T. C.

İstanbul Üniversitesi

Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü

İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı

Yüksek Lisans Tezi

Pain and Violence in Three Contemporary

English Plays

ÖZLEM KARADAĞ

2501050048

TEZ DANIŞMANI

YRD. DOÇ. DR. CANAN ŞAVKAY

İSTANBUL 2008

iii

Pain and Violence in Three Contemporary English Plays

Özlem Karadağ ÖZ Bu çalışmanın amacı, 20. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında tiyatroda ortaya çıkan

Absürd tiyatro, Politik tiyatro ve politik sonrası olarak adlandırılan “in-yer-face”

akımlarının önemli örnekleri olan Samuel Beckett’in Endgame, Edward Bond’un

Lear ve Anthony Neilson’ın Penetrator başlıklı oyunlarında şiddet ve acı öğelerinin

kullanılışını incelemektir. Şiddet ve acı üzerine kuramların ve 19. ve 20. yüzyıl

düşünürlerinin görüşlerinin uygulanmasıyla, daha önceki tiyatro akımlarının aksine,

20. yüzyıl tarihi arka planının da etkisiyle, şiddetin sahnede giderek görünür hale

geldiği, oyun kişilerinin birbirleriyle gergin ve öfke dolu ilişkilerinin olduğu ve

karakterlerin başkalarına acı çektirmekle beraber, acı çeken kişi konumunda

oldukları ortaya çıkmaktadır.

iv

Pain and Violence in Three Contemporary English Plays

Özlem Karadağ

ABSTRACT

This study purports to trace the use of violence and pain in Samuel Beckett’s

Endgame, Edward Bond’s Lear, and Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator which are the

important examples of the movements that arose in the second half of the twentieth

century; the Theatre of the Absurd, Political Theatre and “in-yer-face” which is also

called post-political theatre. With the application of theories on violence and pain,

and under the light of the thoughts of nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers it is

revealed that violence, contrary to older movements in drama, with the contribution

of the historical background of the twentieth century, gets gradually visible on the

stage, the relationships between characters are tense and full of frustration, and as

well as making others suffer, the characters themselves are also the ones who suffer.

v

PREFACE

This study covers the close analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Edward

Bond’s Lear, and Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator, and focuses on the idea of

violence and pain in these plays. What I try to clarify in this study is the change in

the tone of drama and use of violence and the demonstration of the human situation

after the Second World War. It can be seen from both each play’s own development

and the chronological development we are tracing through these three plays that

violence gets more and more dominant in theatre after World War II, and symbols of

aggression, frustration and violence haunt the texts from the beginning to the end.

And the characters in the plays depict the human situation in modern times; they

show that the old values are no longer valid while a new system of crueller values is

being constructed. The characters carry the burden of their past. As they are

indifferent to their own present condition, they are also indifferent to that of the

world. Yet they go through a suffering which grows everyday.

This thesis consists of three parts; each in itself breaks into two. After an

introduction on violence, its use in the theatre before the twentieth century and the

changes in the drama of the second half of the last century comes Chapter I. The first

part of this chapter covers the historical background after World War II and its

effects in drama of the times: the Theatre of the Absurd. The second part traces the

use of aggression and suffering as a never-ending process in Beckett’s Endgame.

The first part of Chapter II discusses the birth of political theatre and the use of

violence in the plays of the political theatre. The second part covers Edward Bond’s

Lear, and the use of political violence, torture and power struggle which causes pain

and also makes innocent ones suffer. Chapter III which is the last chapter of this

thesis is written on a very contemporary movement in theatre; “in-yer-face”. The first

part of this chapter tries to explain the aims of “in-yer-face”, the employment of

violence and pain in the plays of this genre while the second part focuses on Anthony

Neilson’s Penetrator and studies the suppressed desires and memories of the

characters, which reveal themselves in violent acts. The use of filthy language and

seemingly reasonless physical violence reveal the unconscious memories and desires

and the traumatized present lives which cause unbearable pain in the characters.

vi

Finally, the conclusion gathers up the results collected from the close study of each

play.

It is a pleasure to present my hearty thanks to all the members of my

department, the English Language and Literature, for their support. To whom I owe

most is my supervisor Assist. Prof. Canan Şavkay I thank her a lot for her

suggestions, advices, comments and guidance through the process of this work.

I am grateful to Prof. Zeynep Ergun, for her support, encouragement, and

sympathy especially in my times of desperation, and for supplying me with various

ideas and sources. I am also grateful to Assoc. Prof. Murat Seçkin who always gave

me courage about my thesis work, gave me new ideas, shared his knowledge and

supplied me with plays to read, and hearty laughs. I thank Prof. Esra Melikoğlu and

Assist. Prof. Arpine Mızıkyan for their affection, support, and their continual interest

in the progress of my thesis. I also thank Assoc. Prof. Özden Sözalan for her

precious help in my thesis work with her ideas and sources that she supplied me

with. I also thank Buket Akgün, who was always supportive and helpful through this

period.

I also thank my friends those who were understanding and supportive through

all this time. My special thanks are due to my true friend Suna Yılmazer who helped

me a lot in my research, she was always positive, encouraging, and she never lost her

belief in me. I am also grateful to my house mates Nilay and Zeynep for their

understanding, their patience and for filling me with liveliness, happiness and energy

whenever I feel desperate.

I thank my mom and dad for supporting me to create a room of my own

which also helped me to keep myself sane, and finally I thank my little sister, Gizem,

who was always there for me, and with great understanding helped me to study,

always supported me and never let me lose my belief in myself.

vii

CONTENTS

Öz………...……………………………………………………………………….iii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………iv

Foreword…………………………………………………………………………..v

Contents…………………………………………………………………………...vii

List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………...viii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: Aggression and Suffering in a World of Desolation:

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

1.1. The Rise of the Theatre of the Absurd……………………………..11

1.2. Aggression and Suffering in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame………...20

Chapter 2: The Use of Violence as a Political Device,

Through a More Cruel Society: Edward Bond’s Lear

2.1. Political Theatre……………………………………………………46

2.2. Political Violence, Epidemic Cruelty and Pain

in Edward Bond’s Lear…………………………………………… 53

Chapter 3: Personal Problems, Repression and Violence in a Decade of Trauma:

Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator

3.1. The So-called Post-Political Theatre or “In-yer-face”……………..73

3.2. Verbal and Physical Violence and Traumatic

Past Memories in Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator…………………81

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...102

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………108

Illustrations………………………………………………………………………..115

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Ellie Kurttz, Hitomi Manaka in Ninagawa Company’s Titus

Andronicus.............................................................................................................115

Fig. 2. Tom Holte, Image from Titus Andronicus, Royal Shakespeare

Company………………………………………………………………………….115

Fig. 3. Manuel Harlan, Image from King Lear, Royal Shakespeare Company… 116

Fig. 4. Donald Cooper, Image from King Lear, Peter Hall Company…………...116

Fig. 5. Image from Waiting for Godot………………………………………….. 117

Fig. 6. Dana Adams, Image from Waiting for Godot, Waterfront Theatre…….. 117

Fig. 7. John Haynes, Image from Happy Days…………………………………. 118

Fig. 8. Kirk Markley, Image from Happy Days, Infernal Bridegroom

Productions………………………………………………………………………. 118

Fig. 9. Stage design model for Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Villanova

Theatre…………………………………………………………………………… 119

Fig. 10. Image from Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Villanova Theater……….. 119

Fig. 11. Image from Endgame, Phoenix Theatre………………………………....120

Fig. 12. Image from Endgame, Phoenix Theatre…………………………………120

Fig. 13. Donald Cooper, Image from Edward Bond’s Saved, The Royal Court

Theatre…………………………………………………………………………….121

Fig. 14. Catherine Ashmore, Image from Bond’s Lear, Sheffield’s Crucible

Theatre…………………………………………………………………………….121

Fig. 15. Image from Bond’s Lear, The Royal Court Theatre…………………….122

Fig. 16. Image from Penetrator, The American Place Theatre…………………..123

Fig. 17. Image from Penetrator…………………………………………………..124

1

INTRODUCTION

Violence itself is hardly new. The Greeks, Romans, Seneca, Kyd, Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus, Webster – all have numerous murders, mutilations, and rapes.1

Sanja Nikcevic makes such a comment in her article “British Brutalism, the

‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director”, while she is criticising the

new born drama in Britain in 1990s2. Her words also reveal the aim of this study

on the use of violence and pain in contemporary British drama, for neither

violence, nor pain is a new theme in theatre.

Since the drama of the Ancient Greeks, plays include events or scenes of

violence, comprising torture, rape scenes, and demonstrate the physical or

psychological suffering derived from these factors. However, depending on the

period, conditions and the tradition of theatre change the use of violence and

suffering on stage.

Aristotle, the forefather of drama theory, in his Poetics, divides the plot of a

play into three, and the last part is the “Scene of Suffering”:

Two parts, then, of the Plot-Reversal of the Situation and Recognition- turn upon surprises. A third part is the Scene of Suffering. The Scene of Suffering is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like. 3

In fact, the Greek tragedy is based upon the sufferings of the main characters,

noble men fall from power, their situations change from good to bad, and their

sufferings also include the killing of a person “near or dear”4 and Aristotle adds

that,

If an enemy kills an enemy, there is nothing to excite pity either in the actor the intention - except so far as the suffering in itself is pitiful.5

1 Sanja Nikcevic, “British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director”, National Theatre Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, August 2005, p. 263. 2 The new born drama is “In-yer-face” which is studied in the last chapter of this study. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by. S. H. Butcher, Mineola, Dover Publications Inc., 1997, p. 21. 4 ibid. , p. 25. 5 ibid. , p. 25.

2

According to him, the plot should excite pity in the audience, and this can be

achieved by the use of violence; murdering a relative consciously or without

knowing. However, he clearly forbids the usage of anything irrational in the plot of

tragedy:

Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy.6

Thus the irrational use of violence is also excluded from the plot; everything in a

tragedy should be rational.

However, Plato banishes the art of poetry and drama from his utopia. In the

tenth part of The Republic he talks about the negative effects of poetry and drama

on the audience. These arts reveal our emotions which we “forcibly restrain”7:

[I]t represents sex and anger, and other desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany all our actions. It waters them when they ought to be left to wither, and makes them control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them.8

Yet for Aristotle, this is why the public should see the plays; people should

confront with their emotions through the help of the on stage actions which cause

fear, pity, or grief because the audience experiences what may befall upon them or

what they have already suffered and repressed. Thus, this confrontation leads to

catharsis9 which is the release of these excessive feelings. Terry Eagleton in Sweet

Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, remarks the necessity of catharsis for the state

as well as for Aristotle:

Aristotle’s ingenious riposte to this censure is the doctrine of catharsis, which accepts Plato’s premises while denying his conclusion. Tragedy can perform the pleasurable, politically valuable service of draining off an excess

6 ibid., pp. 28-9. 7 Plato, The Republic, trans. by Desmond Lee, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2003, p. 350. 8 ibid., p. 350. 9 Catharsis: A strong emotional reaction often due to sudden insight of the nature and causes of deeply hidden painful memories. An episode of emotional release and discharge of tension associated with bringing into conscious recollection previously repressed or unpleasant experiences. Raymond J. Corsini, “Catharsis”, The Dictionary of Psychology, Philadelphia, Brunner/Mazel, 1999, p. 145.

3

of enfeebling emotions such as pity and fear, thus providing a kind of public therapy for those of the citizenry in danger of emotional flabbiness.10

The confrontation with the emotions which lie deep inside, the excessive feelings

that root from the on stage actions are necessary for the audience, because, as

Eagleton also indicates these confrontations have the same affect as therapy.

However they should render just as long as the running time of a play: when the

play ends the audience should leave the theatre in his/her natural state relieved

from these feelings; as Eagleton also points out “Aristotle holds that we should

leave them behind us as we exit.”11

The excitement of deeper emotions by the demonstration of misfortunate

events, misunderstandings, scenes of violence and suffering, and the desire to make

the audience confront with the incidents that can happen to anyone are the heritage

that the tragedy has kept on afterwards. For example, for the on stage

demonstration of violence which causes pity and fear, one should look at the

revenge tragedy and the after traditions. The revenge tragedy highlights the

violence blending it with anger, grief and ethics for the main plot of these plays are

centred upon vengeance itself:

Vengeance offers the writer a compelling mix of ingredients: strong situations shaped by violence; ethical issues for debate; a volatile, emotive mixture of loss and agitated grievance. 12

Yet, the violence used in the revenge tragedy is a righteous one according to the

plot, thus keeps up with Aristotle’s idea of the rational. Revenge is a right that the

avenger gains through the actions of the other person. Hence, rather than being

“sadistic violence”13 it is a way to establish the order again:

‘Revenge’ as Byron’s Faliero says, is ‘not an impulse of mere anger’, it is virtue by reflection’. The avenger reflects upon what has been done in order to reflect what has been done. His killings are distinguished from common murder

10 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003, p.153. 11 ibid., p. 154. 12 John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, Oxford, Oxford University Pres, 1996, p. 3. 13 ibid., p. viii.

4

by the sign, the evidence, of their fittingness. Hence the impulse to display, where the murderer’s urge is to conceal.14

So the violence of the revenge tragedy is far from being sadistic. The aim is to

undo what is done by repeating the same action, just the avenger and the avenged

change places. Thus the avenger is also able to find an equivalent for his suffering,

because by reflecting what has been done, he also reflects what has been suffered.

Everything the avenger has experienced at first hand, finds its equivalent which

also concords with the Bible:

The injunction, ‘life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe’ (Exodus 21: 23-5) was designed to set limits to violence.15

Shakespearean Tragedy also takes on the same theme of “eye for eye,” like we see

in Titus Andronicus16. The scenes of violence were acted out on stage in the

Elizabethan Age and the metaphysical sufferings of characters are also brought on

stage with the use of symbols. Gloucester’s eyes are gorged out on the stage in

King Lear17, and King Lear’s metaphysical anguish that derives from the situation

he led himself into is demonstrated in the storm scene. Othello strangles his wife

on the stage in Othello. Lavinia is raped by Demetrius and Chiron, and to disable

her from telling what has happened, her tongue and hands are cut in Titus

Andronicus. Like the ancient tradition of tragedy in Shakespeare’s tragedies, too,

the mighty fall from power, the happiness of the past turns into suffering for the

noblemen as Larry A. Brown points out:

Shakespeare enriched the stage with some of its most fascinating and enduring characters. In his plays tragedy falls on someone of high status, larger than life, not an ordinary person slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, or petty problems. The suffering and calamity are exceptional, contrasting with previous happiness or glory.18

14 ibid., pp. 16-7. 15 ibid. , p. 22. 16 Figures 1&2. 17 Figures 3&4. 18 Larry A. Brown, “Tragedy After Aristotle”, http://larryavisbrown.homestead.com/Tragedy_after_Aristotle.html, 07.05.2008.

