![]() ![]() Dialogues are faster than before, and the use of slang is now normal, with an abundance of sexual references and racist terms. The language is often coarse and aggressive. ![]() Interestingly, a significant part of the violence lies in the words. In fact, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre presents many explicit sex scenes, and there are often naked actors on the stage. They used many shock tactics and wanted to smash all the taboos they could. So, they reacted putting all the cruelty they saw in real life in their works. Instead, they saw new wars and new genocides they were touched by the negative aspects of capitalism and consumerism, inequality and urban problems like the spread of drug, and acts of violence committed by young people. They also hoped the world could have changed after the end of the cold war. ![]() The new young writers were angry: they struggled to emerge as not a lot of funding was reserved to the arts as a consequence, it was hazardous to invest in the production of a play by an unknown playwright. ![]() This phenomenon was called ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre, because what was staged physically and emotionally affected the audience as if all the cruelty of the world was literally thrown on the spectators. A very explicit one, who dealt with typically avoided subjects, and was influenced by several Scottish plays like the theatre version of Trainspotting. As a matter of fact, in post-Thatcherism England, and especially in London, a new challenging theatre avant-garde appeared. It may be a natural consequence to wonder why it was normal to witness to so much cruelty in the stages of the time. And what is more, a single act of violence could include more than just one type of violence. In these works, there can be found physical, emotional, psychological violence, sexual abuse, and even violence towards the damage of one’s possessions. Many different types of violence exist, and at the time theatre-goers could bump into all of them. Violence is not shown for its own sake therefore Kane’s theatre is incredibly full of metaphors. And I tried to show how much can be hidden in a single violent scene it is not about the actual acts of cruelty, but about the meaning of violence and what it stands for. I chose this author because of her originality, she is a valiant exponent of the kind of theatre popular in England at the time, but she also offered more to think about of many of her fellow writers. They are respectively from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and 4.48 Psychosis. In my dissertation, I analysed two examples of violent, disturbing scenes from the British theatre of the nineties, one concerning interpersonal violence and one self-inflicted violence. ![]()
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