Sarah Kane: From The Existence Of Tragedy To The Modern Theater

Sarah Kane attempts to, through a series of brutal and cruel stage images,create in her theatre of early phase an existential despair of the subject, whose body and emotion suffered from all kinds of torment and anguishes inflicted by the unknown and turbulent object in the objective world. In her theatre of late phase, we find the densest extent, to which the existential despair has arrived. What is surprising is that the object in Sarah's theatre of late phase is completely disappeared, or textualized. During her transformative process of dramaturgy, Sarah adopts a variety of postmodern deconstructive theatrical dramaturgies like the refusal of representation, the suspension of linearity, anti-centrism, de-ocularcentrism and so forth, in the place of the ocular shock effect and deconstruction of Realism Theatre. Through her postmodern dramaturgy, Sarah intends to represent the esthetics of the sublime, and an unspoken and unrepresented despair and pessimism, which can only be felt by human beings, but never be represented by any sort of arts form.This dissertation falls into five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, in which we pose some questions to Sarah Kane's elusive plays and make the comparison and contrast between her plays with those of In-Yer-Face Theatre and the New Brutalists. We analyze her virginal play Blasted by the configuration of modern tragedy which reveals the unique objective world in the second chapter. In chapter three, we further the analysis in the object in Phaedra's Love, and demonstrate the'hypereality'and consumer society created by the simulation of the mess media which explains Hippolytus's existential despair. The fourth chapter is about the horror of the sharing pains and the revenge of the horrible object, which incarnate the love and sufferings of Grace's and Graham's, and Tinker's persecution on the four unconventional loves. In chapter five, we compared Sarah Kane's dramaturgy with the theatre of cruelty by Artuad and Derrida's theatrical theory. Sarah Kane exploited a variety of postmodern dramaturgy to deconstruct the basis of the realism theatre. She suspended the linearity and refused the representation, which resulted in the evaporating of the object in Sarah's world of theatre. Thus she can arrive at the postmodern sublime esthetics alleged by Lyotard, and the ultimate existential despair which can never be represented by the tradition theatre.