5

The subject is again what befalls powerful men and how miserable they become

because, Shakespearean Tragedy, too, carries the aim of giving a lesson to the

audience, especially to the nobility:

Renaissance critics thought tragedy should serve as an example of the fall of great princes; plays acted as warnings to present rulers not to give themselves over to vice, injustice, or ambition, or else they might meet the same fate. In addition, critics defined tragedy in terms of protagonist’s moral flaw.19

However, what separates Shakespearean tragedy from Greek tragedy is the change

in the role of the protagonist in the plot. In Greek tragedy, the tragic happens

because of the external forces (like gods) that work upon the protagonist, whereas,

in the Shakespearean version; the reason is the tragic flow of the protagonist

himself. What befalls the protagonist derives from his own actions:

Shakespearean tragedy derives mostly from the protagonist’s own actions, not performed in ignorance or as casual mistakes, but deeds characteristic to his or her nature. The main interest lies more with the character’s internal conflict than any external opposition.20

The trigger for what befalls the protagonist lies in his own responsibility and

this draws tragedy to more personal subjects in the later trends. The violence,

aggression and personal suffering are always subjects of drama, even at the end

of the nineteenth century. Ibsen makes his character, Hedda Gabler commit

suicide with a rifle because she is no longer able to bear the heaviness of her

past actions and her present life, which cause her to suffer inwardly. At the

beginning of the twentieth century, the trauma of the Great War is reflected

upon the works of drama. The psychology of war atmosphere is reflected as the

individual anguish. Yet, until the Second World War violence was only used as

a tool in the plays to complete the flow of the plot whereas the suffering was

both a consequence of being physically hurt and/or a metaphysical pain.

However, in this study I purport to explore the change of the use of

violence and pain in drama in the second half of the twentieth century. Three

19 ibid. 20 ibid.

6

consecutive plays; Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Edward Bond’s Lear, and

Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator, all of which are written after the Second World

War are the core of this study. Taking into consideration that all the history of

theatre includes violence and suffering, and the subject of theatre is human beings,

it tells more about the human nature and her/his development according to social,

political and historical events. As Neil L. Whitehead suggests,

To be violent is clearly a capability we all possess, but why we should choose to be violent, or how we can be induced to act violently, will obviously differ culturally and historically.21

Thus, the use of violence and pain in drama also changes according to history.

What changes in the drama of the second half of the twentieth century is the

change of individual’s standing in life and her/his reaction to what is going on

around her/him. The first half of the twentieth century had seen two great wars, and

continued to witness wars around the world, also the oppressive and totalitarian

regimes that dehumanize the human beings. Hannah Arendt, as a political theorist,

comments upon the historical background of the twentieth century:

[T]he twentieth century, which has become indeed, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator.22

Set in such a background, contrary to their predecessors, the playwrights of the

twentieth century in the second half, created plays that carry the symbols of the

war time psychology, trauma and its dark atmosphere. Each of the chosen plays

here shows closeness to its historical background: Endgame gives the hints that it

is written after the Holocaust, as Lear’s plot reflects the times of distress between

the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R., the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union and the

existence of the Berlin Wall. There is the existence of the Gulf War in the

background of the daily lives of Penetrator’s characters. In these plays, violence

becomes a means of communication as well as a way of torturing the other and

21 Neil L. Whitehead (editor), Violence, Oxford, James Curry Publishers, 2004, p. 56. 22 Hannah Arendt, On Violence, Florida, Harvest Book, 1970, p. 3.

7

violence can be classified as verbal, physical and psychological when these plays

are studied. Jeanette R. Malkin studies the verbal violence in contemporary drama

in her Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard,

and points out that:

The group of postwar plays studied here differ, however, in their elevation of language to the central action, and actor; in their pessimistic vision of man’s ability to remain free and humane in the face of verbal coercion; and in their warning that man has become a prisoner of his speech. The violent action of language is directed both against the audience and against the characters.23

In the plays chosen in this study, too, the same idea is recurrent. In each play

verbal violence is dominant and it works upon both on the characters and on the

audience. In the old traditions while language had the mission to deliver the

message of the play to the audience, in the second half of the twentieth century the

use of language goes beyond this aim and becomes dominant to the play.

Furthermore, the language gets more and more violent comprising insults and

swearing especially in “in-yer-face”. Yet the common denominator of these plays

is physical and psychological violence along with the verbal violence. Though

physical violence is generally seen as the outcome of suppressed feelings or

elongated aggression and directly acted out on the stage, psychological violence is

more complex. Pierre Bourdieu in his book Masculine Domination talks of

“symbolic violence” as follows:

[T]aking ‘symbolic’ in one of its commonest senses, people sometimes assume that to emphasize symbolic violence is to minimize the role of physical violence… [U]nderstanding ‘symbolic’ as the opposite of ‘real, actual’, people suppose that symbolic violence is a purely ‘spiritual’ violence which ultimately has no real effects. 24

Symbolic violence does not shadow the existence of physical violence. Contrary to

the beliefs, it has real effects, yet it is not visible like physical violence. Though it

reveals itself in the daily actions and renders unconsciously it is so much effective

23 Jeanette R. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 1. 24 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. by Richard Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p. 34.

8

on the public and the individual. For Bourdieu those who are subjected to symbolic

violence cannot realize this situation because it becomes natural:

The dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making them appear as natural. This can lead to a kind of systematic self-depreciation, even self-denigration […] 25

Being unaware of the violence of the system that seems to be natural, those who

are subjected to violence begin to believe that they themselves are defected.

Bourdieu, covering the subject of symbolic violence in Masculine Domination

shows how it works upon the females in patriarchal systems, and shows the

masculine domination over women (the dominated) through the use of symbolic

violence. However, symbolic violence is existent in every system and works upon

every individual. In the context of this study symbolic violence also means

psychological violence. I also place the use of décor in these plays under this

category because the choice of décor is also a way to show the violence on stage.

As again in Bourdieu’s thinking, violence pervades everything, it is just invisible.

And anything that causes suffering in the characters, yet is not physically apparent

is here taken as the symbolic/psychological violence.

Another important similarity in these plays is the use of violence as a tool

of communication:

Another feature of the existing literature is that “violence” is often referenced as an immediate interpersonal relationship, leading to an emphasis on the phenomenological experience of violence by victim and perpetrator. This focus on the interpersonal therefore tends to exclude not only the structuring factors of society, culture, and history but ipso facto the whole domain of warfare and military emphasis on depersonalization of “the enemy.”26

Hamm’s making others suffer more in Endgame is a way to tell them that nothing

is going to be better; Lear’s insistence on shooting the Third Worker is a message

he tries to give to his people as well as to his daughters; that he is still the one who

is in power. And what we see in Penetrator is the direct representation of the

25 ibid., p. 35. 26 Whitehead, op. cit., p. 56.

9

transformation of language’s aim; verbal violence becomes a way of daily

communication. In these plays, violence is used as a means of communication but

also as to dehumanize “the other”, which leads to suffering for both parties. Thus,

Freud’s classification of suffering, which talks about the three levels of suffering,

also coincides with these plays:

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere.27

So, Freud’s classification of suffering draws a connection between the levels of

violence; suffering can also be classified as physical, and psychological:

According to Cassell, suffering can be defined as a state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the person, that is, any aspect of the person – physical, social, psychological or existential.28

Though Freud’s classification seems to refer to mainly physical suffering, they

also refer to the psychological suffering which is also named mental suffering. In

each play chosen for this study, the suffering of the characters is about the pain that

derives from their existence because it brings forth responsibilities and questions

about life. For the existentialist psychiatrist and writer Irvin D. Yalom existential

suffering comprises four reasons:

1. Freedom, which means that man must always choose. Every choice implies a responsibility and creates anxiety. Unethical choices made earlier in life may result in existential guilt and in a need of reconciliation.

2. The question of meaning and meaninglessness, where, e.g., relationships, spirituality, and even religion may (but do not have to) give meaning.

27 Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, New York, W. W. Norton, 1961, p. 24. 28 Peter Strang, et. al., “Existential Pain – An Entity, a Provocation, or a Challenge?”, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, Vol. 27, No. 3, March 2004, p. 242.

10

3. Existential isolation, which refers to the fact that in certain questions, one can feel alone – even in the company of others – particularly prior to one’s own death or in relation to (an absent) God.

4. Death, which is the source of a universal anxiety but also reflects life and makes the remaining life more intense and authentic.29

Especially in Endgame, we can see that characters are also going through

existential suffering. It is impossible to make choices or to carry the burden of the

choices that had been made in the past, the fear of or yearning for death, the non-

existence of God or any religious beliefs make each character suffer more in these

plays.

The important commonality in these plays is the problem of violence and

pain’s being dominant to the whole plot. It is even a means of communication

between the characters. Rather than violence as a part of the plot, violence and

aggression become the main subject of the plays, and the characters suffer both

physically and psychologically throughout the play.

To explore the use of violence and pain in these contemporary plays along

with the ideas of Freud on suffering and suppressing aggression, Girard’s,

Bourdieu’s ideas on violence, and mostly the criticisms of Christopher Innes,

Martin Esslin, Aleks Sierz on the chosen plays are used. I attempt to reach an

understanding of how the violence and suffering get more and more visible in each

play, and how the use of them and their effects develop or change in these

consecutive plays.

29 ibid., p. 243. (This classification is summarized in the article from Irvin D. Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy.)

11

1. AGGRESSION AND SUFFERING IN A WORLD OF

DESOLATION: SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME

1.1. The Rise of the Theatre of the Absurd

The human situation in a world of shattered beliefs1

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by the two world wars

that took place in the first half of the century. The Second World War arose only

twenty-one years after the Great War, and continued for six years. For those who

witnessed the Great War, the emergence of another world war, created a problem

of distrust and trauma. Throughout the Second World War over seventy million

people were killed2. Before the break of the Second World War, Poland was

threatened by Germany while Romania and Greece were threatened by Italy. And

in 1939 “Germany attacked Poland.”3 What made the Second World War different

and more problematic than the First World War or the other wars in history was its

being a war declared on civilians. The war started with the invasion of Poland yet

Nazi Germany declared war also on European Jews and other people who were not

desired in Europe. This was of course not a desire to fight with them but to kill

them or to keep them alive just as long as they were useful economically4. So, the

so-called ‘undesired’ civilians were taken to concentration camps or the labour

camps. On the other hemisphere, with the United States’ participation in the war,

1 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of The Absurd, , New York, Vintage Books2004, p. 23. 2 Robert Alexander Clarke Parker, The Second World War: A Short History, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 281-305. 3 Paul Preston, “The Great Civil War”, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, ed. by T. C. W. Blanning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 176-177. 4 Victor Rothwell, War Aims in the Second World War: The War Aims of the Major Belligerents, 1939-45, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 22. “German war aims in the Second World War were uncompromisingly ethnocentric, and were characterised by immeasurable callousness and cruelty. At a conference on policy in conquered Soviet territory in July 1941 Hitler ruled that: ‘Our guiding principle must be that these peoples have but one justification for existence – to be of use to us economically.’ Exactly a year later, in July 1942, Martin Bormann drew up a list of ‘principles for the government of the Eastern Territories’ based on instructions from Hitler. One of these was that ‘Slavs’ who were not working for Germany should die.”

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this holocaust took another turn: on the sixth of August in 1945, the US Army

dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima5, and on the ninth of the same month they

dropped another one on Nagasaki6 and the war was over.

England, which was geographically away from the battle field but was a

part of the Allies in World War II, had some dispositions at homeland. As

European Jews were being taken to the concentration camps, in England, although

it seemed that normal life was going on, people started to live in prefabs covered

with earth and in the tube for sheltering, and the gas masks were a part of daily

life7. The impact of two great wars within the space of fifty-years was traumatic for

those who lived in the second half of the twentieth century. All the experience,

especially the war’s taking a boundless and merciless shape created distrust and

unrest in all countries. The belief in God and the belief in human being’s central

position were lost after the Second World War.

It was right after the war when the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd begun

to emerge. Absurd theatre was a term used for the playwrights of the 1950s8 and it

was a trend that included playwrights of Europe and England. It is important that

the theatre of the Absurd refers to the time after the Second World War, and thus it

is closely connected to the Post-war conflict. As Martin Esslin describes it, Absurd

theatre’s

hallmark is its sense that the certain attitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war.9

The plays of the Absurd were set in this shattered world, chaos and a feeling of the

loss of all things past were what remained after the two great wars. The plays were

5 Spencer Tucker, P. M. Roberts, “Bombing of Hiroshima”, Encyclopedia of World War II: A Political, Social and Military History, California, ABC-CLIO, 2005, p. 680. 6 ibid., “Bombing of Nagasaki”, p. 1043. 7 Nick Yapp, The British Millennium, Köln, Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2000, pp. 849-51. 8 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, revised by C. E. Preston, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 1999, p. 910. 9 Martin Esslin. op. cit., p. 23.

13

different from the conventional plays in the sense that they lack the traditional idea

of plot, speech and characters.

Absurd Theatre’s idea of the character who is absurd for s/he has no

connection with her/his surroundings, and there is no obvious coherence or

meaning in what s/he says, create the absurd on stage. This somewhat funny

character recalls the old idea of “homo absurdus”10. Yet, the absurdity of human

beings has gained another turn in the last century; it was no longer, a human

being’s absurd standing in the great design of the world or universe, the thought

emerged that the universe had no design at all. With the influence of Sartre and

Camus’s existentialism, the meaning of absurdity begun to refer to the detached

human being in a godless world. The disbelief in the existence of god, loss of the

belief that man has a purpose in life and the idea that s/he has no connection with

the universe made the question of the meaning of existence arise. When seen in

this perspective, it was as if the human being had lost the main reason of survival,

and there was no obvious meaning in living at all. Yet what the existentialist

thinkers suggested was not completely in that direction. Sartre introduced the idea

of the man who is in the mud11 and not aware of this fact, but, it is anguish that

awaits him when he becomes aware of it:

In Sartre’s vision man is born into a kind of void […], a mud […] He has the liberty to remain in this mud and thus lead a passive, supine, acquiescent existence […] in a “semi-conscious” state and in which he is scarcely aware of himself. However, he may come out of his subjective, passive situation […], become increasingly aware of himself and, conceivably, experience angoisse (a species of metaphysical and moral anguish). If so, he would then have a sense of the absurdity of his predicament and suffer despair. The energy deriving from this awareness would enable him to ‘drag himself out of the mud’, and begin to exist. By exercising his power of choice he can give meaning to existence and the universe. 12

10 Cuddon, op. cit., p. 911. “Homo absurdus”: “Clearly, the idea that man is absurd is by no means new. An awareness of the essential absurdity of much human behaviour has been inherent in the work of many writers. Aristophanes, Plautus… Chaucer, Erasmus, Cervantes… - have all shown an acute feeling for man’s comicality…” 11 Sartre’s use of mud actually refers to the life itself which is lead as a daily routine and divorces human being from her/his individuality. 12 ibid., p. 295.

