Blasted, Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed. Reading Love, Faith and Hope in Sarah Kane’s Plays

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.3, University of Bonn (Institut fur Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Contemporary British Drama, language: English, abstract: In this paper, Sarah Kane’s debut play Blasted , alongside her proximate plays Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed , will be discussed in order to explore the nature of the plays concerning their subject matter. Among these plays, Phaedra’s Love is the only one that is based on a model and therefore not utterly Kane’s content. The story is written loosely after Seneca’s version of the Phaedra myth, in which a tragedy arises because the title character falls in love with her royal stepson. Beyond the thematic discussion, the question whether the subjects Sarah Kane connects her plays with are presented in a positive or negative way will be issued in the paper. If there is love in the plays, in how far is it satisfying for the characters? And does strong faith really promise a hopeful ending? In order to answer these questions, the paper is divided into two parts, starting with a short theory chapter, that follows this introduction and provides a brief introduction to in-yer-face theatre in general. Subsequently, one finds the main part of the paper, which consists of three sub-chapters and includes the analysis of each of the named plays. A conclusion of the findings will round the paper off.