In Yer Face Theatre

The article focuses on the representation of violence in Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal.
Building on Slavoj Žižek’s theory, the paper suggests that the play is a complex exploration of the problem as it not only depicts instances of what Žižek calls subjective
violence, but also probes into systemic violence that may have led to the eruption of
the former. *e article argues that the characters are socially excluded and that it is
precisely this fact that drives them to commit felonies. *e paper also addresses the
question of whether Prichard’s play is an in-yer-face drama, suggesting that it eludes
such categorization as it is also a piece of social realism.

Tragic Seneca has enjoyed a varied reputation. As T.S. Eliot put it, "In the Renaissance, no Latin author was more highly esteemed that Seneca; in modern times, few Latin authors have been more consistently damned". The author of this damnation of Seneca was the German early Romantic, August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his 1808 series of lectures on dramatic art. This essay examines these lectures in detail, exploring the motives for Schlegel's influential condemnation of Seneca Tragicus, and similarly explores his late 20th century revival, which had strikingly similar reasons for extolling Seneca as Schlegel had for condemning him.

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.

Sarah Kane is one of the most significant playwrights of the 1990s' in-yer-face theatre. Kane, who believes in the power of theatre in changing people's lives, aims to shake the audiences' senses not to remain silent about the unpleasant events around them. In this sense, her Blasted is an achievement. The play exemplifies all features of in-yer-face theatre. By examining Blasted, the study aims at indicating how in-yer-face theatre makes the spectators face the things which are unsaid and concealed. Through its vulgar language, sexuality, violence, and atmosphere constructed with catastrophic plots on the stage, the play violates a lot of conventional theatrical features and breaks all taboos.

This paper attempts to analyse an in-yer-face play Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley in relation to the labyrinth metaphor and its correlation to the concepts of entrapment, being lost and thrown, search for authenticity and the possible exit from the labyrinth. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the relationship between the labyrinth metaphor and the myth of Theseus and the pyramid image which are demonstrated in the play. In that regard, Mercury Fur will be analysed within the framework of the labyrinth metaphor, its meaning in the play, and its connection to the other concepts. The first part of the paper introduces in-yer-face-theatre, Mercury Fur and the labyrinth metaphor, the second part provides an overview of the play and its thematic concerns, the third part exemplifies the labyrinth metaphor concerning the play, and the last part includes the conclusion.
Keywords: labyrinth metaphor, entrapment, lost and thrown being, authenticity of being, the
myth of Theseus.

This PhD dissertation presents a close analysis of one of the ageless discourses of human life – apocalypse, or the End – within the highly controversial In-Yer-Face drama of the 1990s British stage. The study particularly argues that there is a strong apocalyptic sense in the plays of the decade, and it discovers that the apocalyptic representation within these plays varies. Five plays by three prominent playwrights of the decade are used to illustrate and expand the focus. After a detailed examination of the apocalyptic discourse, it is claimed that Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Faust is Dead are based on certain philosophical ideas of the End, Anthony Neilson’s Normal and Penetrator reveal the apocalyptic through an extreme use of violence, and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis comingles representations of the apocalyptic and psychological trauma.

This paper focuses on the content of a work of drama in terms of its reflection of the society and period of its' production and focuses on the major events that effected the society in that period and had a role in shaping the content of that theatrical work. In other words, the context for the theatrical work is focused on in this paper and a connection between the context and the content is thus established by providing evidence from related criticism on the theatrical work and the text of the work itself. In this scope, the theatrical work chosen for this study is Mark Ravenhill's 1997 play Faust is Dead and the period that it was produced in is 1990s in Britain. Thus, a connection between the 1990s society and the major technological changes that affected the British society dramatically in that period and their reflections in Mark Ravenhill's play will be established and supported with reference to relevant literature.