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The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset also refers to this necessity

of becoming aware of one’s existence:

The stone is given its existence, it need not fight for being what it is – a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavourable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. This he has to queer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically.13

Ortega sees existence as something that is outside the reality of the human being,

and it can only be attained if it is striven for. As for him, human beings are

captured in a programme of life which they think to be their very existence but it

has no connection with the reality; it only creates an illusion of existence, and

causes more problems for the individual:

Man invents for himself a program of life, a static form of being, that gives a satisfactory answer to the difficulties posed for him by circumstance. He essays this form of life, attempts to realize this imaginary character he has resolved to be […] he comes to believe deeply that his character is his real being. But meanwhile the experience has made apparent the shortcomings and limitations of the said program of life. It does not solve all the difficulties, and it creates new ones of its own.14

Ortega’s thoughts on human beings’ illusion of her/his real being which is indeed a

vicious circle, brings into mind another existentialist thinker that fuelled the ideas

of the Absurd. Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus expresses his ideas on the

feeling of absurdity and the situation of the absurd man. He also underlines this

vicious circle of the everyday programme:

It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ‘Begins’ – this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens

13 José Ortega y Gasset, “Man Has No Nature”, Trans. by H. Weyl, E. Clark, W. Atkinson. Ed. by Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 1975, pp. 153-154. (“Man Has No Nature” is originally an essay in History as System and Other Philosophy Essays from the same author.) 14 ibid., p. 156.

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consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. 15

Camus’s ideas on mechanical life and the possibility of an awakening are close to

Ortega’s ideas, but they also recall Sartre’s idea of the human being who is in mud

and begins to suffer when he realizes that he is in it. Camus’s idea of the human

being who is just a part of her/his daily routine coincides with Ortega’s individual

“who invents for himself a program of life”.16 And the weariness, the question

‘why’ and the awakening that follow coincide with Sartre’s views of realization of

being in the mud. To all these existentialist thinkers, the routine to which the

human being adapts her/himself is just an illusion, to become aware of this fact

creates a weariness or anguish, and it is the choice of the human being to stay in

this vicious circle or to get out of it.

The plays of the Absurd theatre mainly focus on this kind of becoming

aware of oneself, but the problem is that the characters cannot find a way out of

this mud, and suffer because of being unable to do so, because, as Sartre indicates,

this awareness creates suffering. Yet also, the realization of this fact, or, as Camus

puts it, “the consciousness” leaves the individual with the problem of existence, the

dissolution of the illusion makes clear that “man’s being and nature’s being do not

fully coincide.”17 Thus, s/he realizes the absurdity of her/his situation. As Camus

also suggests:

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.18

15 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. by Justin O’Brian, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2005, pp. 11-2. 16 Ortega y Gassel, op. cit., p. 156. 17 ibid. p. 154. 18 Camus, op. cit., pp. 4-5. (Martin Esslin also makes reference to the same paragraph in his The Theatre of the Absurd.)

16

It is easy to see that in the plays of the Absurd theatre, characters have no hope for

the future; they even cannot achieve getting out of their present situation. What

Camus indicates in his definition of “the feeling of Absurdity,” can be seen in these

plays too, for the characters have no connection with their settings, their memories

are shattered, they have no hope and what they go through on the stage is the very

absurdity of their existence. These characters do not want to continue with the

same routine though they are unable to break it. One can even go further and say

that it is the unknown that awaits them outside this routine, so they are also

unwilling to get out of the illusionary routine of their lives. Their suffering also

stems from being in-between. For example, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for

Godot19, Vladimir and Estragon20 suffer from this situation of being in-between;

they wait for a figure whose identity is unknown to us and who does not appear in

both acts, Godot. They always want to leave but they cannot:

ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go? VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go. [They do not move.]21 […] VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go. [They do not move.]22

Though they want to leave they can never do so, because waiting has become their

only justification for existence though they do not know why they are waiting and

what would happen if Godot is ever to come. Nothing changes, everything repeats

itself.

Samuel Beckett in his Happy Days 23 makes a direct reference to Sartre’s

mud imagery. Winnie24, in the first act, is “embedded up to […] her waist”25 into a

19 Figures 5&6. 20 The two of the five characters in Samuel Beckett’s two act play Waiting for Godot, dated 1952. 21 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2006, p. 52. 22 ibid., p. 88. 23 Figures 7&8. 24 One of the two characters in Samuel Beckett’s two act play Happy Days dated 1961. 25 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, The Complete Dramatic Works, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2006, p. 138.

17

mound and in the second act she is “embedded up to (her) neck…”26 and she

cannot move her head. She does not refer to her being stuck up in the mound, she

does not even try to get out of it, and during the two acts she acts as if nothing is

abnormal on the stage. She thus represents the human being, who is stuck in the

mud, yet not aware of it or does not try to get out of it, and thus the suffering grows

continually.

Esslin underlines the idea of the absurd in the Absurd Theatre: “The

Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human

condition; it merely presents it in being – that is, in terms of concrete stage

images.” 27 This is what Beckett and other absurdist playwrights do in their plays.

They demonstrate the absurd man on stage. It is no longer a question of man’s

situation in the world and his striving for a better life. Everything is reduced to

being mechanical and meaningless, relationships between characters are devoid of

emotional ties and what reigns on the stage is aggression, suffering and depression.

As Laurence Kitchin also indicates, Absurd theatre is cut off from the traditional

drama with its disuse of conventional drama techniques:

If reality is meaningless, a circular progress by man from nothing to nothing in a universe with no God, then the classical forms of dramatic construction no longer apply. Action rising through complications to a climax can be discarded. So can character, a convention at variance with the facts of being. So can plot. Along with Aristotelian construction, out goes the epic, because you can’t have an epic hero dedicated to nothing. And whenever possible, we get rid of language, too. For, as is well known, language is a barrier to communication.28

The disuse of all the conventional techniques leads the way to a new technique, for

what the audience sees on the stage is more than the physical world of actions. It is

more about the individual, her/his suffering and her/his meaningless flow of life.

Though one can say that there is not much happening on the stage, all the words,

and the silences, every little act on stage incites the audience to contemplation.

Contrary to the pre-twentieth century plays, in which speech is used as a tool to

deliver the message of the main plot, in the Absurd theatre, there is no such plot;

26 ibid., p. 160. 27 Esslin, op. cit., p. 25. 28 Laurence Kitchin, Drama In the Sixties: Form and Interpretation, London, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1966, pp. 29-30.

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one can also suggest that everything repeats itself in the plays of the Absurd

Theatre. Every little act and word creates a symbol for the reader/audience.

Laurence Kitchin indicates that for the Theatre of the Absurd

[T]he true field of battle is inside us, in the unconscious. The Theatre of the Absurd attacks us below the threshold of consciousness, mainly by visual devices and by language in a state of fragmentations, in short, by a kind of intellectual clowning. 29

The great suffering during and after the two great wars, the shattered

beliefs, and the loss of meaning were the main cause of the Theatre of the Absurd,

for in these plays the individual continues her/his daily routine with a pain that s/he

carries like a burden. The background with which the character in no way

coincides is the basic subject: “The main concern of the Theatre of the Absurd is

with mankind in despair, with doomed individual, alone in Pascal’s illimitable

spaces and bitterly joking.”30 And again, as Kitchin indicates these playwrights31

experienced the war atmosphere, “[T]he dominant historical event, of course, is the

Second World War, a good deal of which can still be interpreted as ‘legal’

violence,”32 and it was impossible not to think that this experience influenced their

writing and the images they created in their plays.

The “‘legal’ violence” of the war, the change in the emotional ties between

people, the belief that the worse had been seen and everything is untrustable were

also represented on stage. The use of the oppressive atmosphere, the insoluble

course of the play, the speech that becomes violent, or the disturbing silence in the

plays of the Theatre of the Absurd reveals the effects of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre

of Cruelty on this trend: “Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet and other neo-

surrealist writers, (are) indebted in some cases to Artaud.”33

For Artaud; “the theatre must disturb the spectator profoundly, pierce his

heart and soul in such a way as to free unconscious repressions and oblige men to

29 ibid., p. 30. 30 ibid., p. 31. 31 The most important writers of the Theatre of the Absurd were Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet. 32 ibid., p.37. 33 ibid., p. 29.

19

view themselves as they really are.”34 What connects the Theatre of the Absurd

with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is the same use of stage devices to reach the

audience’s unconscious and to be able to make them conscious of what is going on

inside. Antonin Artaud in The Theater and Its Double explains this need by

making reference to the time he lived in: “In the anguished, catastrophic period we

live in, we feel an urgent need for a theatre (in) which events do not exceed, whose

resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times.”35

For the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd, the background was the

same, though theirs was not like Artaud’s need for a cruelty theatre that will

continually disturb the audience. Living in a world where “[E]verything that acts is

a cruelty”36 and everything that gives pain, every symbol in this trend’s plays can

turn into a sign of aggression and/or suffering. And this is the main concern of the

Theatre of the Absurd; the disharmony between the individual and his

surroundings, the incurable pain of the individual and the inextricable vicious

circles that human beings are unable to break. These all can lead to aggression and

suffering in the characters because of the oppression and tension that come out.

Absurdist playwrights’ characters such as Beckett’s are absurd characters because

– as Albert Camus suggests in The Myth of Sisyphus - they are like Sisyphus who

are bound to carry a rock to the top of the hill only to see it fall again. This burden

they carry is like an eternal punishment; it is also a burden that one continues to

carry on without knowing why. 37

34 Cuddon, op. cit., p.910-911. 35 Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre and Cruelty”, The Theater and Its Double, New York, Grove Press Inc., 1958, p. 84. 36 ibid., p. 85. 37 Camus, op. cit., pp. 115-120.

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1.2. Aggression and Suffering in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

We are closed in and the key is turned

On our uncertainty... 38

Endgame39 was first performed in 1957, twelve years after World War II

and what Beckett40 creates in this play is like the psychological remainder of

Eurocentric history with two world wars and what it left behind in the human

mind. In this dystopia both the stage which symbolizes the house and the outside

world represent death and all the characters are unable to live on their own and are

connected to each other through the ties of obligation and need. All the natural

relationships are diminished to hatred and anger. There is a continual rise both in

the suffering of the characters and their anger which are demonstrated by the use of

stage symbolism, the dialogues between characters and the main atmosphere of the

play. And though there is only one instance of physical violence41 in Endgame, the

play shows how aggression dominates the stage like a ghost, how violence

gradually gets visible on the stage, and how the suffering becomes more and more

unbearable.

The tools Beckett uses in this play – setting, characters, plot, and language

– all take us to the subject of aggression and suffering. The play opens with Clov

gazing at the décor covered with old sheets. He then removes the sheets and

reveals Hamm who is sitting on an armchair on castors and there are two ashbins

38 W.B. Yeats, “Mediations in Time of Civil War”, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2000, p. 173. 39 Figures 9, 10, 11, 12. 40 Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): “perhaps the one truly international figure in contemporary theatre. Self-exiled from Ireland, the roots of his drama in the Existentialism of Sartre and Camus, picking up on the Surrealism of Andre Breton or Roger Vitrac in the 1920s. There is also a link with Antonin Artaud’s collaborator in the 1930s who directed Beckett’s early plays […] And while many of his dramatic characters possess a recognizably Irish background and sometimes consciousness, Beckett consciously deals in universal themes, and […] avoids any specifically Irish locality or political theme […] He is […] very much a part of the twentieth-century British theatre – and indeed his work […] had as much if not more impact on the British dramatists, even than Brecht.” Quoted from: Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 6. 41 Clov hits Hamm in the head with the toy dog. (Samuel Beckett, Endgame, The Complete Dramatic Works, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2006, p. 129.)

21

touching each other which contain Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s invalid parents. They

live in a claustrophobic place which Hamm regards as a “refuge”, for the outside

world symbolizes “death” for them. They are short of all sources, and until Clov

sees a boy42 coming towards their refuge, it is suggested that they are the only

human beings alive in the world. Throughout the play Clov fulfills everything

Hamm asks of him, but he also questions himself for not refusing Hamm. Hamm,

on the other hand acts like a vindictive old man who is never happy about anything

and talking quite a lot, he refers to his old memories which reveal his cruelty

towards others. Hamm keeps his parents in ashbins, and curses them for

procreating him. Nagg and Nell, on the contrary, seem to have a more emotional

tie between them for they talk of old memories, and seem to care for each other.

Yet, all these characters suffer from something unnameable and any living thing is

met with great shock and wanted to be annihilated immediately. We never learn the

reason why they are stuck up in this place, and why a catastrophic atmosphere

reigns.

The three levels of violence – symbolic, verbal and physical – are existent

in Endgame: the first derives from the setting and the atmosphere of the play,

which suppresses both the characters and the audience and creates aggression, and

from the invisible rules of relationship between the characters like being in a

master/slave relationship. The second is the verbal violence, the tone of their

voices, the words they use for each other, and even the silences create and

demonstrate violence. The third is physical violence. In this case, it is not only the

physical attempt to hurt another that is suggested, but also all the physical actions

that create tension, aggression or even suffering either in the characters or the

audience. All these levels mingle with each other and work upon the audience.

Stemming from the levels of violence, there are also levels of suffering in

the text. When Freud’s classification of suffering is taken into consideration,

suffering also comes from three directions: from our own body, from the outside

world and from others.43 In Endgame, the characters suffer from their inabilities

which coincide with the first level of suffering in Freud’s classification. They also

42 We are never sure if there is really a boy outside or not. 43 See the quotation taken from Freud on page 9.

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suffer because of the extinguished earth outside which draws a link with the

suffering that comes from the external world. What Freud calls more painful is also

dominant in the text; for all the suffering comes from those people who are

enclosed within this “refuge” and need each other.

