Ethical intentionality in sarah kane’s blastedDramaturgy, performance and reception / intencionalitat ètica a blasted, de sarah kane: Dramatúrgia, escenificació i recepció

Resumen

This PhD thesis, entitled “Ethical Intentionality in Sarah Kane’s Blasted: Dramaturgy, Performance and Reception / Intencionalitat ètica a Blasted, de Sarah Kane: dramatúrgia, escenificació i recepció,” aims to contribute to the field of theatre studies by offering an analysis of the dramaturgy, performance and reception of Blasted (1995), by Sarah Kane (1971-1999), from an ethicopolitical perspective. The starting point for the thesis is drawn from Liz Tomlin’s Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship: Provocations for Change (2019), which argues that contemporary political dramaturgies intend to interpellate spectators so that they will react to the harmful consequences of neoliberalism by means of a critical and/or resistant response. In relation to previous studies of Kane’s work, the originality of the thesis lies, first of all, in identifying the harmful relationship between individuals that occurs in the normative, hierarchical framework of neoliberalism as the central conflict in Blasted. In this sense, one of the main contributions of the thesis is to carry out the dramaturgical study of Blasted from an entirely ethicopolitical perspective and through an innovative methodology that combines a detailed textual reading (close reading) with a theoretical framework based on Emmanuel Levinas’s and, above all, Judith Butler’s ethics. This combined methodology sheds fresh light on some of Blasted’s less studied scenes and provides a complex portrayal of the characters and the ethical conflict between them. In addition, the methodology used in the thesis may be deployed to read other contemporary dramaturgies from an ethical perspective. The dramaturgical analysis of Blasted is complemented by an examination of two 21st-century productions of the play and their reception: the British staging directed by Robert Wilson at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 2015 and the Catalan Blasted (Rebentats) directed by Alícia Gorina and premiered at the Temporada Alta Festival in 2017 and Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in 2018. By identifying, in the productions’ staging, set design and acting, the four strategies for spectatorial political interpellation that Tomlin describes in her study—ironic interpellation, autonomy and affect, empathy and agonism and antagonism and agency—the thesis outlines the ethicopolitical intentionality of both productions while bearing in mind at all times the necessary distinction between the spectatorial interpellations that come from the dramaturgy itself and may be described as part of Kane’s ethicopolitical legacy, and those that emanate from the choices and decisions made by production’s artistic team. The practical application of the methodology drawn from Tomlin’s study is another significant contribution made by the thesis, since it can be replicated to analyse the ethicopolitical intentionality of other contemporary productions. Finally, the study of the real responses of spectators to the two selected productions of Blasted, based on reviews published in the media, on personal blogs and social networks, lead to the conclusion that the strategies of ethicopolitical interpellation identified in them are not always successful.