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. They are respectively from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and 4.48 Psychosis. 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. 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. Violence is not shown for its own sake; therefore Kane’s theatre is incredibly full of metaphors. Many different types of violence exist, and at the time theatre-goers could bump into all of them. In these works, there can be found physical, emotional, psychological violence, sexual abuse, and even violence towards the damage of one’s possessions. And what is more, a  single act of violence could include more than just one type of violence.
It may be a natural consequence to wonder why it was normal to witness to so much cruelty in the stages of the time.
As a matter of fact, in post-Thatcherism England, and especially in London, a new challenging theatre avant-garde appeared. A very explicit one, who dealt with typically avoided subjects, and was influenced by several Scottish plays like the theatre version of Trainspotting. 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. 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. They also hoped the world could have changed after the end of the cold war. 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. So, they reacted putting all the cruelty they saw in real life in their works. They used many shock tactics and wanted to smash all the taboos they could. In fact, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre presents many explicit sex scenes, and there are often naked actors on the stage.
Interestingly, a significant part of the violence lies in the words. The language is often coarse and aggressive. Dialogues are faster than before, and the use of slang is now normal, with an abundance of sexual references and racist terms. ‘In-yer-face’ theatre wanted the audience experience first-hand what was staged and then make people reflect. This is what experiential theatre is about. Sarah Kane loved it and also wanted to go beyond the boundaries of what was considered a good play.
She was born in Essex, in 1971, and committed suicide at 28 years old in 1999. She wrote only five plays and a short script. But she had a huge desire to experiment, and she went a little further with every play. Indeed, her first play, Blasted, shared different features with more traditional well-made plays, while her third work, Cleansed, with its episodic structure, ambitious directions and abundance of metaphors marked a step farther from realism and, at last, 4.48 Psychosis does not even look like a play as regards its textual composition. Moreover, she wanted form and content to be one. She used violence to condemn complacency, to remind people of the cruelty humans are capable of.
To demonstrate how much these new artists dared to show, that violence can be used to create a good work of art, and to show how meaningful a representation of violence can be..in the second chapter, I analysed the fourth scene of Cleansed. Here we find a gay couple, Carl and Rod, inside a mysterious institution controlled by a man who is at the same time a doctor and a torturer. He chose the idealist Carl as its victim, through whom to conduct an experiment in order to understand how strong one’s love can be. He tortures Carl until he betrays his companion and from then on, every time Carl tries to express his feelings for Rod, he cuts the part of the body Carl is using to communicate. The process works similarly to Dante’s retaliation. However, after that, a reader understands that the most gruesome of Kane’s plays is actually about the power of love. Love never dies in this play. Every character is in love with another, they are butchered and killed, but no one stops loving his or her partner. Hence, in the sequence of horrors, there is also a lot of poetry: Cleansed is a play that relies a lot on the visual imagery and, for example, flowers burst through the floor after a couple made love.
On the other hand, 4.48 Psychosis lacks directions. It does not even suggest the number of characters involved. They are genderless, ageless and nameless. In some pages, there are free verses, in others numbers, lists or medical notes. Arguably, the play is set in a psychotic mind..or more than one mind: there is not a clear identity. However, there are some recognisable dialogues between a patient and a therapist or psychiatric. The narrative voice is for sure a clinical patient who accepts to try therapy. She is unutterably depressed and suicidal. Her own thoughts damage her, and I tried to explain how thoughts can harm a person and if this person is conscious of that. Obviously, this play is much more intimate and psychological than Cleansed. It shares less with the typical ‘in-yer-face’ plays and in some aspects is more post-dramatic, but it cannot be easily labelled. 4.48 Psychosis has often been regarded as a very autobiographical text or a suicide note, given that it ends with the protagonist’s suicide. The presence of autobiographic elements could not be denied, by the way, an author who can describe a mentally disturbed mind so accurately has to know at least what severe depression feels like, if not the psychosis itself. However, to state the play is only a piece of suicide art is too reductive and does not give justice to Kane’s work. In fact, it has been argued that with 4.48 Psychosis Kane went even beyond Beckett, beyond what was thought possible to stage. And violence was an essential part of the path she made to arrive at this result.

Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley
Özlem Karadağ

ABSTRACT
This study aims to explore personal and collective traumas in three representative in-yer-face plays: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. These three playwrights, who are among the most outstanding playwrights of the British theatre and in-yer-face movement, wrote their plays after the 1990s, which were still overshadowed by the horrific historical events of the twentieth century. Again, written shortly before and after the millennium, they usher in the ghosts of a traumatic past and fear of the future. First, the in-yer-face movement will be placed in the theatre tradition by examining its ties with the Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the Theatre of Catastrophe. Under the guidance of Trauma theory and taking into consideration the effects of the historical and cultural background of Britain after World War II, this study will then attempt to show that in the plays under discussion dystopian and traumatic elements become more and more central. Each character both because of his/her problematic personal background and collective catastrophes and radical changes is heavily traumatized. Story-telling, the telling of trauma, becomes central to the plays. It triggers trauma, but it also suggests a fragile chance of redemption for the characters and possibility for a better future. Recurrent trauma shatters their apathy or refusal to remember horrific events, memory of which must be recovered for the characters and culture to be healed. However, a sense of dystopia prevails.