The symbolic violence which affects the psychology of the characters and

the audience firstly derives from Samuel Beckett’s use of disturbing elements

while creating the play’s atmosphere and décor, the setting of the stage is

claustrophobic44:

Bare interior.

Grey light.

Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn.

…covered with an old sheet, two ashbins.

Centre, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, HAMM.

Motionless by the door… CLOV.45

Beckett presents us with a bare interior; “two ashbins” are the living spaces for

Nagg and Nell. We also know that there is a kitchen which Clov calls “my

kitchen”46 and he always comes and goes between his kitchen and the stage. The

windows are high-up and the curtains are drawn, and even when Clov opens the

curtains nothing changes, because there is no sun light. The sky is “grey”, even

“light black”47. Even the fact that these living beings are covered with sheets as if

they were dead contributes to the heavy atmosphere of the play. As Nancy

Scheper-Hughes also indicates in her essay “Sacred Wounds: Making Sense of

Violence”, all these signs can be read as material signs of aggression:

Bourdieu finds aggression, domination, and violence in the least likely places--in the architecture of the home, in the tense exchange of gifts, in systems of kinship classification, in all the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu

44 See Martin Esslin, op. cit., p. 62 and Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 317. 45 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, The Complete Dramatic Works, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2006, p. 92. 46 ibid., p. 93. 47 ibid., p 107.

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suggests, is everywhere in social practice. It is "misrecognized" because its very familiarity renders it invisible.48

If we take into consideration that during World War II, the tube and prefabs

covered with earth were used as shelters, this stage design is very much

reminiscent of the wartime psychology. The characters try to keep up with the

daily routine; though in this stricken place, their suffering and aggression towards

each other grow everyday, they continue with their routine, Clov obeys Hamm’s

orders, Hamm continues with his story. Mária Minich Brewer indicates that,

[F]igured as mud and dust, light and dark, cold and rain, solitude and radical physical and psychic deprivation, the Beckettian world has more than a descriptive or incidental resemblance to a post-nuclear condition.49

This reminder of war time atmosphere created by the dimness again causes both in

the characters and in the audience a feeling of disturbance and of being trapped.

The slow motion of the play also adds up to the tension:

CLOV goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He

looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and

stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at

window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder,

carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back

curtain.. he gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for

ladder, carries it over[…] He gets down, takes one step towards window right,

goes back for the ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right,

gets up on it, looks out of window[…] he […] goes with ladder towards

ashbins, halts, turns, carries back ladder and sets it down under window right,

goes to ashbins, removes sheet covering them, folds it over his arm […] He

goes to HAMM, removes sheet covering him […]50

Drawing the curtains back, removing the sheets, all these actions are done slowly

and they take longer than they normally should. This slowness contributes to the

idea Clov puts forward by saying “[S]omething is taking its course.”51 It is

expected to happen until the end of the play but what is taking its course is not

48 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Sacred Wounds: Making Sense of Violence”, Theatre and Violence, Nancy Scheper, et. al., Tuscaloosa, Southeastern Theatre Conference, 1999, p. 10. 49 Mária Minich Brewer, “Samuel Beckett: Postmodern Narrative and the Nuclear Telos”, Boundary 2, Vol. 15, No. ½, Duke University Press, Autumn 1986- Winter 1987, pp. 153-170. 50 Beckett, op. cit., pp. 92-93. 51 ibid. , p. 98.

24

known by anyone, and this triviality adds up to the tension that rises through the

play.

As Beckett’s Kafkaesque style52 emphasizes, in this dim atmosphere, the

characters are under the control of something catastrophic which extinguished

everything outside, but kept them alive, but at the same time left them in a pain

which they want to end, yet are not able to. Out of a fear of loneliness and isolation

they stick together in order to continue their existence, yet they are unwilling to

keep up with the daily routine though they hesitate to end it.

In Endgame, the living space symbolizes limitedness and suppression.

Clov and Hamm are aware of the fact that there is no life outside and their own

will soon come to an end when they have run out of their stocks. When Hamm

wants to touch the walls he says “[O]ld wall! [Pause] Beyond is the…other hell.”53

Their living space is like a hell, and there lies the other hell outside. There is

suffering both inside and outside. They suggest that they are living in a waste land,

where seeds do not grow, where there is no longer any living nature. Hamm’s

confession about the people whom he could have helped but chose not to54, and the

silence of the sea “because there are no more navigators”55, all give clues about the

fact that they are disconnected from the rest of the living world of which non-

existence they are sure of. The other hell represents nature, and it is another factor

which makes human beings suffer, because, nature is also violent:

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There’s no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV: Then she hasn’t forgotten us.56

52 Cuddon, op. cit., “Kafkaesque”, p. 441. “Characteristic of the style, tone and attitudes of the writings of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), and especially the kind of nightmarish atmosphere which he was capable of creating through the pervasive menace of sinister, impersonal forces, the feeling of loss of identity, the evocation of guilt and fear, and the sense of evil that permeates the twisted and ‘absurd’ logic of ruling powers.” 53 Beckett, op. cit., p. 104. 54 ibid., p. 125. 55 ibid., p. 124. 56 ibid., p. 97.

25

Hamm’s saying “[N]ature has forgotten us” is a desire to explain the suffering they

are going through and their being alive whereas everyone else is dead. For Hamm,

they suffer because nature has forgotten them, if it has not they would be dead like

the others which would be the end of their suffering. Yet, as for Clov it did not

forget them but it merely does not exist anymore; the seeds do not come up, there

are no more waves, no more rain or sunshine. However, the reality that they are

still going through a change in a negative way like losing hair, teeth, and their

bloom etc., though it is just the consequence of getting old, this shows how nature

works negatively upon human beings. And just as the interior is claustrophobic, the

outside world is dark and symbolizes death. As Christopher Innes also suggests:

[T]he situation is even more static. Only one of the four is able to move; a claustrophobic interior replaces the empty landscape of Waiting for Godot; and there is no possible exit since outside ‘the earth is extinguished’. The action is again structured on analogies and repetitions.57

Thus we are presented with characters who are full of rage and pain as an outcome

of being suppressed both psychologically and physically.

The limitedness and suppression can also be gathered from the

impossibility of mobility; Nagg and Nell are not able to leave the ashbins, and

neither Clov nor Hamm are able to leave the house. The immobility also derives

from the inabilities of the characters which brings us to the second class of the

suffering, which comes from one’s own body: Nagg and Nell lost their legs in an

accident: “NAGG: When we crashed on our tandem and lost our shanks”58, and

they are gradually losing their sights and hearing:

NAGG: Can you see me? NELL: Hardly. And you? NAGG: What? NELL: Can you see me? NAGG: Hardly. […] NAGG: […]Our sight has failed. NELL: Yes. […] NAGG: Can you hear me?

57 Innes, op. cit., p. 317. 58 Beckett, op. cit., p. 100.

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NELL: Yes. And you? NAGG: Yes. [Pause] Our hearing hasn’t failed. NELL: Our what? NAGG: Our hearing.59

As for Clov and Hamm, Clov cannot sit, and Hamm is an invalid, he cannot stand

or walk, and he is also blind. Hamm needs Clov’s help to move his chair and he

gets information about what is going on by asking Clov. Clov represents all of

Hamm’s senses. As Martin Esslin also suggests, “Clov (is) performing the function

of the senses for him”60. The disabilities, the physical suffering and the

metaphysical anguish create frustration. The inability to move, to see, to lie, and

not being able to (physically) free oneself from other’s help causes pain and

frustration.

It is also strange that both Hamm and his parents have problems with their

legs, as if it was a family curse. We learn that Nagg and Nell lose their feet when

they crush on their tandem, but we never learn why Hamm is an invalid or how he

got blind. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant explain the significance of the foot

as something to do with the soul: “If the FOOT is a symbol of the soul, then a

defect in the foot or in the gait betrays a weakness in the soul.”61 As learned from

Nagg’s speech, Nagg and Nell were uncaring parents who did not like to listen to

their crying child and Hamm is a figure who treats people around him cruelly.

When we also refer to his blindness this spiritual disability can be taken further.

Blindness is seen as a symbol of two contradictory ideas:

For some, blindness means ignorance of the real state of things, denial of the obvious and hence madness, stupidity and irresponsibility. To others, the blind are those who ignore the deceitful shows of this world, and […] too deeply buried to be discerned by ordinary humanity. The blind share the godhead, they are inspired: poets, wonder-workers, ‘seers’. Such, in short, are the two aspects, blessed and cursed, positive and negative […] Old men are also depicted as blind: in their case blindness symbolizes the wisdom of old age. Prophets are usually blind as well, as if their eyes needed to be closed to physical light […] Their blindness was sometimes a punishment inflicted by the gods, when these seers had abused their gift of clairvoyance […]62

59 ibid., p. 99. 60 Esslin, op. cit., p. 66. 61 Jean Chevalier, et. al., “Lameness”, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. by John Buchanan-Brown, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, pp. 587. 62 Chevalier, op. cit., “Blindness”, pp. 99-100.

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Hamm’s blindness can be seen as a prophet’s or a poet’s blindness, especially

when we think of his “prophetic relish”63 while he is speaking to Clov or his

getting on with his story (about himself and a man who begged him) which he calls

“my chronicle”64. But it also very much coincides with his situation, that he wants

to be ignorant of the real state of things, he continually asks Clov about the

weather, the state of the outside world, or even what Clov does etc., and whatever

the answer is, he first does not believe in it and wants to see things the way he

desires to see:

HAMM: Did your seeds come up? CLOV: No. HAMM: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted? CLOV: They haven’t sprouted. HAMM: Perhaps it’s still early. CLOV: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted.

[Violently.] They’ll never sprout.65

His statements can be regarded as a sign of hope, that the seeds will come out one

day, yet, one of the most important instances that reveals his physical blindness’

being a sign of irresponsibility and the denial of the obvious is where he asks Clov

about Mother Pegg. At a time when everyone around them is dead, he asks if

Mother Pegg’s light is on:

HAMM: Is Mother Pegg’s light on? CLOV: Light? How could anyone’s light be on? HAMM: Extinguished! CLOV: Naturally it’s extinguished. If it’s not on its extinguished. HAMM: No, I mean Mother Pegg. CLOV: But naturally she’s extinguished!66 […] HAMM: [Violently] When! What’s happened! Use your head can’t you! What has happened? CLOV: What for Christ’s sake does it matter?

[…] HAMM: I don’t know. [Pause. CLOV turns towards HAMM.] CLOV: [Harshly.] When old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for her lamp and you told her to get out to hell, you knew what was happening then, no? [Pause.] You know what she died of, Mother Pegg? Of darkness.

63 Beckett, op. cit., p. 109. 64 ibid., p. 121. 65 ibid., p. 98. 66 ibid., p. 112.

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HAMM: [Feebly.] I hadn’t any CLOV: [As before.] Yes, you had.67

This speech between Clov and Hamm signifies Hamm’s blindness to his past

actions and to the present situation they are in. Though not in the general sense,

Hamm has his share in whatever happened around them. Thus, his blindness is also

a moral blindness to what happens around him. He actually likes to make people

suffer which shows that he uses both physical and symbolic violence and causes

physical and mental suffering in others. He never helps people while he has the

chance, he reduces his parents to an animal state, and he is the very reason why

Clov suffers every day. Hamm, who always asks “[A]m I right in the centre”68 and

feels uncomfortable if he is a little far from the centre, and as “the centre… can be

none other than God… at the invisible centre of being, unaffected by time or

space”69, he is very much like a god figure without his sight and ability to move.

His words give the feeling that he could put an end to all suffering: “Enough, it’s

time it ended […] Yes there it is, it is time it ended, yet I hesitate to… end.”70 He

sounds as if he had the power to end it, yet by hesitating to end, he shows that he

can also prolong the suffering. It is obvious from Hamm’s way of talking and his

past memories that he likes being in power and make others suffer for no

comprehensible reason. Yet Hamm’s story, his memories and his standing in the

house show that he is superior than Clov or the other people he mentions. Violence

is a tool which makes the one stronger who uses it, and although Hamm does not

use physical violence, he uses the weaknesses of other people who need him. The

example of Mother Pegg’s death caused by his not giving her oil, refers to his

cruelty and indifference to people around him. Oil in biblical terms means light,

and anointment;

The kings of Israel were anointed and the oil then endowed them with God-given authority, power and glory, the Lord being in any case regarded as the real power behind anointing. This is why the oil of the anointing was regarded

67 ibid., p. 128-9. 68 ibid., p. 93. 69 Chevalier, op. cit., “Centre”, p. 173. 70 Beckett, op. cit., p. 93.

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as a symbol of the Spirit of God […]. Because the person anointed has, as it were, been raised to the sphere of the godhead, no mortal should touch him.71

As the beholder of the oil, and being the only person who can supply others with

oil for light, Hamm is also above others, his is like a godly power in a world of

insufficiencies. Yet, if we consider the story of Christ in the Bible, Hamm’s uses

his power in the wrong way. In the Bible it says:

And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head. Thou givest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, are many, are forgiven; for she loved much… 72

Thus, it can be said that Hamm has abused his powers. Though he was asked to

share his oil he chose not to, and thus his blindness and lameness in both feet can

be seen as a punishment. Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents puts

forward the idea of private possession:

According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor.73

And the same is true for Hamm, whose possessions give him power and let him ill-

treat his neighbours. On the other hand, there is another attribution to oil in the

Bible which directly refers to oil for oil lamps; Christ talks about the wisdom of

watching of the good servants who expect Christ’s coming every moment. And

then we learn the story of the ten virgins: “Then shall the kingdom of heaven be

likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the

71 Chevalier, op. cit., “Oil”, p. 714. 72 The New Testament, St Luke, 7:44-47. 73 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, New York, W. W. Norton, 1961, p. 60.

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bridegroom.”74 Five of them were wise and took their lamps and oil, and the other

five were fools and forgot to take oil. At midnight the bridegroom comes and the

virgins use their lamps to meet him yet the foolish ones asked the wise ones oil for

their lamps:

[B]ut the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you; but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy yourselves. And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to marriage: and door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.75

Hamm’s refusal can be interpreted as his being was wise and ready like the five

wise virgins, so although the others were wasted he was saved. Yet, in a world of

desolation where beliefs are shattered, he still suffers. The doors of the kingdom of

heaven do not mean anything, there is no salvation anymore. As a consequence

they are not able to pray either:

HAMM: [...] Let us pray to God. CLOV: Again! NAGG: Me sugar-plum! HAMM: God first! [Pause.] Are you right? CLOV: [Resigned.] Off we go. HAMM: [To NAGG.] And you? NAGG: [Clasping his hands, closing his eyes, in a gabble.] Our Father

which art – HAMM: Silence! In silence! Where are your manners? [Pause.] Off we

go. [Attitudes of prayer. Silence. Abandoning his attitude, discouraged.] Well?

