"Mere voyeurs in Bedlam": Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and "In-Yer-Head" Theatre - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2012

"Mere voyeurs in Bedlam": Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and "In-Yer-Head" Theatre

Résumé

Talking about his most unconventional plays Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Fewer Emergencies (2005) in a 2006 interview with Ensemble Modern, Martin Crimp said that “in this second kind of writing, the dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one.” Picking up on this expression, this paper intends to define the main characteristics of a theatre which has recently been investigating individual neuroses, psychiatric disorders and psychological trauma from alternating points of view on the British stage. In Attempts on Her Life, the suicide character of Anne who, in scenario 11, “quite clearly should’ve been admitted […] to a psychiatric unit […] where she could receive treatment”, provides a metacritical reflection on the work and life of Sarah Kane, and an uncanny hint at her death two years later. Influenced in return by Crimp's play, Kane's last two plays show a similar, converging evolution of her dramatic writing toward what we could call a ‘psychopoetics of the stage’. Ultimately, 4.48 Psychosis (2000) can be interpreted as a first person sequel to Attempts on Her Life, putting Anne back on stage through the voice of an anonymous female patient indeed receiving treatment in a mental hospital before committing suicide. More generally, the creation of a dramatic space that is no longer physical, but psychological, and which not only explores the kind of “drama-in-the-head” (Crimp) that we are all experiencing but also investigates mental disorders from contrasting standpoints seems to characterize a specific turn on the contemporary stage toward what could also be labelled ‘In-Her-Head theatre’. Using different aesthetics, other British plays such as Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) and Mark Haddon's Polar Bears (2010), like Alan Ayckbourn's earlier Woman in Mind (1985) but with more serious undertones, focus indeed on the tortuous and haunted mindscapes of psychotic female characters, unveiling a parallel inner space which is often threatened by the confined space of a hospital room where the action may or may not take place. While renewing the forms of a stylised psychiatric realism on the stage to explore psychological issues from within, either through a poetics of voices or scenic images, such plays raise urgent ethical and societal questions. In particular, they reflect on the notions of responsibility, free will, and agency and the converging modalities of psychiatric, ethical, and dramatic treatment of the (woman as a) patient/ person/ character.
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hal-04287923 , version 1 (15-11-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04287923 , version 1

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Solange Ayache. "Mere voyeurs in Bedlam": Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and "In-Yer-Head" Theatre. International and interdisciplinary conference "Confined Spaces: Considering Performance, Madness, and Psychiatry", Dr. Anna Harpin (University of Exeter); Dr. Juliet Foster (University of Cambridge), Sep 2012, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04287923⟩
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