Sarah Kane's Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

Sarah Kane's Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

Sarah Kane's Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

Sarah Kane's Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

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Overview

The first book to focus exclusively on playwright Sarah Kane's approach to mind and mental health; it brings together archival material, healthcare contexts and contemporary performances. As such, it offers an important re-evaluation of Kane's oeuvre, revealing the relationship between theatre and mind, which lies at the heart of her theatrical project.

Drawing on performance theory, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this book argues that Kane's innovations generated a 'dramaturgy of psychic life', which re-shape the encounter between stage and audience. It uses previously unseen archival material and contemporary productions to uncover the mechanics of this innovative theatre practice.

Through a radically open-ended approach to dramaturgy, Kane's works offer urgent insights into mental suffering that take us beyond traditional discourses of empathy and 'mental health' and into a profound rethinking of theatre as a mode of thought.

It makes a case for the relevance of Kane's work to understandings of contemporary diagnostic categories and places it in urgent debates about mental health in the medical humanities.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781350283169
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 10/31/2024
Series: Methuen Drama Engage
Pages: 230
Product dimensions: 5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mark Taylor-Batty is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Deputy Head of School in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His previous publications include The Theatre of Harold Pinter (Bloomsbury, 2014), About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (Faber and Faber, 2005), Roger Blin: Collaborations and Methodologies (Peter Lang, 2007) and, he co-authored with his wife, Juliette Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Continuum, 2009).

Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan and the series editor of Methuen Drama's Miller scholarly editions. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.

Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan. He is series editor of Methuen Drama's Arthur Miller scholarly editions, and with Mark Taylor-Batty of Methuen Drama's Engage series. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Revisiting Kane
- Why Kane?
- The question of biography: mental health and politics
- Context: Mental Health in the 1990s: Phaedra's Love and 'community care plays'

Chapter 1: Plays and playing: The Dramaturgy of Psychic Life
- A Starting Point: Experientialism and the mind
- Dramaturgy
- Theatre and thought
- Psychic life and psychoanalysis
- Crave with Paine's Plough (1998): Exploring Experientialism

Chapter 2: The stage as traumatic space
- Kane's Feminist Legacies: Feminist theatre and sexual trauma
- Theatre as a theoretical response? PTSD and mimetic traumas
- Blasted : The psychic life of sexual trauma
- Blasted at the Crucible: A trauma reading

Chapter 3: Rhythm, Interruption, Psychosis
- Phaedra's Love to Cleansed: A dramaturgical turbaning point
- Dramaturgical tools: Prediction and interruption in Cleansed and Crave
- A cognitive reading: Psychosis and prediction errors
- Influence on Kane from Strindberg and Artaud
- Cleansed at the National Theatre: Playing it against the text

Chapter 4: The Mind as Theatrical Site
- Crave and 4.48 Psychosis as 'mental health' plays
- The mind-as-site
- Neoliberal healthcare and psychosis: dramaturgical responses to political changes
- 4.48 Psychosis at the Lyric Hammersmith: splitting the mind into space

Chapter 5: RSVP ASAP
- Kane and desire: What does theatre want?
- Suicidality: returbaning to Kane's sources
- Staging desire: An apostrophic reading with Barbara Johnson
- 4.48 Psychosis by the Belarus Free Theatre: Queer love and suicidality

Conclusion: Looking ahead: Kane and the future of 'mental health'

Bibliography

Index

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