Skip to main contentAs she paused to hang herself in 1999 at the age of 28, Sarah Kane stood as the most controversial British playwright since Edward Bond. Her first play, Blasted, was: Critics scrambled for new synonyms for filth. Yet she received praise from peers, even finding a fan letter slipped under her flat's door from Harold Pinter (very Pinter-esque, that). Still, 1995's Blasted--with its cannibalism and sexual torture--fed outrage, though it was nothing compared with the response achieved by her next play, Phaedra's Love.
Premiered at London's Gate Theatre in 1996, Kane's mesh of Euripides' plotting for Hippolytus with the brutal despair of Seneca's Phaedra produced more cries from critics. But lost in the denunciations of her staging rape, desultory masturbation and disembowelings was the fact that Kane was primarily a moralist with a keen satiric sensibility. She was a new Jacobean, whose focus, like the Jacobean playwrights of the 17th century, zeroed in on contemporary horrors and vice.
Jacobean playwrights were driven by the age of uncertainty that surrounded them. Elizabeth I was dead, and the accession of James I seemed to herald chaos. Their plays are marked with murder and torture, as well as macabre humor. Stages are stacked with corpses by play's close, from The Revenger's Tragedy to the era's masterpiece, Hamlet. And under this cordage of flesh spreads the great, grim compost of Seneca's bloody tragedies.
Like Seneca, the Jacobeans tried to get to the root of evil by exploring it fully. Edward Quinn wrote, "Underlying this sense of dissolution and incongruity is a steadfast refusal to accept any facile consolatory explanations." It's an apt description of Kane's work too.
Kane's Phaedra differs from its sources. The play enters a hell of unexamined passions, which the "love" in the title ironically alludes to and which Phaedra exemplifies. She's ravenous for the body of her husband Theseus' son, Hippolytus, a lout fat on fast food and TV. Unlike the virgin of Euripides and Seneca, Kane's Hippolytus is an insensate sex pig, but the result's the same: a man removed from human love. All of Kane's characters live in oblivion, caught up in the cult of self and celebrity. It's a world that sounds vaguely familiar.
Grace Carter's direction of this tough piece still needs work, but it's a good start. She succeeds with her casting: James Moore's half-conscious Hippolytus, Madeleine Sanford's lust-crazed Phaedra, and the choric Strophe of damali ayo (who also provides the witty set of gold-laced penitentiary wire, boldly symbolizing Theseus' dystopian kingdom). Yet Carter shies from some of Kane's violence, though the scenes among the three principals are potent. The Titus-like end is a bit of a mess (literally), with characters piled in scrums. The scene calls for something choreographic, like the shocking finale of Passolini's Salo: bloodbath as ballet. But is there a more poetic call to question our brutal lives than Kane's ending? Guts split and spilling, Hippolytus suddenly sees the sky, perhaps for the first time ever: "Vultures...if there could have been more moments like this." An odd beauty, but considering these times....
defunkt theatre at the Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 993-9062. 8 pm Thursdays- Saturdays, 4 pm Sundays. Closes Feb. 16. $10-$15, with a Sunday two- for- one offer.
"Fear and amazement beat upon my heart, even as a madman beats upon a drum."
WWeek 2015