepares his audience for the misogynist attitudes portrayed in the play,

using the most contemptuous culturally-transmitted words for female

anatomy. This is followed by the second scene’s contextualisation of Max

and Alan’s masculine friendship, seemingly built upon emotionally distanced

interactions. This is disrupted by Tadge’s arrival, and his horrifically

violent descriptions of his time in the army and his torture at the hands

of the “penetrators”. Yet it ends with its most sentimental moment, with

Tadge’s uncharacteristic reversion to nostalgic, childlike innocence: ‘I

used to like coming to your house’ (P 117).

This structure is, according to Sierz, characteristic of In-Yer-Face

drama: ‘The most successful plays are often those that seduce the audience

with a naturalistic mood and then hit it with intense emotional material’.91

Neilson uses naturalism to suggest problematic social norms, and with the

introduction of the socially maladjusted Tadge, uses a crisis to force the 90 Sierz 2001, op.cit.91 Ibid., p.5.

27


characters to recognise these problems and to (reluctantly) reveal

suppressed emotional qualities. The Observer’s review of the play found that

‘robotic violence is gradually displaced by moral ambiguity and

tenderness’.92 This does not just apply to Tadge; for instance, at the start

of scene six, Alan reacts to Max’s once-commonplace homophobic jokes with a

newfound self-consciousness: ‘Why do you say things like that?’ (P 95),

beginning to attempt to analyse Max’s passive-aggressive bigotry: ‘It

obviously worries you’ (P 95). What was before unthinking becomes the

subject of moral questioning, and eventually, after these moral issues are

presented, the play ends with a sense of resolve.

This allows the audience to witness the reappraisal of Max and Alan’s

sentimental values. Neilson has stated that ‘all the characters are

yearning to go back to a world where sexuality, and all the complexity that

it brings, did not dominate their lives’;93 yet in the first few scenes,

their actions ironically indicate the opposite of this yearning. Before

Tadge’s arrival, Max jokingly provokes Alan by simulating sex between his

teddy bears. Alan reacts with a genuine sense of discomfort, couched in the

‘distancing technique’ (P (notes) 118) of his “Brucie voice”: ‘I think they’ve

had enough!’ (P 74). Max responds: ‘You’re too sentimental. The teddies like

to fuck’ (P 74), going on to further express distaste for sentimentalism:

‘Families are built on fucking […] When I became a man, I put away childish

things’ (P 74). Max associates masculinity with a lack of innocence (for

Jefferson, the distinguishing feature of sentimentalism),94 deriding Alan as

92 The Observer, qtd. in Ibid., p.75.93 Anthony Neilson, qtd. in ibid., p.78.94 Jefferson, op.cit., p.527.

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either feminine or childish. He maintains this image, by distancing himself

from his childhood as much as possible, for example, dismissing Starsky and

Hutch in spite of Alan’s sentimental attachment to it: ‘It was shite then

and it’s shite now’ (P 66). Although the individual instances are subtle,

Neilson begins to expose the problem of masculine anti-sentimentalism’s

equivalence to repression, a repression which recurs later in the play in

much more damaging ways.

Neilson is exploring ‘the sort of homophobia that is the warped

product of repressed homosexual desire’;95 littering the dialogue with

homophobic slurs and insults. Max throws around words like ‘poofs’ (P 65),

‘bumboy’ (P 67), and ‘faggots’ (P 69), as well as asserting a masculine

dominance over women, deriding Mikey’s feminist friends as ‘fanny-bashers’

(P 70). He is using language as a means of establishing his masculine

authority, repeating these terms and perpetuating them from similar usages;

it is because homosexuality and femininity are culturally seen as

tantamount to a loss of self-assertion that Max maintains this deflection

of such concepts being applied to him, at the expense of honest emotional

connection.