The translation of Anthony Neilson's two-act in-yer-face play The Wonderful World of Dissocia into Turkish brings forth various struggles for the translator. Translation of plays has a hesitant nature; the missions of translating a literary text and translating a text written for the stage overlap each other. The translator aims to be loyal to the original "literary" text but in the case of a text that is primarily written for the stage, the responsibility of conveying the message of each sentence, by referring to the target culture if needs be, becomes a dominant one. The linguistic and textual features of above named in-yer-face play, the comic allegoric elements it includes, and the linguistic and symbolic conflict between the two acts lead the translator to a different translation experience. Yet also, the contemporary and daily usage of language, as well as the poetic cues that are constructed with a vocalic conformity make the translation process a challenging one. The aim of this article is to comment upon the difficulties, challenges and the authentic experience that the translation of this contemporary play brings forth.

Abstract
This chapter studies the relations between the experiential theater of Sarah Kane and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater theory. Postdramatic theater is a new interpretation of the artful representation of the human-being through a set of novel aesthetics that get rid of the traditional dramatic concepts such as authoritative dramatic text, mimesis, representation, and linear and regular flow of events. In this sense, this study examines how and to what extent some significant characteristics of Kane’s plays, especially their breaking away from the text and traditional plot construction, and the apocalyptic discourse are conducive in revealing the postdramatic in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. (Although the original study is in Turkish, I have its English translation as well. If you are interested in reading the chapter in English please contact me.)

Caryl Churchill's plays thematically embody elements of many-isms such as feminism, sexism, capitalism, and socialism, labeling her dramaturgy as an eclectic combination of social philosophies and political ideologies. Although genuinely creative and original in her writing and theatrical practices, Caryl Churchill does not refrain from making use of preceding European theatrical theory, practice, and culture. In this sense, she is a playwright who benefits considerably from the thematic and technical aspects of the Brechtian epic theatre, which can be observed in her Mad Forest. Sarah Kane, on the other hand, with her experimental dramaturgy that stretches and twists features of realism and naturalism into new post-dramatic forms, is no less different from her predecessor Caryl Churchill in terms of embracing challenging, confrontational ideas and reflecting them in her plays. Notwithstanding with her openness to novel dramatic styles, Sarah Kane, too, acknowledges earlier dramatic aesthetics as seen in her Phaedra's Love, which is an adaptation of the classical Roman playwright Seneca's Phaedra. Likewise, it can be observed that Sarah Kane utilizes certain features of the Brechtian epic theater in her Cleansed. Considering these, this article studies how and to what extent Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane maintain the Brechtian dramatic elements in their Mad Forest and Cleansed, respectively. By examining this tripartite interaction among Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, the study also tries to reinterpret the dramatic relations among these seemingly distant playwrights of different generations.