CLOV: [Abandoning his attitude.] What a hope! And you? HAMM: Sweet damn all [To NAGG.] And you? NAGG: Wait! [Pause. Abandoning his attitude.] Nothing doing! HAMM: The bastard! He doesn’t exist!76

Even their praying attitudes are mechanic; they try to pray to a god in whose

existence they do not believe.

Yet as the owner of everything Hamm is the one in power, and he sees his

power as a way to be in control and a tool to make others suffer. His relationship

with Clov is also based on the same conditions:

74 The New Testament, St. Matthew, 25:1. 75 The New Testament, St. Matthew, 25:9. 76 Beckett, op. cit., p. 119.

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HAMM: I’ve made you suffer too much. [Pause.] Haven’t I? CLOV: It’s not that.

HAMM: [Shocked.] I haven’t made you suffer too much? CLOV: Yes! HAMM: [Relieved.] Ah you gave me a fright!77

Hamm takes pleasure from other people’s sufferings and this reveals his violent

nature. The relationship between Hamm and Clov reminds the relationship

between the two parts of a binary opposition. In Derrida’s view these binary

opposites are structures culturally and while the one side of the opposition attains

positive meanings, the reverse is true for the other side. And though these

opposites are structured culturally they begin to be thought as natural oppositions.

Though it is never explicitly told in the text, even Clov, who was very young when

he came to serve Hamm, signifies the complete opposite of Hamm. And thus, Clov

and the others are in a way mirror images for him. Thus, by using Clov, Hamm

continually remembers his place in the world; he is the powerful one, he is the

oppressor, yet he is also the one who is unable to walk or see. Clov is the one to

open up the act by drawing the curtains and removing the old sheets, so it is

Hamm’s responsibility to end the game. Clov is the one who brings life to the stage

and he will be the one to take on its responsibilities. The very first words of him

also suggest this burden of him, he opens the play with the last words of Christ on

the cross78: “[F]inished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.”79

As for Christ, in the Bible it goes like; “he said, It is finished: and he bowed his

head, and gave up the ghost.”80 Christ says “it is finished” and all his suffering

ends, yet Clov who is like a Christ figure suffers every day and is subjected to

reasonless violence and punishment. He says “nearly finished, it must be nearly

finished,” and as the first words of the play, these show that the routine of his life

does not change, he continues to suffer. And Hamm, as it has been mentioned

before is like a God figure who hesitates to end the suffering, and he is the one who

controls Clov’s life. This life is like a punishment for Clov, thus, his Christ like

77 Beckett, op. cit., p. 95. 78 Christopher Innes also makes the same reference in Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, p. 310. 79 Beckett, op. cit., p. 93. 80 The New Testament, St John, 19:30.

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words are followed by his reaction: “I can’t be punished any more.”81 This idea of

punishment is expressed in Clov’s words: “[G]rain upon grain, one by one, and one

day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause] I can’t be

punished any more.”82 This is reminiscent of the punishment of Sisyphus: “Zeus…

condemned Sisyphus to Tartarus to pay for his lifelong impiety. For the rest of

eternity he had to roll a block of stone to the top of a hill only to see it roll back

again as it reached the crest.”83 Clov’s punishment is this impossible heap which

grows every day but never comes to an end, and all these references show that life

is itself a crucifixion for Clov, existence itself gives pain. Yet, Clov, as Mary

Bryden also indicates, got used to his suffering and punishment, because “he

envisages a kind of monitoring of his reactions to punishment; his learning to

‘suffer better’ might, he wonders, induce his tormentor(s) to grow weary of their

prey.”84

Clov is a patient figure who is trying to create an order. He is slow in

motion and does everything as if it is ritual. Whenever Hamm whistles to him,

Clov, like an obedient dog, goes to his place near Hamm’s chair. Even when he

gets really angry and questions why he obeys Hamm all the time, he never

completely stops his work in hand, yet his anger grows as the play continues. The

reason for his frustration is the feeling of obedience towards Hamm which obliges

him to obey his never-ending orders. He is under the pressure of trying to do

everything at one and the same time, and he hears Hamm’s voice which always

asks for something violently or angrily.

One of the reasons why Hamm acts aggressively towards Clov is the

difference between them which brings us back to the idea of binary oppositions.

The play gives the idea that Clov acts the part of a female by calling the kitchen

(which again according to these culturally structured terms represents the female

space) “my kitchen”, while Hamm is the male sitting in the centre of the stage,

dominating others. Hamm as he himself states, is also a father figure to Clov:

81 Beckett, op. cit., p. 93. 82 ibid., p. 93. 83 Arthur Cotterell et. al., “Sisyphus”, The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology, China, Hermes House, 1999, p. 83. 84 Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, London, Macmillan Press, 1998, p. 159.

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HAMM: […] It was I was a father for you. CLOV: Yes. [He looks at HAMM fixedly.] You were that to me. HAMM: My house a home for you. CLOV: Yes. [He looks about him.] This was that for me.85

As a father figure, having replaced his father’s authority, he does not get better than

his own father. He continually exploits Clov both physically and psychologically,

and we learn that he never cares for Clov’s desires or needs. When they are talking

about bicycle wheels, Hamm is amazed to learn that Clov does not have one, and

Clov reminds him how he begged him for a bicycle:

CLOV: When there were still bicycles I wept to have one. I crawled at your feet. You told me to get out to hell. Now there are none. 86

Clov’s begging recalls a child’s begging to his father, but, Hamm and Clov’s

relationship is a master-servant relationship. And it is a relationship between a

torturer and a tortured person as Hamm signifies the hammer and Clov the nail:

“(Hammer and Nail – French ‘clou’?) Hamm is the master, Clov the servant.

Hamm is selfish, sensuous, domineering.”87 As the master of the house Hamm

continually gives orders and he generally acts like a whimsical old man. Clov, on

the other hand, obeys all the orders, tries to tolerate his whimsical character and his

insults. Though he begins to question his loyalty by asking “[T]here is one thing

I’ll never understand… Why I always obey you. Can you explain that to me”88, he

never ceases to obey him. He also expects Hamm to explain why he cannot stop

obeying him. This relationship between Hamm and Clov brings us to Sartre’s view

on master-slave relationship. Bruce Baugh comments upon Sartre’s thoughts as

follows:

[…] the spirit of seriousness is an adaptation of powerless individuals (slaves) to an otherwise untenable situation. The belief in the objectivity of values is a “consequence of the desire to substitute a de jure existence for a de facto existence” […] on the part of the slave, and this desire is correlative to the slave regarding the master (to whom he owes his life) as a “man of divine right.” If he wants to live, the slave must recognize the master as an absolute, confusing the master’s desires with objective necessity […] [F]rom this point on, his

85 Beckett, op. cit., p. 110. 86 ibid., p. 96. 87 Esslin, op. cit., p.62. (See also: Innes, op. cit., p. 311.) 88 Beckett, op. cit., p. 129.

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existence has meaning only in terms of the master’s values and choices […] : the meaning of “having been born to serve; of being, in relation to the man of divine right, the man of divine duty” […]. Duty, then, is merely “the violence of others, only internalized” […]89

Clov’s inability to leave Hamm stems from the same idea. Clov does not know any

other way to survive, as he himself says he was too young to remember when he

first came to Hamm’s house. Hamm, who is both his master and a father figure for

him, give his life meaning, it is through Hamm that he obtains his identity and the

same is true for Hamm, too. And as there is no one alive around them, to choose

another way and to let go of each other is impossible:

HAMM: […] Why do you stay with me? CLOV: Why do you keep me? HAMM: There’s no one else. CLOV: There’s nowhere else.90

Yet, it is not easy to completely understand their relationship in terms of emotional

ties. They stay together because there is no other choice, but some instances also

show that there was once an emotional tie between them:

HAMM: You don’t love me. CLOV: No. HAMM: You loved me once. CLOV: Once!91

When we look at the relationship between Nagg and Nell we can see that Hamm

and Clov’s relationship is devoid of feelings. Nagg and Nell with their “very

white” faces constitute a pair, while Hamm and Clov constitute another with their

“very red” faces. Nagg and Nell with the colour symbolism of white signify the

death of old values which are thrown into waste bins, while Hamm and Clov

through the symbolism of red, represent what is alive and what is full of rage.92

89 Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 103. 90 Beckett, op. cit., p. 95. 91 ibid., p. 95. 92 See Chevalier, op. cit., p.1105 and p.792. “White: …The white of the west is the matt white of death, which absorbs the individual… It is the herald of absence … and the disappearance of consciousness…” (pp. 1105-6). “Red: Red, the colour of FIRE and of BLOOD and regarded

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This is why the memories Nagg tells do not mean anything in the present, they

belong to old times when human relations and memories signified sharing. When

Nagg tells memories from the times when he and Nell were engaged, they laugh

heartily and compared to what Hamm tells us their memories do not contain

cruelty and suffering. Nagg and Nell seem more emotional towards each other.

Nagg keeps a piece of his biscuit for Nell to eat and when Nagg knocks on the lid

of Nell’s bin, Nell comes out saying “What is it my pet… Time for love?” and

when they want to kiss each other yet “[T]heir heads strain towards each other,

fail to meet, fall apart again” it signifies the impossibility of a return to the past

and old values. On the other hand, there is the following conversation:

NELL: […] Have you anything else to say to me? NAGG: No. NELL: (…) Then I’ll leave you. NAGG: (…) I thought you were going to leave me. NELL: I am going to leave you.93

This conversation recalls Clov’s desire to leave Hamm, which draws a connection

between Clov and Nell. While Nell takes refuge in the ashbin by closing the lid,

Clov takes refuge in his kitchen, yet they are not able to leave. Even though they

say so, they both continue to listen to Hamm or Nagg telling stories or recalling old

memories. Clov also repeats what Nell says early in the play “Why this farce, day

after day?”94 Yet, contrary to Nell, when Hamm asks Clov to kiss him, he refuses,

as if to highlight the idea that emotional ties are no longer valid, and what

individuals feel for each other is aggression:

HAMM: Kiss me. [Pause.] Will you not kiss me? CLOV: No. HAMM: On the forehead. CLOV: I won’t kiss you anywhere. [Pause.] HAMM: [Holding out his hand.] Give me your hand at least. [Pause.]

Will you not give me your hand? CLOV: I won’t touch you.95

universally as the basic symbol of the life-principle, with its dazzling strength and power…” (p. 792). 93 Beckett, op. cit., p. 101. 94 ibid., p.99. (See p. 107 for Clov’s use of the same sentence.) 95 ibid., p. 125.

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This instance shows that there is no sign of affection between them, yet although it

is not very explicitly shown, Clov’s refusing to touch the hand that is held out

creates tension because it expresses emotional violence. This connection between

Nell and Clov creates another couple: Hamm and Nagg who are both story tellers,

and cruel father figures though their memories and views of life do not coincide

totally. Just as Nagg ignored his son, Hamm ignores his foster son. Nagg always

asks to be fed just as Hamm always orders some things to be done. It is also

strange that Clov and Hamm reveal a similar attitude to the father figures. Hamm

does not feel anything for his father:

(To Nagg) HAMM: [Exasperated.] Have you not finished? Will you never finish? [With sudden fury.] Will this never finish? [NAGG disappears into his

bin, closes the lid behind him…]96

And Clov does not feel anything for Hamm who was like a father to him, Clov’s

answers to Hamm also come “exasperated” and full of frustration:

HAMM: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? CLOV (lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name could there be on the horizon?97

(and) HAMM: (…) Clov! CLOV (turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What is it? […] HAMM: (…) Do you know what's happened? (Pause.) Clov! CLOV: (turning towards Hamm, exasperated): Do you want me to look at this muckheap, yes or no?98

At the same time, Hamm’s opening words “[C]an there be misery … loftier than

mine”99 highlight the idea that he, too, suffers. The most intense feeling in the play

is the feeling of suffering of the characters; the soliloquies of Hamm for instance,

show that he has suffered, and is still suffering from something unknown. Some

96 ibid., p. 103. 97 ibid., p. 107. 98 ibid., p. 128. 99 ibid., p. 91.

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instances in his speeches, though they show his cruelty, also indicate that he is

going through a pain which others are not yet aware of because of the physical pain

they are in, but Hamm knows that there is no cure to this pain because being alive

itself creates suffering:

HAMM: […] All those I might have helped… Helped! [Pause.] Saved! [Pause.] Saved! [Pause.] The place was crawling with them! [Pause.Violently.] Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that! [Pause.] Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself! […] Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!100

While mocking one of the Old Testament’s commandments “Love thy neighbour

as thyself”101 he indicates that as long as one is on earth there is no way to find a

way out from suffering, for everyone life is like a crucifixion. He uses these words

while he continues with his story:

HAMM: […] The man came crawling towards me, on his belly… Well, what ill wind blows you my way? He raised his face to me, black with mingled dirt and tears… already the sun was sinking down into the… down among the dead… It’s my little one, he said. Tsstss, a little one that’s bad… Where did he come from? He named the hole… That the place is still inhabited? No, no, not a soul, except himself and the child – assuming he existed…I lost patience. [Violently.] Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that! […] But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? […] Here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death, in peace and comfort.102

This story which he calls his “chronicle” shows that even when there were people

around him, death was already reigning, and the life of these people could not be

seen as existence because the conditions were so miserable. He also foreshadows

that everything will be worse, nothing will change for good, and that there is going

to be no solution. Even death would be better than living on this earth which is, as

Hamm calls it, worse than hell.

Hamm’s suffering also stems from his past, from his parents which he

carries like a burden. He also has some kind of hatred against them, he calls his

100 ibid., p. 125. 101 The Old Testament, Leviticus 19:18. 102 Beckett, op. cit., p. 117-8.

