Further Extremes

Since reading Sarah Kane's play Blasted I've been thinking on and off about just how far a dramatist can reasonably go in terms of representing extreme experiences - particularly those of a sexual or violent (or both) nature - on stage. I suppose one simple answer is: they can go as far as they like if there is an audience for it. And another: since there seem few limits on the dreadful extremes of experience, of cruelty and suffering, human beings subject each other to with monotonous regularity, it would dishonest to not allow such to be represented in the theatre. In holding up a mirror to nature we must allow the mirror to reflect the extremes of that nature.

The problem is, I'm still not entirely convinced by these arguments, and I can't quite figure out why. I know for sure that I much preferred reading Michael Frayn's Afterlife to Ms Kane's work (though I've got a feeling I'll still have details of her play in my head when the cleverness of Mr Frayn's account of the career of Max Reinhardt will have faded) and I think Afterlife gives us a deeper insight into what we might loosely term the human condition. There's something suspect for me in the sincerely compelling intensity of Blasted.

Funnily enough, reading Kane's Crave, which was generally well-received by the critics I believe, didn't work for me at all. I just couldn't put the four voices together in a way that made them something greater than the sum of their parts. Presumably this works better in performance because on the page it appears almost juvenile in places. I hate to say this, because I'm uneasy about belittling any writer, and especially one as genuinely tormented and abundantly talented as Ms Kane, but I'm wondering if there is an element of self-indulgence in her work that compromises it. I think I feel the same way about Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and F**king which I read just after Blasted, as a way of getting myself to think through my responses to this sort of In-Yer-Face, Theatre of Extremes.

Gosh, I'm conflicted on this. Because it's obvious how talented these writers are, and how they are obviously telling us truths. But it doesn't seem to me to be quite the Truth in the way that Frayn somehow manages in his theatre of distance, moderation and intelligence. And then there's this from the postscript to Afterlife that resonates for me: It (the financing of Reinhardt's Everyman) sounds more and more like the situation in the British (and the German) theatre today, which struggles piously to present plays about poverty and degradation to an audience not very closely acquainted with either - and which has to be subsidised by the charitable efforts of people on even more remote terms with them. Interesting, eh?