Que veut dire Martin Crimp lorsqu’il explique que, dans ses pièces Attempts on Her Life (1997) et la trilogie Fewer Emergencies (2005), « l’espace dramatique est un espace mental, pas un espace physique »  ? Comment comprendre cette « mentalisation » du drame initiée par Samuel Beckett (That Time, Not I, Footfalls), continuée par Harold Pinter (Moonlight, Silence) mais aussi explorée par Sarah Kane dans Crave (1998) et 4.48 Psychosis (2000), et poursuivie aujourd’hui selon diverses modalités poétiques par d’autres auteurs britanniques (Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green…) ? Est-il possible de concilier l’écriture et l’exploration dramatique de la psyché – et si oui, comment ? – avec le phénomène concurrent d’une « quantisation » de la scène, dont témoigne la multiplication de pièces « quantiques » par des auteurs comme Michael Frayn, Simon Stephens et Nick Payne ? Depuis la fin des années 1990 jusqu’à aujourd’hui, de telles pièces renouvellent le rapport du théâtre à l’espace physique – et non mental – en s’appliquant, à la suite de Tom Stoppard, à dramatiser les découvertes et les hypothèses révolutionnaires de la physique quantique. Parallèlement, l’émergence d’un théâtre que l’on pourrait dire non plus tant « in-yer-face » que « in-yer-head » appelle à s’interroger sur le développement d’un corpus de pièces dont l’intérêt porte sur le fonctionnement de la psyché humaine, de l’inconscient et de la conscience, et à analyser les modalités et les implications de l’écriture et de la mise en scène de l’espace mental ou du psychisme (mind) sur la scène britannique des vingt dernières années. Tandis qu’Aleks Sierz décrivait, au tout début des années 2000, la violence frontale, viscérale et spectaculaire, essentiellement physique et ancrée dans l’expérience sensorielle, développée au cours des « nasty nineties » par des écritures scandaleuses et subversives, les dramaturgies de l’espace mental explorent le non-dit, l’indicible, l’oblique, le trou, le fantôme, approchant ainsi « l’endroit le plus sombre [qui] est toujours sous la lampe » (Crimp, Atteintes à sa vie). Portées par les pièces expérimentales de Crimp et les derniers textes de Kane, mais également explorées par d’autres auteurs de théâtre depuis l’entrée dans le vingt-et-unième siècle – y compris ceux désignés initialement comme les autres piliers de l’esthétique « in-yer-face » (Ravenhill, Neilson, ou encore Ridley) –, les « réalités rivales »  invisibles de nos imaginaires mais aussi des théories quantiques se donnent à voir sur la scène du théâtre britanniuque. Des théâtres de l’absence, qui s’élaborent autour du sacrifice du personnage féminin principal (Attempts on Her Life de Crimp, 4.48 Psychosis de Kane), jusqu’aux théâtres de l’incertitude, qui abordent l’indétermination psychique par le biais de la thématique quantique et de la catégorie des possibles (Copenhagen de Michael Frayn, Heisenberg de Simon Stephens, Constellations de Nick Payne), en passant par les théâtres de la dissociation, qui explorent le traumatisme et les manifestations de la souffrance psychique et cognitive (Blue Heart de Caryl Churchill, Three Women and a Piano Tuner de Helen Cooper), les contradictions entre les multiples versions du drame, qui se déploie sous une forme fragmentée, déconstruite, plurielle et inaboutie, (re)localisent le véritable drame de l’humain dans le doute, l’indéterminé, les probabilités. A travers la violence et la performativité du langage, de telles pièces renversent la perspective en s’appuyant sur un changement de paradigme qui permet d’interroger la vérité impossible du sujet dont le visage se spectralise, « scotché au verso de [s]on esprit » .

This thesis uses the semiotic perspective to deal with cruelty in Sarah Kane’s drama. Stage drama needs specific dramaturgy; it is different from other types of drama in that it is written to be performed and not to be merely read. Thus, it would usually include items that help to transform it from text into a live performance. In the semiotic analysis, these items are termed sign systems. The task of semiotic analysis is to break down the dramatic piece into its components of sign systems and analyze each of them in relation to the others. Semiotic analysis is not concerned merely with how many components are there or what they might be, rather it is concerned with how the general meaning is created and what each sign system signifies. Sarah Kane is a post-modern dramatist; she belongs to a dramatic movement known as in-yer-face that had appeared in the 1990s. Sarah Kane's drama is distinguished by its richness of multiple sign systems and their significant presence in all of her work. She uses drama to send strong messages about society and human nature and she does so by her heavy reliance on cruelty, physical or psychological. Thus, the researcher attempts to define how sign systems were used by Sarah Kane to present cruelty and to what ends.

In the three consecutive plays of  Mark Ravenhill, that is Handbag ,  Faust  and Pool ( No Water), the human mind and body are sexually abused, burnt and cut to death and even deformed/battered so as to create gradually an alternative piece of !art", an expression of post-human, the problemmatic !normal" body representing the gradual deformation of cliche/traditional public identities of a mother/father, wife/husband, woman/man lover/friend/artist/professor into private, self-destroyed, self-created and/or selfconstructed identities in our contemporary world.  In this article, Ravenhill#s method of materializing this shift in identities through the vessel of human body and with an increased expression of  cruelty in each play will be explained and illustrated through the behavioural analyses of  some relevant characters.