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father “[A]ccursed progenitor”103, he does not want to listen to them, he wants

them to suffer as much as he does. He keeps his mother and father in ashbins, and

reduces them to an animal state:

NAGG: Has he changed your sawdust? NELL: It isn’t sawdust… […] NELL: Now it’s sand. NAGG: Has he changed yours? NELL: No. NAGG: Nor mine. 104

And when they talk too much, he orders Clov to “bottle them,” he even goes

further and asks Clov to “screw down the lids.”105 This hatred against his parents

can be derived from his hatred for himself, for they are the very reason of his

existence. Thus, being his progenitor, his father is accursed and should suffer like

him. Yet another reason for this hatred stems from his problematic relationship

with his parents. When he was a child, Nagg himself tells him that they did not

care for him:

NAGG: […] Whom did you call when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark? … Me. We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace. [Pause.] I was asleep, as happy as a king, and you woke me up to have me listen to you… It wasn’t indispensable, you didn’t need me to listen to you. Besides I didn’t listen to you. 106

It could be possible that he thinks that they are responsible for all his sufferings,

and suppression of being ignored comes up as violence towards others, which also

reveals the desire of being listened to and to be considered as an important person

by the others. The child’s relationship with her/his parents is the most important

factor that contributes to the individual’s future personality. To be a neglected,

emotionally ignored child in the past is reflected as aggression and cruelty in the

present:

103 ibid., p. 96. 104 ibid., p. 100. 105 ibid., p. 103. 106 ibid., p. 119.

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A number of studies have identified an association between aggression and parental neglect and/or the experience of negative parenting styles. Both a strict punishing parenting style […] and a lack of emotional warmth and support […] have been cited as significant factors contributing to later aggressive and antisocial behavior… Lack of emotional warmth and support by parents may also be associated with aggressive behavior. The lack of affective ties between the adolescent and his or her parents entails the absence of ties with conventional society, which may in turn generate the development of deviant behavior.107

It is easy to see that Hamm’s aggression and view of the world and other people

mainly derive from his relationship with his parents. It’s not only the emotional

warmth and support that he lacks; he is also undesired by his parents. When he

asks Nagg “[W]hy did you engender me” Nagg answers:

NAGG: I didn’t know. HAMM: What? What didn’t you know? NAGG: That it’d be you.108

God-like Hamm’s situation is reminiscent of a figure from Greek mythology;

Hephaistos, the smith of gods. Hamm, lame in both feet and with the allusion to the

hammer in his name, is reminiscent of this Greek god who was the son of Zeus and

Hera:

Hephaistos was lame as a result of having interfered to a quarrel between his parents. So angry did Zeus become that he flung his son from the top of the Mount Olympus […] In other version, Hera tried to drown her imperfect child… A sequel to this tale has the smith god gain his revenge as a fully grown man by making a golden throne for his mother which was actually a trap.109

Hamm is also despised by his parents as seen in Nagg’s answer, and Hamm also

takes revenge from his parents by trapping them in ashbins which are more

insignificant than the gold throne. The father’s indifference and hatred for Hamm

can clearly be understood from his answer. This is why he does not like the idea of

love, for he is a person who was not loved by his parents. It is as if he is devoid of

107 Mark Paul Mattson, Neurobiology of Aggression: Understanding and Preventing Violence, New Jersey, Humana Press, 2003, p. 222. 108 Beckett, op. cit., p. 116. 109 Cotterell et. al., op. cit., p. 48.

40

all feelings, because when he asks Clov about Nell, he says “Go and see is she

dead.” Clov goes and looks into the bin and answers:

CLOV: Looks like it. […] HAMM: (…) and Nagg? […] CLOV: Doesn’t look like it. […] He’s crying. […] HAMM: Then he is living… Did you ever have an instant of happiness?110

The mother’s death has no importance for him, he quickly dismisses the subject.

And Nagg’s crying means that he is alive because they are condemned to live in a

world of pain and a world where everything is dead, even the feelings between

people. Even Hamm’s mother Nell tells Clov to “desert”111 him. The relationship

between Hamm and Clov is devoid of emotions, but it is not devoid of ties of

obligation and frustration. It is also sensed through the text that Clov’s tone is

gradually rising, as the tension rises. He gets angry with Hamm because of his

unending orders and questions which disturb his sense of order, because Hamm

always creates chaos even on a very simple subject and confuses Clov’s mind:

CLOV: I oiled them yesterday. HAMM: Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday! CLOV (violently): That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. (113)

For Hamm words do no longer mean what they did in the past and as it was

he who taught the words to Clov, the loss of meaning also affects him, and it

disturbs the feeling of order which in a sense substitutes to the desire of being safe.

Words are not trustable anymore they are also used as tools of violence. Verbal

violence, as mentioned before, is dominant to the text. Verbal violence creates

more tension besides creating mental suffering. In the 42-pages-play, words like

“violently, angrily, etc.” occur for 31 times in the parentheses that denote the tone 110 Beckett, op. cit., pp. 122-3. 111 ibid., p. 103.

41

of the speech and Hamm speaks “violently” or “angrily” 25 times, and 18 times he

addresses Clov in this manner. What is dominant in the text is the verbal violence;

the tone of the speaker, the words they use for each other show their aggression.

When Hamm whistles to Clov for the first time, and has him at his side he insults

him: “You pollute the air!”112 or he makes fun of him if he finds the opportunity:

CLOV: […] I’ll leave you, I have things to do. HAMM: In your kitchen? CLOV: Yes. HAMM: What, I’d like to know. CLOV: I look at the wall. HAMM: The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene mene? Naked bodies? CLOV: I see my light dying. HAMM: Your light dying! Listen to that! Well, it can die just as well here, your light.113

It is mostly Hamm who uses language to humiliate or torment the others, he giving

vent to his suppressed feelings, chooses to speak to Clov prophetically. He makes a

long speech containing dark omens in order to make Clov suffer emotionally:

HAMM: […] (Pause. With prophetic relish.) One day you'll be blind like me. You'll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me. (Pause.) One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat. (Pause.) You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more. (Pause.) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Pause.) Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on.114

112 ibid., p. 93. 113 ibid., p. 98. 114 ibid., pp. 109-10.

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These prophecies are at the same time a desire in Hamm to what he really wants

Clov to suffer from. Even the idea that another person will suffer like himself and

become a blind, lonely person, lightens his own suffering. Yet what he

foreshadows for Clov is also a summary of his past and present days, it is a speech

that he makes in order to escape from the pain. Thus, verbal violence also becomes

a way to escape suffering as well as making others suffer.

This kind of examples to what Hamm does to Clov is the instances that

arises the violent side of Clov. Yet what these characters feel for themselves is

incomprehensible, too. Though Clov says that he cannot be punished anymore, he

lets things take their course. Hamm always asks for his pain-killer, but he also

dreams of being killed because the consequence of both will be the end of

suffering: “Why don’t you kill me?”115 “If you must hit me, hit me with the axe…

or with the gaff…/ Put me in my coffin!”116

Killing him is also Clov’s own desire; he says “[I]f I could kill him I’d die

happy”117 and when Hamm asks “Why don’t you kill me?” he answers that he does

not “know the combination of the larder”118. It is also strange that it is Clov again

who commits the only violent act of the play by hitting Hamm with the toy dog,

and he is the one who acts out what Hamm desires to be done to his parents. Clov’s

background is also unknown by the audience, except the fact that he lost his father

at a very young age and Hamm was like a father to him. Yet as a person who had

been ignored when he was a child, it is easy to gather the idea that Hamm has also

ignored Clov, and it is easy to conclude from their present relationship that he has

suppressed him to the extent that he created a devotion that Clov himself cannot

explain.

Clov’s way of torturing Hamm is to threaten him with his leaving the place;

he says three times “I’ll leave you”119 in their conversation. Until it comes to the

point where Clov hits Hamm with the dog, all violence is verbal. Hamm always

115 ibid., p. 96. 116 ibid., p. 130. 117 ibid., p. 103. 118 ibid., p. 96. 119 ibid., pp. 110-11.

43

desires to know what is going on. Even when he asks whether it is light or dark he

asks this violently and some time later the answers back begin to come as violently

as his questions. And the climax is achieved when Hamm wants Clov to do several

things for him simultaneously. Clov having a small nervous attack hits him in the

head:

CLOV (looking): Quiet! HAMM (angrily): Give me the dog! (Clov drops the telescope, clasps his hands to his head. Pause. He gets down

precipitately, looks for the dog, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards Hamm and strikes him violently on the head with the dog.) CLOV: There's your dog for you. (The dog falls to the ground. Pause.) HAMM: He hit me! CLOV: You drive me mad, I'm mad!120

The continual suppression of his feelings gives way to a sudden explosion. As

Freud says “the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense become

the aggressive tendencies”121. The relationship between Hamm and Clov shows

that the suppression of feelings comes up as violence. As it is said before, Hamm’s

attitude to his parents also derives from a similar suppression which has its roots in

his childhood.

Physical violence is used in order to hurt another person, but within the

context of Endgame, it can also mean salvation if the act includes killing. Hamm

asks Clov to hit him with the gaff or the axe, so that his suffering may end. When

Clov sees a boy outside, he gets shocked because they do believe that there is life

outside. He takes the gaff with him when he goes to the door:

CLOV (dismayed): Looks like a small boy! HAMM (sarcastic): A small... boy! CLOV: I'll go and see. (He gets down, drops the telescope, goes towards door, turns.)

I'll take the gaff. (He looks for the gaff, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards door.) HAMM: No! (Clov halts.) CLOV: No? A potential procreator?122

120 ibid., pp. 129-30. 121 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. by Joan Riviere, London, L & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1927, p. 79. 122 Beckett, op. cit., pp. 130-31.

44

“A potential procreator” means the continuation of life. The desire to kill is the

desire to end the suffering, to kill him is to end all suffering by extinguishing all

life on the earth. His being a potential procreator is the possibility of the

continuation of the pain and violence, so the best choice is to kill him or let him die

if he really exists.

The very end recalls the idea of waste land, when Hamm tells him that he

does not need Clov anymore, and Clov agrees with it. Because as Esslin suggests

[I]f he leaves, Hamm must die, as Clov is the only one left who can feed him. But Clov also must die, as there is no one else left in the world, and Hamm’s store is the last remaining source of food. If Clov can muster the will power to leave, he will not only kill Hamm but commit suicide.123

Gone from Hamm, Clov will be dead, because there is no life out there, without

Clov, Hamm will be dead because there is no one to take care of him, and so their

sufferings will find an end just as Clov informs us at the very beginning by saying

“it is nearly finished.”124 They together do not diminish the pain and suffering they

go through; they just prolong their sufferings. What Beckett creates in Endgame is

a vicious circle of suffering and violence. The one and only way out from suffering

in this play is death, yet they hesitate to end the game. The main question is to be

aware of the fact that we are mortal beings. Should one continue suffering in the

emptiness and elongate the road to salvation or see the quick death as a solution?

The most important theme of Beckett’s plays in general is this problematic

relationship between his characters and the suffering and meaninglessness in the

routine of life which has become mechanical. In Endgame, too, Hamm and Clov

are aware of their situation, and their surroundings, yet they cannot change and do

not want to change what is already going on. They physically and mentally are in

pain and know that it is a never-ending process. The only solution they find is to let

go of each other, which would also show the silent acceptance of what is laid out

before them. Yet, at the end of the play nothing changes, they cannot achieve to

end the suffering, and cannot break the vicious circle, because when Hamm makes

123 Esslin, op. cit., p. 63. 124 Beckett, op. cit., p. 93.

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his last soliloquy, Clov “halts by the door and stands there, impassive and

motionless, his eyes fixed on HAMM, till the end”125 and Hamm “covers his face

with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless.”126 And the

play ends as it started, we never learn if Clov leaves or not, we just see him

standing where he was at the beginning of the play. As if to show that this vicious

circle of suffering and aggression will start from where it ended.

125 Beckett, op. cit., p. 133. 126 Beckett, op. cit., p. 134.

46

2. THE USE OF VIOLENCE AS A POLITICAL DEVICE,

THROUGH A MORE CRUEL SOCIETY: EDWARD BOND’S

LEAR

No year goes by without one or more wars occurring somewhere in the world, many of them savage civil wars.1

2.1. The Political Theatre

It had been twenty-five years since the Second World War was over, yet its

trauma had not been overcome in 1970s, which was also due to the events in the

1950s and 60s. Though the fear of a possible third war did not come true, the war

itself was epidemic and spread out towards nearly every country; wars, which were

mainly civil wars, were fought mainly in Africa, Asia and South America. Europe

was not a battlefield in these wars, yet France was fighting against Vietnam

between 1946-1954 and against Algeria between 1954-1962. It was not only

France but America was also at war with Vietnam (1964-1973). In 1970s there

were still wars in China, Vietnam, Indochina, Colombia, Korea, Kenya, Algeria,

South Africa, Guatemala, Iraq, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, Ireland which

continued in the seventies and some also continued through the eighties, and the

nineties2. There was also unrest between Soviet Union and the West. Joseph Stalin

who died in 1953, though he had his roots in Marxism3 was later not seen as

different from Hitler in his totalitarianism4. This led people to refuse the

totalitarian form of communism:

By the close of the century the tide finally turned against communist autocracy and dictatorship. The suffering and oppression all over the world in the twentieth century was much greater than it had been in the nineteenth…

1 J. A. S. Grenville, A History of the World from the 20th to the 21st Century, Oxon, Routledge, 2005, p. 10. 2 Piero Scaruffi, “Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century”, http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html, 08.06.2008. 3 Paul Dukes, “The Rise and Fall of the Big Three”, History Review, vol. 52, Gale Group, 2006, pp. 42-46. 4 Ian Thatcher, “Nazism and Stalinism”, History Review, Gale Group, 2003, pp. 8-12.

47

Western societies were spared the nightmare after the 1945 of a third world war, which more than once seemed possible, though they were not spared war itself. These wars, however, involved far greater sufferings to the peoples living in Asia, Africa and Middle East than to the West. 5

Though Europe spared itself from being the battlefield of these wars, the

cold war between USA and Soviet Union which begun with Churchill’s “Iron

Curtain” speech was enough to create distrust. The cold war begun in 1946, and

continued till 1990:

The Soviet-American cold war was a rhetorical war, one fought with words as weapons. But the cold war was more than threats by one nation hurled against another. The rhetoric created the consensus we call the cold war. When one begins studying its origins, one immediately concentrates on public statements: Stalin's "February Election" address, Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech, Truman's speech to a joint session of Congress in March 1947, Marshall's commencement address announcing the Marshall Plan, and on and on through major and minor statements by central figures in the rhetorical drama of the beginnings of the cold war.6

The cold war was more than unrest between two different nations; it was a desire

on both parts to gain power over other countries, and each saw itself being in the

right. This cold war continued for the second half of the twentieth century:

The Cold War had divided the most powerful nations in the world into opposing camps. The West saw itself as the “free world” and the East as the society of future, the people’s alliance of the communist world. They were competing for dominance in the rest of the world, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, where the West’s overwhelming influence was challenged by the East. The struggle dominated the second half of the twentieth century… Both sides piled up nuclear arsenals capable of destroying each other and much of the world, and there was no sure defence against all the incoming missiles. 7

However, the consequences of the Second World War and the events of post-war

times brought only suffering. In the Soviet Union under the government of Stalin a

great number of people suffered from forced labour, not only prisoners of war, but

also criminals and those found guilty of political offence were being sent to labour

5 Grenville, op. cit., p. 9. 6 Lynn Boyd Hinds, et. al., The Cold War As Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950, New York, Praeger Publishers, 1991, pp. 1-2. 7 Grenville, op. cit., p. 9.

