Jan Parker reviews Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering by Leah Sidi (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Editor’s Content Note: This review includes discussions of suicide and mental distress as well as references to onstage depictions of sexual violence.
Sarah Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis (2000), containing transcripts from psychiatric consultations, was written shortly before she committed suicide in February 1999. Her play Crave’s (1998) final scenes are set in a psychiatric ward, and Cleansed (1998) is dedicated to staff and patients of ES3 at the Maudsley Hospital (South London) where Kane had been an inpatient.
Her first play, Blasted (1995), was hailed as ‘In-yer-face’ theatre, depicting horrors on stage and evoking equally shocking violence and abuse off. She talked of being in an ‘extreme state’ when researching Cleansed; elsewhere, of the only way of expressing the self as being through ‘violence’ (Saunders, 2002) and her plays as ‘experiential’ – of shocking the audience into experiencing extreme states such as she reports experiencing:
I’ve only ever written in order to escape from . . . hell. […] when you sit and watch something and think, well that’s the most perfect expression of the hell that I felt, then maybe it was worth it. (Rebellato, 1998).
How important, then, to give an account of this influential playwright’s ‘psychic life’.
Sarah Kane’s ‘Mad Plays’
Leah Sidi has extensively researched late 20th Century medical and psychiatric structures and models, and Kane’s communications – as well as a wealth of scholarship and critical analysis – in order to set Kane’s plays within the record of ‘mad plays’ such as Equus and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like Kane’s, these ‘mad plays’ challenge contemporary models of madness/mental distress and radical, coercive surgical and drug treatments. Plays like Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange are concerned with psychiatry’s patriarchal and cultural stereotyping and query the validity of the sanity/insanity binary (‘the chronic insanity of the sane’ of 4.48 Psychosis).
But Sidi, in what will prove to be a seminal book for theatre studies as well as medical humanities, does so much more than historicising or ‘biographising’ a creative’s output (though as she says ‘Sarah Kane haunts her plays’). Nor does Sidi see Kane’s plays as agitprop – works designed simply to raise awareness, shocking her audiences into activism – rather, Kane’s plays and comments are more complexly created, more formally challenging and too variously and excessively affecting to allow for any such single, simple line of argument.
Sidi gives an account of each of Kane’s plays through different lenses: the affect of various and varying dramaturgy; Kane’s mental state and experiences; her comments as psychiatric patient and as stage director; and the plays as drawing on and located against the ‘politics of madness’ at the time. Sidi’s book concludes that Kane offers a complex dramaturgy of psychic life which uses theatre to create a mode of radical sharing of and in mental experience.
Complementarily, and illuminatingly, Sidi analyses the dramaturgy of each play: the play worlds created and their playability. From the start, Kane was acknowledged as pushing the boundaries not just of subject matter but also theatrical form and their sense- and meaning-making. So we have a book fully exploring and analysing not just all the above but, importantly, what it is to analyse, in turn and together, the playwright and the plays through three or more lenses: the plays’ contexts, influences and affects; the plays’ creation of disturbing experiences of delusion, shock, horror, dislocation and sudden pity (and, says Kane, ‘love’); and the place of the plays in the annals of ‘theatres of madness’.
Sidi both shows, and bears witness to, the enduring power of Kane’s plays which remain challenging to the directors and audiences of today; they are anything but of just historical importance, of one woman’s semi-autobiographical protest against the structures of the treatment of mental distress.
Reading and Staging Kane’s Plays: Why are they Important Today?
Sidi’s opening paragraph is worth quoting here in its entirety:
This book starts from a simple conviction: that it is possible and necessary to communicate experiences of acute psychic pain to those who have not (yet) experienced them. Necessary because anguish, despair, disorientation and hallucination are parts of the human condition – as much as joy, hope and rational thought. Necessary too because we live in a cultural and political moment that has created a hierarchy of human experience which sees no value in despair. It sees no value in lives that require rest, a helping hand, a network of interdependent care. It sees no value in acknowledging the pain of others and vilifies those who refuse to pull their socks up and take their meagre lot with gratitude. This is why we need Sarah Kane’s theatre today. To teach us to hold the world’s cruel gaze without flinching. To understand that experiences which emphatically refuse to resolve themselves into positivity and productivity are also valuable, visionary and politically important. To find ways of existing within and alongside despair (p.1).
So, Sidi gives us the following readings of Kane’s four major plays: Phaedra’s Love (1996) as mental health satire in which Phaedra – whose forbidden passion for her stepson Hippolytus is the subject of Greek, Latin and French tragedies – is ‘torturous, vindictive and suicidal’. The Doctor diagnoses Hippolytus as ‘depressed […] he should change his diet’ and eventually as ‘unpleasant [an understatement!] and therefore incurable’. Together with Hippolytus’ second ‘medical consultation’ which ends in parodic extreme sexual violence, she concludes Kane’s comedy ‘comes from the failure of attempts to comprehend and contain pathological behaviours’ (p.9).
Blasted (1995),Kane’sfirst defining play, shocked with its onstage sexual and other extreme violence but Sidi argues, from recent feminist criticism, that the trauma at the heart of the play is what happens offstage, between acts, showing Kane’s dramaturgy as informed by the then – and now – current discussions about traumatic memory. She sees the play as having to come to terms with the irruption of sexual violence into the present – the present we are confronted by – while the crisis is driven by the omitted traumatic rape, a rape that we were not shown but which dominates the play’s affect.