As a much-discussed part of the human mind, memory today is an interdisciplinary subject studied by a variety of academic fields such as psychology, sociology, psychiatry, cultural studies, and literature. In British drama, it finds a reflection with the term "memory plays" whose representative playwright in the twentieth century is Harold Pinter. On the other hand, it can be observed that Anthony Neilson, emerging as a voice of the British In-Yer-Face drama of the 1990s, makes an emphatic use of memory in his plays like his predecessor. In this sense, this paper argues that Anthony Neilson's playwriting shows resemblances to Harold Pinter's, which is acknowledged as the Pinteresque, that, more specifically, Pinter's Old Times (1971) and Neilson's Penetrator (1993) share much in their use of memory, and analyses the particularities each playwright employs in their utilisation of this concept within their plays.

Totally different from the traditional forms, In-yer- face theatre is mostly referred as a new breath in the provocative drama, in which the audience is made to go through the shocking experience of the mix of sex, violence and street poetry on the stage. Being more than a collection of experimental and provocative shock-tactics, this collection of plays is the consistent critique of modern life and the problems of their time; therefore, the plays unavoidably question the problems of violence, masculinity, post-feminism and consumerism. As the in-yer- face sensibility, which has boomed in the 90s, was being collectively shaped through the challenging and outstanding forms in the British theatre since the 50s, the same provocative and confrontational sensibility was also being gradually shaped from the other-side of the ocean, within the New World by the American playwrights with their unique treatment of the ‘extremities’ with the extreme language on the stage. Thus, this paper attempts to analyse and scrutinize the very in-yer- face sensibility within the American context through Amir Baraka’s Toilet (1964) and Holly Hughes’s Dress Suits to Hire (1987) by discovering how the concepts of sex, violence, homosexuality and blatant language have constructed the new inner voice as the extremity of provocative and confrontational theatre.  Keywords: In-yer-face Theatre, sex, violence, homosexuality, masculinity.

Que veut dire Martin Crimp lorsqu’il explique que, dans ses pièces Attempts on Her Life (1997) et la trilogie Fewer Emergencies (2005), « l’espace dramatique est un espace mental, pas un espace physique »  ? Comment comprendre cette « mentalisation » du drame initiée par Samuel Beckett (That Time, Not I, Footfalls), continuée par Harold Pinter (Moonlight, Silence) mais aussi explorée par Sarah Kane dans Crave (1998) et 4.48 Psychosis (2000), et poursuivie aujourd’hui selon diverses modalités poétiques par d’autres auteurs britanniques (Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green…) ? Est-il possible de concilier l’écriture et l’exploration dramatique de la psyché – et si oui, comment ? – avec le phénomène concurrent d’une « quantisation » de la scène, dont témoigne la multiplication de pièces « quantiques » par des auteurs comme Michael Frayn, Simon Stephens et Nick Payne ? Depuis la fin des années 1990 jusqu’à aujourd’hui, de telles pièces renouvellent le rapport du théâtre à l’espace physique – et non mental – en s’appliquant, à la suite de Tom Stoppard, à dramatiser les découvertes et les hypothèses révolutionnaires de la physique quantique. Parallèlement, l’émergence d’un théâtre que l’on pourrait dire non plus tant « in-yer-face » que « in-yer-head » appelle à s’interroger sur le développement d’un corpus de pièces dont l’intérêt porte sur le fonctionnement de la psyché humaine, de l’inconscient et de la conscience, et à analyser les modalités et les implications de l’écriture et de la mise en scène de l’espace mental ou du psychisme (mind) sur la scène britannique des vingt dernières années. Tandis qu’Aleks Sierz décrivait, au tout début des années 2000, la violence frontale, viscérale et spectaculaire, essentiellement physique et ancrée dans l’expérience sensorielle, développée au cours des « nasty nineties » par des écritures scandaleuses et subversives, les dramaturgies de l’espace mental explorent le non-dit, l’indicible, l’oblique, le trou, le fantôme, approchant ainsi « l’endroit le plus sombre [qui] est toujours sous la lampe » (Crimp, Atteintes à sa vie). Portées par les pièces expérimentales de Crimp et les derniers textes de Kane, mais également explorées par d’autres auteurs de théâtre depuis l’entrée dans le vingt-et-unième siècle – y compris ceux désignés initialement comme les autres piliers de l’esthétique « in-yer-face » (Ravenhill, Neilson, ou encore Ridley) –, les « réalités rivales »  invisibles de nos imaginaires mais aussi des théories quantiques se donnent à voir sur la scène du théâtre britanniuque. Des théâtres de l’absence, qui s’élaborent autour du sacrifice du personnage féminin principal (Attempts on Her Life de Crimp, 4.48 Psychosis de Kane), jusqu’aux théâtres de l’incertitude, qui abordent l’indétermination psychique par le biais de la thématique quantique et de la catégorie des possibles (Copenhagen de Michael Frayn, Heisenberg de Simon Stephens, Constellations de Nick Payne), en passant par les théâtres de la dissociation, qui explorent le traumatisme et les manifestations de la souffrance psychique et cognitive (Blue Heart de Caryl Churchill, Three Women and a Piano Tuner de Helen Cooper), les contradictions entre les multiples versions du drame, qui se déploie sous une forme fragmentée, déconstruite, plurielle et inaboutie, (re)localisent le véritable drame de l’humain dans le doute, l’indéterminé, les probabilités. A travers la violence et la performativité du langage, de telles pièces renversent la perspective en s’appuyant sur un changement de paradigme qui permet d’interroger la vérité impossible du sujet dont le visage se spectralise, « scotché au verso de [s]on esprit » .