48

camps, if they were not executed.8 Though industry was growing, there was a

decline in farming9. There was the danger of famine, yet, it was not only a threat to

USSR, but a threat for the world in general:

There are no accurate statistics relating to the people of the world who, since 1945, have been driven by fear, hunger or the hope of better opportunities to migrate… The more prosperous countries of the world continue to erect barriers against entry from the poor countries and stringently examine all those who seek asylum.10

However, in 1961 the construction of the Berlin Wall became a concrete symbol of

the Iron Curtain. It was constructed by the Eastern Bloc to prevent the migration of

people from the East to the West for better chances, and as Frederick Taylor’s

article suggests it was “a tangible symbol of the suppression of human rights by the

Eastern bloc.”11 While those from the Eastern bloc were not able to pass to the

West and any attempt ended up with death, it was not condemned to the West bloc

to pass to the East. And the wall separated the West from East for 28 years. It was

not until 1989 when the wall was pulled down that the Eastern bloc collapsed12.

All the events of the second half of the twentieth century, such as the Cold

War, the Vietnam War, the Berlin Wall, affected the whole world. All these events

created unrest and at the end protest in the public:

By 1968 enormous stresses had developed in almost every country. Protests moved away from the nonviolent tactics favored by Civil rights advocates to confrontations. Such patterns of protest and violence were symptomatic of deep-seated doubts about the validity of long-accepted conventions of behavior and traditional values (…).13

This unrest was reflected in theatre as well. In the late 1960s there was the

influence of Brecht in the political theatre. It was the distress of the second half of

8 R. W. Davies, “Forced Labour Under Stalin: The Archive Revelations”, New Left Review. Vol. A., no. 214, 1995, pp. 62-80. 9 Thatcher, op. cit., pp. 8-12. 10 Grenville, op. cit., p. 11. 11 Frederick Taylor, “The Berlin Wall: A Secret History”, History Today, vol. 57, no. 2, History Today Ltd., February 2007, p. 43. 12 Yosefa Loshitzky, “Constructing and Deconstructing the Wall”, CLIO, vol. 26, no. 3, Gale Group, 2002, p. 275. 13 Oscar G. Brockett, et. al., History of Theatre, New York, Allyn and Bacon, 2003, p. 509.

49

the twentieth century which actually created the trend or directed the playwrights

to write about social and political issues with a desire to protest against what was

going on around them. Though it was not possible to say that theatre can be devoid

of politics, the art which avoided being directly political was being replaced by the

plays which were concerned about social and political events:

The concern for aesthetic values was largely replaced by the demand that theatre serve as a weapon in exposing and fighting outmoded values and practices both political and civil. The focus increasingly centered around issues of gender, race, and class. 14

For the playwrights of the political theatre “all theatre (was) political”15. And many

of them followed the theatre of Bertolt Brecht who had died 15 years ago when

Edward Bond wrote his Lear (1971). Brecht’s theatre was mainly political though

he was not supporting the propaganda of politics in theatre, yet for him the

ordinary events that are displayed on stage cannot be considered as the outcome of

destiny or other forces, everything centred on the individual and is connected with

everything social and political. This idea criticizes the traditional tragedy in which

a noble person falls from his high standing and suffers because of knowingly or

unknowingly angering the gods or/and again for not conforming to the prophecies

of the oracles. Instead of these patterns, Brecht chooses to use characters from

daily life, whose “destinies” are in complete interaction with what goes around

them. As he himself indicates in one of his interviews:

Once I take that into consideration my plays are forced to deal with political matters. Thus when a family is ruined I don’t seek the reason in inexorable fate, in hereditary weaknesses or special characteristics – it isn’t only the exceptional families that get ruined – but try rather to establish how it could have been avoided by human action, how the external conditions could be altered; and that lands me back in politics again. I don’t mean that all playwriting ought to be political propaganda, but I do feel that one shouldn’t be satisfied with just one way of writing plays.16

14 Brockett, et. al., op. cit., 2003, p. 529. 15 Colin Chambers et. al., Playwright’s Progress: Patterns of Postwar British Drama, Oxford, Amber Lane Press Ltd., 1987, p. 61. 16 Bertolt Brecht (from his interview with Luth Otto), “Interview with an Exile”, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett, London, Methuen Drama, 1993, p. 68.

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Brecht had his own rules how this kind of drama should be created. First of all, the

play had to be written realistically covering all the social and political ideas that

reign, in order to reflect them on the stage and make a change in the audience.

Rather than fitting into conventions, Brecht’s technical devices should break the

boundaries that limit the theatre:

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society’s casual network / showing up the dominant point as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction.17

In Britain, many important playwrights of the political theatre, such as Howard

Brenton, David Edgar, and most importantly Edward Bond wrote their works in the

late 1960s. The plays of these important figures of the political theatre were

banned. Edward Bond’s plays generally were condemned by the public because of

his use of violence in his plays. His play Saved18 (1965) in which a baby is stoned

to death in a park was banned because of the display of scenes containing extreme

violence. If we take his own ideas on his theatre into consideration, it can be seen

that his desire is to show how capitalism abuses human beings. Yet he also tries to

show how similar socialism is to capitalism when it is abused and turned into a

totalitarian regime. On his note to Saved he explains his thoughts on the capitalist

system and its use of violence as follows:

… [C]apitalism has had to drag its hell up out of the ground and set it in our midst. If men are necessarily violent they will always endanger one another, so there must be a strong authority that will use violence to control violence. This authority is the ruling class. It maintains its existence by using violence and being able to organise it politically.19

17 Bertolt Brecht, “The Popular and The Realistic”, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett, London, Methuen Drama, 1993, p. 109. 18 Figure 13. 19 Edward Bond, “Author’s Note: On Violence”, Plays: One, London, Methuen Drama Ltd., 1991, p. 11.

51

And Christopher Innes quotes Bond’s thoughts on his use of violence in his plays;

it is not a desire to show reasonless scenes of violence on stage but a need to

awaken people into their own condition on earth:

In fact the change from bleak realism in Saved to the Grand Guignol of Early

Morning or Lear is only a response to the public’s capacity for accommodating themselves to violence. As Bond admits: ‘If I went on stoning babies in every play then nobody would notice it anymore. I had to find [continually new] ways of making people notice, of making those things effective.’ This is what he has labelled ‘the aggro-effect’ in deliberate distinction from the Brechtian ‘alienation effect’.20

Unlike Brecht, Bond follows the aim of disturbing the audience which can be seen

as a reminder of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Although he uses violence as a tool

in his plays to show that he criticizes it, and to criticize the ruling classes who use

violence for the “maintenance of law and order”21, he contradicts himself when he

justifies the left-wing violence:

If you decide never to use violence you have still done nothing to make the world less violent. That can only be done by making it more just. I am not a pacifist, we have to say what things are and not what we would like them to be. Reason is not yet always effective, and we are still at a stage when to create a rational society we may sometimes have to use irrational means. Right-wing political violence cannot be justified because it always serves irrationally; but left-wing political violence is justified when it helps to create a more rational society, and when that help cannot be given in a pacific form.22

This gives rise to the question whether there is a kind of violence that can be

justified in any way. What does Bond mean by rational society and how can it be

created by the use of violence, though it is at the same time seen as an irrational

means. German sociologists Adorno and Habermas also try to define the rational

society. As Deborah Cook indicates:

Adorno and Habermas lay claim to the tradition of critical theory in their concern for establishing what Horkheimer once described as [reasonable

20 Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 169. 21 Edward Bond, “Author’s Note: On Violence”, Plays: One, London, Methuen Drama Ltd., 1991, p. 11. 22 Ibid., p. 17.

52

conditions of life] an association of free individuals in which each enjoys the same possibilities for self-realization and self-determination as all the rest.23

Adorno’s idea of “rational society” also shows us what Bond means when he refers

to a rational society, a society in which everyone has the same possibilities and

Adorno also adds that a rational society can never accepts to be a capitalist society:

Adorno once wrote that the goal of a rationally organized society [would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reflexive forms of that suffering.] Late capitalist society has become irrational because all social activity, including thinking, expunges particulars (the very condition of its possibility) under the spell of the levelling exchange principle.24

However, Edward Bond shows that under the government of the left - which lost

its real meaning under Stalin - is not able to create a rational society through the

use of violence. Not only capitalism but also wrongly directed communism can

turn into totalitarianism which reduces human beings into objects. These

totalitarian regimes create a vicious circle of aggression, physical violence and

suffering as Bond shows in Lear25.

23 Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 1. 24 ibid., p. 72. 25 Figures 14&15.

53

2.2. Political Violence, Epidemic Cruelty and Pain in Edward

Bond’s Lear

Everything that acts is a cruelty.26

Edward Bond’s Lear was first performed in 1971, at the Royal Court

Theatre. This play, which is a re-writing of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, was

written as “the Vietnam War rose to its final genocidal peak”27 and it was much

influenced by the historical background of its time. Influenced by the violent

background of the twentieth century, Bond creates a play by altering many

characteristics of the Shakespearean version through the use of excessively violent

scenes. He tries to create an optimistic end expressing a desire to believe that there

could be an end to the oppression28, violence and suffering caused by totalitarian

regimes and egoistical ruler classes. With the repetitive pattern of the play he

shows that the relationship between the rulers and the public is always based on the

violence and suffering of both parties and this creates an unbreakable vicious

circle. The play also shows how cruelty is epidemic in certain instances and how

violence began to be called science or necessity to maintain the established order.

Lear is a king who tries to protect his country from possible enemies by

constructing a wall around his lands. Yet the building of the wall is not desired by

the public because of the need of a work force which the farmers also have to

provide and the poor conditions for the workers cause many deaths. Fontanelle and

Bodice, Lear’s daughters, finding their father wrong, secretly marry the Duke of

North and the Duke of Cornwall who are Lear’s enemies. At the end of the war

between Lear, Cornwall and North, Lear, with Bodice help, is defeated.

Warrington, who does not respond to both sisters’ requests to betray Lear, is held

captive and tortured. Lear takes refuge in the house of a farmer called the

26 Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre and Cruelty”, The Theater and Its Double, New York, Grove Pres Inc., 1958, p. 85. 27 Colin Chambers et. al., Playwright’s Progress: Patterns of Postwar British Drama, Oxford, Amber Lane Press Ltd., 1987, p. 159. 28 Lear is shot while he’s digging the wall, the workers who watch him leave the stage quickly, but one of them looks back. It brings into mind the hope for change. Edward Bond, “Lear”, Plays: 2, London, Methuen Drama, 1998, p. 102.

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Gravedigger’s Boy and his wife Cordelia, who is pregnant. The soldiers, who look

for Lear, kill the Gravedigger’s Boy, rape Cordelia, and take Lear to prison. Then,

workers and farmers ruled by Cordelia rebel against the rule of Fontanelle and

Bodice, and take the country over. Fontanelle and Bodice are executed while

Lear’s life is spared though he is blinded. Lear then returns to the Gravedigger’s

Boy’s house which is now occupied by others and he begins to live there. Every

day many people come to listen to him, yet Cordelia’s rule does not prove to be

different; she continues to build the wall though Lear tries to tell her that it should

be pulled down. The play closes when Lear falls dead while he is digging the wall

with a shovel.

Bond creates a world order which is based on excessive violence. The king

is not like Shakespeare’s Lear who wants to divide his lands between his

daughters. Lear is still in power in Lear and his wall, which is non-existent in the

Shakespearian version, symbolizes his desire to be in power by protecting himself

and oppressing others, though he says it is for the welfare of his people. The wall is

“the symbol both of his power and its paranoia.”29 The daughters are similar to the

versions in King Lear; they have a desire for power, and a tendency to be cruel.

Cordelia, who is not the innocent and honest little daughter of Lear in this version,

also becomes a cruel figure. What is dominant in the text is the rootless violence,

cruelty towards others and the metaphysical anguish which comes after the

realization of the dehumanization of the system. As Christopher Innes suggests:

Lear (1971) uses many of the characters and situations from Shakespeare’s play but alters them to make a despairing statement about human brutality and inhumanity. Selfishness, callousness, and violence continued to be preoccupations of Bond’s later works…30

Yet we know that Shakespeare’s King Lear also thematises violence, cruelty and

suffering. What Edward Bond changes in his text is the emphasis on these themes

as Jenny S. Spencer also suggests:

29 Christopher Innes, op. cit., p. 158. 30 Brockett, et. al., op. cit., p. 533.

55

What separates Bond from Shakespeare on the question of the representation of violence is this constant move from the metaphoric to the literal, from the verbal gesture to the concrete action, from symbolic to physical reality… 31

To begin with the differences between two plays, there are changes in the

names of the characters. Instead of Goneril and Regan, Bond chooses Fontanelle

which means the skull of a baby and Bodice means “corset.”32 As Michael

Patterson indicates,

[I]n Bond’s play Goneril and Regan appear as Fontanelle and Bodice, the first name perhaps suggesting the rather infantile quality of her character, the second possibly indicating her sense of being constrained.33

Fontanelle’s child-like behaviour is balanced with Bodice’s controlling character

who handles everything. Yet although Bodice becomes the ruler of the country

after her father’s defeat and Cornwall’s and North’s unsuccessful escape, she also

suffers because she has to take over control. Besides changing the daughters’

names, Bond also changes the third daughter’s relationship along with her social

standing; Cordelia has no relation with Lear, she is the wife of a farmer. As

Fontanelle and Bodice are seen as the daughters of a cruel king it is clear that they

learned from their father to be cruel, but Cordelia who leads a much more basic life

also feels grudge after the death of her husband, and being raped by the soldiers

which causes her to miscarry her baby. Thus Bond creates a connection between

Lear’s daughters and Cordelia. Cordelia, like Fontanelle and Bodice, is the

daughter of an authority figure, a priest and it was her father who “taught her

everything”34, as Fontanelle and Bodice learn from their father. When Cordelia

takes the control over the country, she also adapts to the system, and continues to

build the wall.