Sidi’s analysis of Cleansed (1998) is informed by Kane’s previous directing of Büchner’s Woyzeck and Strindberg’s ‘psychological’ plays, seeing her play as distilling – and offering to the audience – elements of psychotic experience. It features a torturer/father figure; rats eating dismembered body parts; and graphic scenes of gender reassignment. What could be a formal/playable closure of such a play? Sidi argues that the ‘extreme discomfort’ of the ending is the discomfort of the alternating solicitation and denial of the audience’s predictive capacities, generating a predictive crisis which is ‘analogous to those experienced in some psychotic breakdowns’ (p.14).
Sidi analyses Kane’s ‘psychoanalytic playing’ in Crave’s(1998) four interweaving narratives which invite the audience to simultaneously listen to – and perhaps participate in, judge, diagnose, make a narrative of or understand – the breakdown of order. She accounts for Crave as drawing on and provoking a predictive crisis in the audience, holding them in a space of potentially ‘extreme discomfort’, of not-knowing, and playing on and with dislocation, both physical and psychological.
This dislocation Sidi links to Kane’s plays as especially concerned with their contemporary political framing of ‘madness’ and patient experience in both dramaturgy and affect. For example, she sees Crave as a direct engagement with the dislocation of those displaced from ‘the asylum’ of mental hospitals by the 1990 Care and the Community Act. ‘Care and the community’ was experienced by patients as turning sheltered asylum inpatients into unsheltered displaced persons and forcing them to inhabit roles as petitioners responsible for finding therapy rather than being cared for. The Act troubled the ‘safe’ representation of the ‘insane’ as not part of society, which imagined madness as securely contained in asylums.
Into that social and representational crisis come Kane’s plays: Phaedra’s Love as Mental Health satire; Cleansed as an affective experience of psychic destabilisation; Crave’s quartet of dislocated voices deliver an ‘account of mental suffering […] without entrance or exit […] characterised by indeterminism and inadequacy’ (p.40); 4.48 Psychosis’ litany of failed pharmacological and psychiatric interventions feature a persistent ‘I’ crying into the void.
Perhaps the most innovative and thought-provoking arguments in Sidi’s book concern Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. Rather than giving the audience ‘simply’ the messy intertwining of suicidal despair and desire, Sidi argues that Kane’s play offers a ‘deeply unredemptive vision of care’ that resonates with queer-disabled critiques of contemporary neoliberal policies which confine human value to economic productivity (pp.181-90). This is an extension of the introduction’s answer to why Kane is important today, showing how her work validates lived ‘experiences which emphatically refuse to resolve themselves into positivity and productivity [as] also valuable, visionary and politically important’ (p.1). This stimulating framing is illuminated by compelling accounts of Sidi’s experience of two productions of 4.48 Psychosis by Belarus Free Theatre and Deafinitely Theatre.
Experientialism and dislocated dramaturgy: Sharing Mental Distress
Kane’s plays disturb. They are ‘in yer face’ in the sense applied by Aleks Sierz in his seminal book In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today to describe works that are highly visceral, full of onstage sex and violence, meant to be ‘felt’ rather than analysed. Sierz describes ‘a theatre of sensation’ which involves ‘audiences being forced to see something close up’, of having their ‘personal space invaded’; ‘a theatre that must be lived through’ (p.4). So it is with Kane’s psychic theatre: an almost unmanageably intense theatrical experience in which the audience must choose ‘to look directly or to look away’.
Sidi concludes that Kane enables ‘[a] radical sharing of aspects of mental experience […] central to Kane’s theatrical project was the question of how to communicate something real through theatrical artifice’ (p.2). Femi Oyebode, consulting on a project on trigger warnings, has likened the attention of a theatrical audience to the acute awareness experienced in a clinical consulting room, where the psychiatrist is the ‘noticing critical responder’. Perhaps the trained psychiatrist can look directly but it is difficult not to take many of Kane’s tortured and impossibly violent scenes as inviting/demanding rather that the audience do look away and in doing so reject and be alienated by both character and action.
Instead of leading to understanding, does that not put us firmly into the unsympathetic position of the doctors in Phaedra’s Love and 4.48 Psychosis whose unhelpful judgments pepper the plays: ‘He’s depressed […] he should eat better and get fresh air’; ‘it’s not your fault, you’re ill […] you have to take responsibility’? Or, could it be that theatre can teach us the lesson that we can be affected by another’s, and an Other’s, plight when we neither identify nor recognise ourselves in them? When we may dislike and judge them? When we cannot ‘feel for’ them but suddenly ‘feel with’ the alienating, disturbing, unsympathetic character? Finally, if you can communicate ‘the hell that I have experienced’, should you?
These are just some of the many lingering questions Sidi, and Kane, make us wrestle with.
About the Author
Jan Parker teaches, researches and writes on Tragedy and Epic at the University of Cambridge and has long been concerned with the representation and problematisation of women’s minds and bodies. Her next book is Electra, the Hysteric?
References
Oyebode, Femi. 2023.‘Beyond the Trigger: psychopathology and performance’. Seminar paper given to Faculty of English, University of Cambridge on 6/11/23.
Peter, John. ‘Short Stark Shock’, Sunday Times, 10 May 1998.
Rebellato, Dan. 1998. Brief Encounter with Sarah Kane, recorded interview. Available online: http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane-interview.
Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber and Faber, 2001).