These masculine performances continue until the play’s major turning

point, when Tadge unexpectedly destroys the teddy: ‘It is a vicious and

frightening action, all humour going from his face’ (P 106). Neilson

comments that ‘[e]verybody was hit by that’,96 because it constitutes ‘a

95 Paul Taylor, ‘How deep is their love?: Paul Taylor reviews Penetrator at the Royal Court’, Independent: Theatre (18 January 1994). [22 May 2012] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-how-deep-is-their-love-paul-taylor-reviews-penetrator-at-the-royal-court-1400822.html96 Anthony Neilson, qtd. in Sierz 2001, op.cit., p.79.

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literal symbol of the destruction of childhood’.97 Neilson singles the scene

out as shocking because it relies upon the audience’s sentimental

projections upon the teddy as a totem of innocence. It confirms Tadge’s

complete lack of comprehension of sentimental attachments: Tadge is even

more psychologically damaged than Brian and Tinker, and shows no tender or

emotive gestures; therefore his aggression is uncomprehending and unforced.

Neilson also exposes the performativity of Max’s derision of sentimental

values, as his reaction is ‘gobsmacked’ (P 106), shouting: ‘What the fuck

did you do that for?!’ (P 106).

Tadge’s use of (mostly described) violence in the play provoked Ian

Herbert to write that his ‘descriptions and language can only be of

interest to psychiatrists or terminally depraved people’.98 This reaction

came before the premiere of Blasted, before In-Yer-Face had been seen as a

unified movement, and Neilson’s methods of using extremely disaffected

characters to reaffirm the sentimental values of others proved influential.

His extremism here is primarily an extrapolation of hypermasculine values

found in the depravity of Tadge, in his apparent lack of feeling and

insight.

In contrast to this ‘brainwashed’ (P 81) figure, Max and Alan’s songs,

games, and name-calling appear sentimental; for instance they sing ‘The

Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (P 72), and reminisce about old television

shows (P 66), but Neilson exposes a more subversive side to their

nostalgia, as Max remembers his friendship with Tadge: ‘we became great

friends, and many Chinese burns and deadlegs have passed under the bridge 97 Anthony Neilson, qtd. in ibid., p.79.98 Ian Herbert, ‘Prompt Corner’, Theatre Record 1 (1994), 3-4, p.4.

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since then’ (P 93). Max is sentimentalising formative violence, rather than

tender moments, and when this violence becomes even more extreme it results

in Tadge’s complete sociopathy. Meanwhile, the intimacy shared by Max and

Tadge is completely suppressed. However, Neilson always keeps in mind the

way ‘the credibly masculine fights with a softer influence’ (P 62) in their

flat and by proxy their personalities.

Even their first greeting: ‘Arsehole.’ / ‘Fuckface.’ (P 63) shows a

degree of comradeship beyond Tadge’s understanding; for instance, when Max

tells him: ‘Take the weight off your cock’, he replies: ‘Off ma what?’ (P

78). Tadge cannot comprehend their lighthearted, nonsensical vulgarity, but

he also does not recognise the unrepeatable repulsiveness of his story of

his sexually perverse bunk-mate (P 82). There is, despite their crudeness,

a sense of restraint and protection of innocence in Max and Alan’s immature

insults, but Tadge fails to recognise these boundaries, lacking their

intrinsic sentimentalism.

These intrinsic boundaries are also explored in Neilson’s play

Normal. Although this play deals with a real-life case in 1920s Düsseldorf,

it is presented with a sense of contemporary social context. Peter Kurten

is, like Tadge, a maladjusted sociopath, and while the roots of his

insanity are subverted in the play, John Bull finds that ‘Neilson has his

murderer echo Margaret Thatcher’s words, “There is no such thing as

society”.’99 Neilson is conscious of the dehumanising effect of Thatcher’s

ideology, and Penetrator’s exploration of the politics of masculine identity

99 John Bull, ‘Anthony Neilson’ in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, eds. Martin Middeke, Aleks Sierz, and Peter Paul Schnierer. (London: Methuen Drama, 2011), pp.343-362, p.348.

