"Summon up the Blood": The Stylized (or Sticky) Stuff of Violence in Three Plays by Sarah Kane

“Summon up the Blood” The Stylized (or Sticky) Stuff of Violence in Three Plays by Sarah Kane Christine Woodworth If we are what people say we are, let us take our delight in the blood of men. So said Tertullian in his love letter to the theatre, On the Spectacles .1 Tertullian, it seems, was not far off, as our theatrical histories are awash with blood—real and imagined. Among the complex rituals associated with the ancient Athenian City Dionysia, a blood sacrifice served as a sacred offering to the gods.2 The blood sports of Imperial Rome went so far as to fatten up gladiatorial combatants in order to slow the flow of their blood upon injury so that spectators had longer to revel in their agony.3 Medieval theatre, particularly in the performances of the Cycle plays, dripped with a blood whose symbolic resonances were complexly layered and remain hotly contested. Elizabethan plays were riddled with stabbings, decapitations, and disembowelments, calling for props as simple as “sponges of vinegar” and as complex as bladders filled with sheep’s blood and entrails.4 France’s late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century Grand-­ Guignol theatre has been characterized as a theatre of excess in terms of its horrific representations. Their productions were so gory, in fact, that according to legend, the theatre had to employ a doctor to revive theatre patrons that fainted at the sight of the tortures and violence.5 The use of blood onstage is fraught with religious, social, and practical concerns. The roots of Western and non-­ Western theatre are soaked in the blood of ceremonial sacrifice. For centuries on the stage, blood has vexed those responsible for its manufacture and execution. When used as a prop, blood marks the level of abstraction of a particular piece of theatre. Blood may be realistic, as in the sheep’s blood bladders of the Renaissance, or over the top, as in the gruesome offerings of the Grand-­ Guignol, or stylized, as with the dyed red cotton cloths of Kabuki. The 12      C h r i st i n e W oo d wo r th all-­ too-­ brief canon of Sarah Kane, notorious “bad girl” of the British stage, offers three distinct treatments of blood that exemplify these three demarcations: realistic, excessive, and stylized. Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, and Cleansed serve as productive points of departure for the development of a “grammar of blood” as well as a literary and performative genealogy of blood on the stage. As Andrew Sofer asserts, “The stage life of props extends beyond their journey within a given play. . . . As they move from play to play and from period to period, objects accrue intertextual resonance as they absorb and embody the theatrical past.”6 While often falling within the domain of makeup, stage blood can also be situated within several categories of props, as explicated by Sofer. Blood that is manipulated by an actor rather than merely worn can take on a number of the “lives” of stage props that Sofer sets forth.7 This examination of three of Kane’s plays will address the practical considerations involved in the use of stage blood, the ways in which blood operates referentially , and the perils of blood as a potentially “recalcitrant prop.”8 While the use of blood in Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, and Cleansed does not necessarily break new ground for prop artisans, Kane’s works offer contemporary examples of the continuously vexing and perpetually haunted use of blood as a stage prop. Kane’s first play, Blasted, premiered in 1995 and caused a firestorm among critics. Featuring three characters—the jaded journalist, Ian, the developmentally challenged Cate, and the desperate Soldier—the entirety of the action takes place in a hotel room in Leeds. The frightening dynamic between Cate and Ian escalates to rape, which occurs in the time lapse between the first two scenes. At the end of scene 2, the seemingly distant war intrudes itself upon Cate and Ian’s protective space as the Soldier forces his way into the room and additional horrors ensue. Over the course of Blasted, blood is called for in a number of ways. Ian...