Ravenhill's Some Explicit Polaroids which is considered as one of the most significant plays of In-yer-face theatre that began to gain influence in Britain at the beginning of the Nineties. Some Explicit Polaroids is a political criticism on the confrontation of the two generations and reflects postmodernist tenets, which inhold nihilistic values. In this study, it is aimed to bring forward that Some Explicit Polaroids reproduces the current social milieu in a postmodernist view. In addition to this, the evaluations written on postmodern drama and the criticism on postmodernism are dealt with according to their resonances in the play. The conclusion reveals the evaluations of this study.

En su Diccionario del teatro, Patrice Pavis explica que "Describir la situación de una obra equivale a tomar una fotografía en un momento dado de todas las relaciones entre los personajes, a "congelar" el desarrollo de los acontecimientos para establecer el balance de la acción" (Pavis: 425). La profesora Marcoccia nos recuerda en su artículo Situación dramática inicial e imagen, la precisión con la que el mismo autor define la noción de situación teatral: "la situación comprende las condiciones espacio temporales, la mímica y la expresión corporal de los actores, el marco escénico, la naturaleza profunda de las relaciones psicológicas y sociales entre los personajes". (Marcoccia: 39) A su vez, el académico Fernando de Toro nos dice que "[...] los actores/personajes hablan siempre en una situación concreta, fabricada por ellos mismos e imitando una estructura dialógica[...] "La significación", señala Ubersfeld, "de un enunciado en el teatro separado de la situación de comunicación es un absurdo: esta situación permite establecer las condiciones de enunciación y le da su sentido al enunciado". (de Toro: 43) ¿Cómo referirnos a la anatomía de la situación dramática en Ansia? ¿Cómo describir y traducir en un texto dramático cargado de cortes e interrupciones una relación conceptual como anatomía de la situación dramática? En Ansia, texto de fines del siglo pasado, Sarah Kane quiebra con las validaciones teóricas expuestas arriba, a través de una composición que-a diferencia del Realismo, por ejemplo-no busca acomodarse en un marco situacional dado por elementos claros y definidos ni brindar referencias que adecuen al lector en un cronotopo preciso. Veremos que Ansia rechaza el imperativo que en otros emplazamientos dramatúrgicos busca referenciar a través de un espacio descriptivo y que el extraño lugar que ocupan los parlamentos de los personajes desabastece al intercambio de frases de contenido denotativo.

This research project is aimed at analysing the role of Sarah Kane's œuvre within British theatre criticism of the 90s, as well as within dramatic theory in the first decade of the new millennium. This essay examines the «authorial name» or effigy that both critics and theorists have built around Kane's life, works, scandals, and ultimately, Kane's suicide. By focusing on her «authorial name», we can understand how the artistic system deploys its strategies of recognition and which elements of her work have been overlooked so that effigy or theory matches with her dramatic production. In the last part of the essay, we criticise both the In-Yer-Face label and the post-dramatic ascendent by gathering key formal elements that would undermine the complete adherence to those classifications.

Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley Özlem Karadağ ABSTRACT This study aims to explore personal and collective traumas in three representative in-yer-face plays: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. These three playwrights, who are among the most outstanding playwrights of the British theatre and in-yer-face movement, wrote their plays after the 1990s, which were still overshadowed by the horrific historical events of the twentieth century. Again, written shortly before and after the millennium, they usher in the ghosts of a traumatic past and fear of the future. First, the in-yer-face movement will be placed in the theatre tradition by examining its ties with the Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the Theatre of Catastrophe. Under the guidance of Trauma theory and taking into consideration the effects of the historical and cultural background of Britain after World War II, this study will then attempt to show that in the plays under discussion dystopian and traumatic elements become more and more central. Each character both because of his/her problematic personal background and collective catastrophes and radical changes is heavily traumatized. Story-telling, the telling of trauma, becomes central to the plays. It triggers trauma, but it also suggests a fragile chance of redemption for the characters and possibility for a better future. Recurrent trauma shatters their apathy or refusal to remember horrific events, memory of which must be recovered for the characters and culture to be healed. However, a sense of dystopia prevails.

This book chapter (culled from the author’s PhD dissertation, entitled “The End: The Apocalyptic in In-Yer-Face Drama,” Middle East Technical University, 2009) studies apocalypticism found in Mark Ravenhill's play Faust is Dead through a comprehensive and close analysis of the play.

Bu makalenin amacı, Namık Kemal'in Akif Bey (1874) ve Gülnihal (1875) adlı oyunlarının, William Shakespeare'in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth ve Fırtına'sıyla teknik, tema ve eleştirel bakış açılarıyla olan benzerliklerinin metinlerarasılık kavramı çerçevesinde gerekçelendirilerek incelenmesi ve bu itibarla Kemal'in, kendi toplumundaki güç ilşkilerini ve muhalefet, itaatsizlik gibi konuları anlatabilmek ve eleştirebilmek adına, kendi oyun metinlerini Batı'nın en iyisi olarak nitelendirdiği Shakespeare'le zenginleştirdiğini göstermektir. Ancak bu durum, hiç şüphesiz Shakespeare'in Ondokuzuncu yüzyıl Osmanlı Türk Tiyatrosu üzerindeki etkilerinin ilk örneklerinin ve varlığının ispatlanması anlamına gelse de, bu işe Onyedinci yüzyılın sonlarında başlayan Avrupa'ya kıyasla belli bir geç kalmışlığa da işaret etmektedir. Bunun da nedenleri arasında Osmanlı'nın kendisini dünyanın merkezi olarak görmesi olabileceği gibi, dini çekinceler veya otoriteye karşı başkaldırının sergilenmesi kaynaklı tehlikeleri de saymak mümkündür. Bütün bunlara karşın Namık Kemal otoriter rejimlere karşı olan duygularını ilk oyunu Vatan Yahut Silistre (1872)'de korkusuzca sergilemekten çekinmemiştir. Ancak oyunun sahnelenmesi sonrasında vatan sevgisiyle çoşan halk sokaklara çıktığı için Kemal, halkı kışkırtmak suçuyla tutuklanarak Magosa'ya sürgüne gönderilmiştir. Daha sonra Shakespeare'den aldığı ilhamla sürgündeyken kaleme aldığı Akif Bey (1874) ve Gülnihal (1875)' de üstü kapalı olarak ifade ettiği eleştirileri ise onun ne birkaç sefer daha hapse girmesine, ne de tekrar sürgün edilmesine engel olabilmiştir; ki ölümü bile Sakız adasında sürgündeyken gerçekleşmiştir. Son olarak, Kemal'in kendi ülkesindeki mevcut otoriter devlet yönetimine karşı yaptığı tüm eleştirilere rağmen, ümidini hiç kaybetmeyip bunu vatanseverliği ile harmanlayarak yine de vurguladığını söylemek mümkündür: Gülnihal'de baskıdan uzak ve adil bir yönetimin mümkün olabileceğinden söz ederken, Akif Bey'de ise dilin gücüne başvurmak yoluyla, Shakespeare'in/Avrupa'nın o bilindik olumsuz Osmanlı Türkü ve Türk askeri imajını değiştirme gayreti içerisinde olduğunu söylemek mümkündür. This article aims at an intertextual justication for the technical and thematic similarities between Namık Kemal's, Akif Bey (1874) and Gülnihal (1875), and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Tempest to illustrate Kemal's enriched texts and better understand his display of power relations, forms of deance and non-submissiveness in his own society and hence, his aim for constructing his plays upon what he considered as the best of the Western, Shakespearean material. However, this particular attempt, no doubt signifying the beginnings of Shakespearean inuence upon the Ottoman-Turkish drama in the late Nineteenth Century, came considerably late when compared to Europe starting as early as the end of the Seventeenth Century. The reason might be the Ottoman-Turkish tendency of seeing themselves as the centre of the world or their religious reservations or the danger of publicizing revolt against authority. Hence, when a fearless Kemal came forward and openly displayed his resistance against an authoritative rule in his rst play, Vatan Yahut Silistre in 1873, he had his share of provoking riots, followed by his arrest and nal deportation to Magusa. Few years later in Akif Bey (1874) and in Gülnihal (1875), both of which he wrote during this exile, Kemal only covertly revealed his negative opinions about an authoritarian rule. However, it did not save him from being arrested a few more times, and even die during another exile in Sakız Island. Lastly, it is possible to note that despite his ceaseless critical attitude, Kemal had showed his optimism and love of his country in Gülnihal by suggesting the possibility of a just rule without oppression, and in Akif Bey by displaying a constructive effort through the power of language, to alter the negative Shakespearean/European prejudices about the Ottoman-Turks and Turkish soldiers in general.