31


is rooted in the post-Thatcher generation: it is full of specific cultural

references, to the point that, (although Neilson encourages potential

directors to ‘adapt to suit’ (P (notes) 118) if the references lose

relevancy), they become intertwined with the identities that Max and Alan

have formed. Writing about the In-Yer-Face movement as a whole, Kritzer

asserts that:

These plays suggest that the dangers inherent in the transition

from childhood to adulthood have become more acute as a result

of pervasive exploitation, the breakdown of boundaries, and

isolation. They represent young characters as disabled,

immature, and unable to make choices or construct meaning. They

show the post-Thatcher generation as powerless but unwilling to

define themselves as victims.100

Kritzer identifies the impersonality of Thatcher’s government as a

cause for the immaturity of the characters in Penetrator. While the idea of

immaturity is more pronounced in Shopping and Fucking, Penetrator also suggests

a meaninglessness and a moral deficit in Max and Alan’s dependence upon

drugs, and their use of vulgarity as passive-aggressive defence.

The reasons for Tadge’s sociopathy are more directly the product of

his time in the army. He lists a myriad of atrocities, and the inhumanly

bigoted attitudes to which he was exposed, for instance the gruesome chant

he repeats, about raping a ‘Wounded Arab girl’ (P 109). The song contrasts

wildly with Max and Alan’s songs, in which the lyrics are seemingly not

considered, and it is met with a ‘long pause’ (P 109), as they digest the 100 Kritzer, op.cit., p.63.

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racist, misogynistic, and violent content of the song. Tadge is

desensitised to this ruthlessness of the army, although it is unclear,

based on his obvious lies about ‘Stormin’ Norman’ (P 89) being his father,

which specific experiences changed Tadge. In this sense, similarly to the

forces which Robbie bemoans in Shopping and Fucking, and the mysterious

institution which is the setting of Cleansed, society’s impositions are

ambiguous and confused. Analogously to Kane’s concept of “experiential

theatre”, Neilson expresses cynicism towards the published form of his

plays, finding it ‘contradictory, reductive’,101 suggesting that we embrace

the confusion rather than pin down the experience of his plays. This allows

the audience to draw their own conclusions, based on what they have learned

of the physical scrutiny and ideological singularity of the army; the idea

of “Penetrators”, whether true or not, is almost certainly founded upon

Tadge’s sense of an invasion of private boundaries. However, the idea that

the army is demoralising is shown to be somewhat perpetuated by Alan’s

unsympathetic attitudes: ‘when you join the Army you forfeit your right to be

treated as a human being!’ (P 81).

Tadge also presents the idea of a generational shift: ‘It was better

before. Tell me about before’ (P 109). After the “long pause”, his words

are emphasised, implying a wider, more cultural context. We might interpret

this line as a general comment about his society’s shift towards a less

sentimental form of existence, associating the loss of the innocence of his

childhood with a disturbing invasion of privacy. Because of the confusion

with which he describes his suffering, we might find implicit similarities

101 Anthony Neilson, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama, 1998), p.x.

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with culturally-prominent ‘traumatic events’:102 the egregious ethnic

cleansing in the Balkans (more explicitly addressed in Kane’s Blasted, as

the Soldier displays a similar moral void, manifested with much stronger

violence), or the James Bulger case (and the overtones of a sexual nature

to the murder).

But on a smaller scale, the play is also about repressed events from

Max and Alan’s childhood, culminating in their sexual encounter: ‘You

touched my balls. You asked me to cough. You turned me over and spread my

arse’ (P 112). This is discussed in terms of physical memories; Tadge asks:

‘Do you remember the smell of me?’ (P 112), and Max responds to Tadge’s

gestures towards this emotional discourse. Although their intimacy is

clearly meaningful, there is never a direct suggestion of love, and thus

the sex is ‘inherently problematic’,103 repressed. For Tadge, sex has become

an indistinct blur of organs and violence, culminating in his muddled

speech that ends in ‘a stream of murmur, punctuated by obscenities: “Cock /

Cunt / cunts / cocks / cock …”’ (P 116). Because of his implied rape and

his exposure to such extreme forms of sex, there is no emotional quality

whatsoever in Tadge’s sexuality; he instead desires the innocence and

emotional bond symbolised by his childhood intimacy with Max. Sex remains a

confusing, inapproachable subject; although sexuality is mentioned with an

apparent abandon, when it is intertwined with intimate feelings, the

characters are unable to properly express themselves. Penetrator explores a

self-imposed paralysis (whereas Cleansed explores what happens if characters

are cruelly prevented from self-expression).

102 Ibid., p.29.103 Sierz, op.cit., p.78.

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However, once these issues are aired, and Max and Tadge are alone,

the intensity of the situation fades. The Mail on Sunday review of the play,

whose opinions were echoed elsewhere, complained of this ‘bathetic

conclusion which doesn’t quite come off’.104 Yet Neilson is using bathos to

express hope; once the characters have exposed the series of untruths, they

settle down into an unthreateningly casual, sentimental scene. Much like

Ravenhill’s ending of Shopping and Fucking, the characters have broken down

individual boundaries and are sharing food, at a peace that contrasts with

the rest of the play, and suggests the potential for emotional repair,

linking up with a nostalgic, innocent past: ‘I used to like coming to your

house’ (P 117).

Throughout the play, Neilson maintains a realistic scrutiny of the

cultural properties of masculinity, ‘showing both the ugly and sentimental

sides of men’s feelings’.105 This sentimental note of hope at the end

suggests a potential for a more emotionally-responsive existence, but

within the play’s structure, this depends upon Tadge’s intense disruption

of normality.

Conclusion

The plays I have analysed are neither uniformly sentimental in their

treatments of human emotion, nor unified in their dramatic methods; in many

104 Louise Doughty, review of Penetrator: Mail on Sunday, 23 January 1994, Theatre Record 1 (1994), pp.38-39, p.39.105 Sierz 2001, op.cit., p.80.

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obvious ways, the view of Mel Kenyon, an agent for Kane and Ravenhill, is

largely sensible: ‘There’s no movement. They are all completely

individual’.106 However, as I have explored, and as Kenyon acknowledges,

there are ‘similar themes’107 beyond pushing the boundaries of staged sex

and violence, and each play, contrary to the popular misinterpretation of

In-Yer-Face theatre, expresses a distinctly powerful belief in human

emotionality. Within each play, there is a larger force preventing the

characters from properly developing a sense of morality, but the nature of

this force is confused and indistinct: the playwrights integrate cultural

influences in the same way Mark Ravenhill discovered that he incorporates

the murder of James Bulger into his plays, with ‘all feeling, little

fact’.108

Discussing 19th-century American sentimental novels, Shirley Samuels

writes that sentimental work ‘produces or reproduces spectacles that cross

race, class, and gender boundaries’,109 which is reminiscent of Ravenhill’s

idea of a confusion of feeling, and indistinct politics. In Cleansed, love

prevails through metaphorical bodily dismemberment and gender switches,

whereas in Penetrator, Neilson suggests that gendered performance is a

damaging obstacle to positive sentimental feelings.

It is the social contexts of war, patriarchy and capitalism which

reinforce “race, class, and gender boundaries”, oppressing the characters,

106 Mel Kenyon, qtd. in Ken Urban, ‘Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ‘Nineties’, New Theatre Quarterly 20 (2004), 354-372, p.354.107 Mel Kenyon, qtd. in ibid., p.354.108 Ravenhill 2004, op.cit., p.307.109 Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.4-5.

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and obstructing sentimental expression of the kind Samuels describes. These

cruel structures are intrinsically located within the socio-political

context of the post-Thatcher generation to which the In-Yer-Face

playwrights belong, although the specifics of this context are never

revealed, and are dramatised in starkly different styles.

If the plays are misrepresented as unsentimental it is because they

focus upon the properties of social structures which discourage

sentimentality, provoking conflict when characters therefore fail to find

proper outlets for their emotion. Within each play there is a profound

sense of hope; in spite of being systematically undermined, the characters

all seem to have a fundamentally sentimental emotional core.

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Documents

Sentimentalism and In-Yer-Face Drama: Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Anthony Neilson