Przyglądając się motywom samobójczym w wybranych dramatach przedstawicieli ogólnie pojmowanego dramatu współczesnego naturalizmu, stworzyłam dla własnych potrzeb podział ze względu na sposób przedstawiania zjawiska. Wyróżniam trzy typy wykorzystania motywu samobójstwa: „dramat o samobójcy”, „dramat o samobójstwie” oraz „dramat samobójcy” (czyli dzieło uchodzące za list pożegnalny). Dwa pierwsze dotyczą sytuacji, kiedy samobójstwo jest jednym z motywów przedstawionym w kontekście różnych innych problemów dotykających bohaterki i bohaterów. Dramat o samobójcy dotyczy aktu samobójstwa, które jest tłem dla losów postaci. Analizie poddane zostały: „Legoland” Dirka Dobbrowa, „Pasożyty” Mariusa von Mayenburga, „Norway.today” Igora Bauersima oraz „Ścianę” Elfriedy Jelinek. W dramacie o samobójstwie główny nacisk położony jest na samobójstwo, które staje się tym samym wydarzeniem kulminacyjnym, sytuacją graniczną. Dramatem o samobójstwie są wspomniane: „Norway.today” – ponieważ oprócz ukazania postaci samobójców, ukazuje samo samobójstwo (które staje się tematem dramatu), „Pasożyty” – ze względu na pokazane umieranie bohaterów lub ich dojrzewania w umieraniu, „Legoland” – w którym samobójstwo towarzyszy bohaterom akcji. A także „Łucja i jej dzieci” Marka Pruchniewskiego. Dramat samobójcy dotyczy tekstów, w których istnieje tylko samobójca i jego śmierć, a wszystko inne tworzy jedynie absurdalne tło, które potęguje poczucie osamotnienia i bezsilności bohaterki lub bohatera dramatu. W tym przypadku samobójstwo jest tematem, nie tylko motywem. „4.48 Psychosis” jest tekstem, który z jednej strony prezentuje samobójcę, z drugiej zaś samobójstwo. Jednocześnie zyskał on rangę listu pożegnalnego, ze względu na okoliczności swego powstania. Dramat ten ukazał się bowiem już po samobójczej śmierci Sarah Kane.

1-This article is retrieved from a PhD dissertation. 2-There is no conflict of interest between the authors of the article. 3-In this article, there is no situation that requires the permission of the ethics committee and/or legal/special permission. 4-This article adheres to research and publication ethics. This article was checked by iThenticate. Similarity Index 17%