Thus Bond makes a reference to the oppression and cruelty of the system;

in its nature it carries the characteristics of oppression, violence, and suffering. It

31 Jenny S. Spencer, Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press1992, p. 83. 32 “Bodice” and “Fontanelle”, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, ed. by. Frederick C. Mish, USA, Merriam-Webster, 2004, p. 138 and 487. 33 Michael Patterson, Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pres, 2003, p. 142. 34 Edward Bond, “Lear”, Plays: 2, London, Methuen Drama, 1998, p. 40.

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also works upon the powerful characters, who are rulers. So, everyone is a victim

to the system but also contributes to it by obeying its mechanism, and suffers, yet,

this acceptance curtains the reality of suffering:

We are like caged animals, but, instead of turning on our keepers, we fawn on them because they bring us sufficient food, so we vent our frustration and animosity on our fellow captives.35

The violence and cruelty in the play causes suffering, and suffering again creates

violence. In fact, this vicious circle can be considered as the cage in which the

characters are stuck. It is gradually regarded as ordinary so that, it is no longer

questioned. But, as already said before, through Lear’s personal development and

enlightenment, Bond tries to make an attempt to awaken the audience to this

reality, because for Bond, this is the reality of the world we live in under

capitalism.

The each level of suffering and violence is visible in Bond’s play. In Lear,

the suffering which is caused by the relationships with other men is dominant in

the text.36 Yet, here the suffering that comes from the others also derives from the

social system that is constructed by the people, and this level is the dominant one

in the text. Furthermore, rather than suffering because of one’s own body or the

external world, it is again the human beings who create suffering. Men destroy the

external world and their own existence for the sake of power struggles. Hence, the

physical violence is mainly dominant to the text, yet, it is not easy to separate

symbolic violence, which derives from social construction and the social rules,

from the physical one. Each of them triggers one another.

One of the most important changes from the original text is the change both

in the title of the play and the title of Lear. He removes the “king” from the title,

therefore, he removes Lear’s social standing, his absolute power, and also makes

him one of the others, as if to signify that what Lear goes through, his cruelty, his

fall from power, his suffering can happen to any of us. Lear as a person is more

important than Lear as king:

35 Michael Patterson, op. cit., p. 138. 36 See the quotation taken from Freud in the “Introduction” on page 9.

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The major shift of emphasis is hinted at in the title: the dropping of ‘King’ immediately implies that Bond is not interested in the royal nature of the king but in his function as an individual in an oppressive state, the character of which Lear gradually discerns in the course of the play.37

“King”, symbolizes the absolute power and a person whose “power inspire(s)

fear”, he is also infallible in his “decrees… and his judgements instinct with justice

and goodness”38, and as in many mythologies and in Christian terminology, the

king is the God on earth. As the title “king” suggests he is the one in power.

However the removal of the title “king” shows that these connotations of the word

“king” are no longer valid; goodness, justice, and infallibility of the instinct to

rightly judge are taken from him. Thus, Lear, and through him, any individual can

signify the bad, the unjust and the cruel. Lear by viewing his people as his sheep

and thus by making an allusion to the Old Testament39, supports the idea of being

in the position of God:

I gave my life to these people. I’ve seen armies on their hands and knees in blood, insane women feeding dead children at their empty breasts, dying men spitting blood at me with their last breath, our brave young men in tears – (…) They are my sheep and if one of them is lost I’d take fire to hell to bring him out. I loved and cared for all my children…40

Yet, what is also revealed in this quotation is his belief that he loves his people and

that he sacrificed himself for them. In reality however, it is them who are

sacrificed. His words show that he believes that this was done by the enemy, but it

was he himself who made them suffer and how he created hatred in them, a man

spits blood at him with his last breath. The fear of experiencing the same war

atmosphere is why he wants to build the wall, yet the desire to protect both his

people and his power by the construction of the wall becomes another way to make

the people suffer.

Thus, the main symbol of violence in the play is the wall. The wall not only

makes people suffer, it also kills them. The play opens with the accidental death of

37 Michael Patterson, op. cit., pp. 141-142. 38 Jean Chevalier, et. al., “King”, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. by John Buchanan-Brown, London,Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, pp. 568. 39 David’s confidence in God’s grace: “The Lord is my shepherd”, The Old Testament, Psalms 23:1. 40 Bond, op. cit., p. 21.

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a worker who works on the wall, and ends with the death of Lear who is digging

the wall. This wall which Lear calls “my wall”41, and wants to build in order to

protect his people from the enemies, in fact symbolizes closure, separation and

limitedness:

Traditionally the wall or great wall was the enclosure which guarded and shut in a world to avoid the invasion of evil influences originating at some lower level. Walls had the disadvantage of restricting the realms which they enclosed…42

Though Lear says “[M]y wall will make you free”43, the wall turns his people into

slaves; farmers are forced to work on the wall for the need of workforce, and it

causes a threat that “the countryside would be left derelict.”44 People are taken

from where they live and forced to work on the wall under bad conditions and they

are treated like animals. What Lear says for the workers is not different from his

inspection of the wood for the construction. When he sees the dead body under the

tarpaulin, the engineers’ argument and the following speech prove that compared

with the wall, the workers have no importance:

LEAR (points to tarpaulin). What’s that? ENGINEER. Materials for the – WARRINGTON (to FOREMAN). Who is it? FOREMAN. Workman. WARRINGTON. What? FOREMAN. Accident, sir. LEAR. Who left that wood in the mud? ENGINEER. That’s just delivered. We’re moving that to – LEAR. It’s been rotting there for weeks (To WARRINGTON.) They’ll never finish! Get more men on it. The officers must make the men work! … LEAR. Show me this body. … Blow on the head. FOREMAN. Axe. LEAR. What? FOREMAN. An axe, sir. Fell on him.

41 Bond, “Lear”, op. cit., p. 2. 42 Jean Chevalier, et. al., “Wall”, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. by John Buchanan-Brown, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, p. 1076. 43 Bond, op. cit., pp. 17-18. 44 ibid., p. 16.

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LEAR. It’s a flogging crime to delay work. (To WARRINGTON.) You must deal with this fever. They treat their men like cattle. When they finish work they must be kept in dry huts. All these huts are wet. You waste men.45

Though Lear learns about the death of a worker, the wood which is left in the mud

is more important for him. And the health of the workers is important as long as it

speeds up the construction of the wall.

He wastes his men for the construction of this wall. He kills the Third

Worker, supposing that he is a traitor whose axe kills another workman

accidentally:

LEAR. (…) (To FOREMAN.) Who dropped the axe? … FOREMAN and SOLDIER push THIRD WORKER forward. LEAR. Court martial him. Fetch a firing squad. A drumhead trial for sabotage. Quiet murmur of surprise… … LEAR (to THIRD WORKER). Prisoner of war? FOREMAN. No. One of our men. A farmer. LEAR. I understand! He has a grudge. I took him off his land. … LEAR. (…) He killed a workman on the wall. That alone makes him a traitor. … (He shoots THIRD WORKER …)46

Lear’s desire to kill him does not actually derive from his thinking that he is a real

traitor. Lear himself is aware of the fact that what happened was just an accident:

BODICE. (…) There was an accident. That’s all. LEAR (half aside to her). Of course there was an accident. But the work is slow. I must do something to make the officers move. That’s what I came for, otherwise my visit’s wasted.47

Lear’s words show how rootless violence has become. In order to quicken the

construction of the wall, he does not hesitate to kill a worker, though he says that

these people are his “sheep and if one of them is lost (he)’d take fire to hell to bring

him out.” 48

45 ibid., p. 16. 46 ibid., p. 20. 47 ibid., p. 18. 48 ibid., p. 21.

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This wall is not only a physical barrier between countries; it’s also a barrier

between man and nature. The construction of the wall needs wood and earth, the

use of each one is a harm given to nature. As Chambers and Prior suggests:

[T]he offence against nature is most clearly symbolized in Lear’s and then Cordelia’s earth wall. It has come to represent all the acts of natural destruction to which society , with its technological control has become irretrievably bound.49

The wall which becomes a destructive force to nature causes the suffering

that comes from the external world; the mud wastes the lives of workers. And the

wall does not only physically separate Lear’s country from the enemies’, but

psychologically separates Lear from his people and his daughters and creates

suffering for both parties.

His childish obstinacy on the building of the wall makes Fontanelle and

Bodice marry Lear’s enemies, which can also be seen as a desire to demolish the

wall because their grooms also ask this “as (a) part of the marriage contract.”50 It

can be interpreted as the daughters’ desire to escape from the cruelty of their father

which frightens them:

FONTANELLE. Happiness at last! I was always terrified of him.51

Yet, to be able to pull down the wall, it is necessary to remove the symbolical wall

that stands between the father and the daughters. However, Lear’s insistence on the

construction of the wall makes this impossible and he literally says that there is a

wall between them:

LEAR. […] I built my wall against you as well as my other enemies!52

Thus, he turns his daughters into his enemies because according to him they chose

to be the on the other side of the wall which symbolizes danger and death for him

49 Chambers, et al., op. cit., p. 159. 50 Bond, op. cit., p. 20. 51 ibid., p. 22. 52 ibid., p. 21.

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because he knows that North and Cornwall want to take the revenge of their

fathers, so feeling threatened he draws a line between himself and his daughters

which shows the wall’s invisible existence in human relations.

He does not give them punishment for marrying his enemies yet later he

shows how cruel he can be when he talks to Warrington:

LEAR. […] How could I trust myself to them? My daughters are claimed outlaws, without rights of prisoners of war. They van be raped – or murdered. Why should they be held for trial? Their crimes aren’t covered by my laws. Where does their vileness come from?53

Though he says that his daughters are too good for this world, when Bodice says

that to kill the Third Worker will be an injustice54, his attitude towards his

daughters totally changes. He even does not care about their being raped or

murdered; he does not give them the rights that he even gives to a prisoner of war.

Yet he forgets the true nature of his daughters’ situation when he asks “Where does

their vileness come from?” It is Lear himself who teaches them to be cruel:

BODICE. Father, if you kill this man it will be an injustice. LEAR. My dear, you want to help me, but you must let me deal with the things I understand. Listen and learn.55

He always underestimates his daughters; he does this depending upon his power as

a father and a king. At first, he sees his daughters as kind and merciful, but because

he regards them like that, he does not want them to meddle with the deeds he

understands. The interruptions of Bodice and her not hesitating to shout that she

disassociates herself from the execution of the worker make him angry, because

she thus undermines his authority. The secret marriages, therefore, are the climax

of his anger toward them, yet he does not show his aggression directly to his

daughters. As Bodice and Fontanelle try to dissuade him from his childish

obstinacy of constructing the wall and speak of their husbands, Lear reflects his

anger for them to the Third Worker:

53 ibid., p. 23. 54 ibid., p. 18. 55 ibid., p. 18.

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BODICE. I’m marrying North. FONTANELLE. And I’m marrying Cornwall. LEAR. (points to the THIRD WORKER). Tie him straight! He’s falling! BODICE. So now you don’t have to shoot him. Our husbands could never allow you to, anyway. FONTANELLE. I know you’ll get on with my husband. He’s very understanding, he knows how to deal with old people. LEAR. Straighter. BODICE. You’ll soon learn to respect them like your sons. LEAR. I have no sons! I have no daughters.56

Lear’s attitude to the Third Worker is like the “spontaneous gesture of the man

who kicks his dog because he dares not kick his wife or boss.”57 Or as existentialist

psychologist Rollo May suggest, the aggression is directed to a certain someone,

but violence does not need to be so.

When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object related – that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. But in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we swing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear, one loses awareness of the environment and wants only to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what may.58

The aggression that he cannot direct against his daughters is directed against the

worker. This also shows why the daughters are vile; the question is indeed a

rhetoric one, because it is he himself who teaches them to be cruel. He is not

intentionally cruel to his daughters. It can be suggested that though his way of

showing his love to them does not include compassion and warmth, he loves them,

he always address to them as “my dear child” or “my poor child”. In a vision of the

past we see that he scolds Bodice for wearing her dead mother’s dress:

LEAR. […] (BODICE gets into the dress and comes down to him. He points at

her.) Take it off! BODICE. No. LEAR. Take it off. Your mother’s dress! BODICE. She’s dead! She gave it to me!

56 ibid., pp. 19-20. 57 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory, London, The Athlone Press, 1995, p. 9. 58 Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York, W. W. Norton, 1972, p. 183.

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LEAR (pointing). Take it off! BODICE. No! LEAR. Yes, or you will always wear it! (He pulls her to him.) Bodice! My poor child, you might as well have worn her shroud.59

He scolds her because he fears that Bodice might die, too, because mother’s dress

symbolizes death. As father represents culture, mother represents nature; therefore

nature also represents death for Lear. As he tries to defeat death by building a wall

in the midst of nature, his aggressive behaviour to make Bodice take off the dress

is also an attempt to outlive death. This can be inferred as his love to his daughters,

but the problem is even when he seems to be caring, he shows his love with

aggression as seen in the above quotation. Yet it is a relationship that depends on

his daughters submission when they act against his authority, his kind and merciful

daughters who will govern the country so well after he dies, suddenly turn into

cruel monsters:

LEAR: […] It is perverted to want your pleasure where it makes others suffer… where will your ambition end? You will throw old men from their coffins, break children’s legs, pull the hair from old women’s heads, make young men walk the streets in beggary and cold while their wives grow empty and despair… You have done this to me. The people will judge between you and me.60

When we judge between him and his daughters it is easy to see that there is not

much difference between them. What he thinks possible for them to do is what he

himself has done in the past. The above passage is very reminiscent of the situation

of his people in the war.61 He is just able to justify himself by saying that he has

done everything for his people, while his daughters’ is an egoistical ambition. He is

not able to see yet, that he continues to cause the same suffering by insisting upon

the construction of the wall, and he is not yet able to see that his daughters do what

they have learned from their father. It is too late when he begins to gain an insight

and understand what he has done to his daughters. He begins to realize his fault

when he sees Fontanelle’s body on the autopsy table:

59 Bond, op. cit., p. 53. 60 ibid., p. 21. 61 See above quotation from Bond, op. cit., p. 21, on page 51.

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LEAR. She sleeps inside like a lion and a lamb and a child. The things are so beautiful […] If I had known she was so beautiful… If I had known this beauty and patience and care, how I would have loved her. […] Did I make this – and destroy it? […] I destroyed her! I knew nothing, saw nothing, learned nothing! Fool! Fool! Worse than I knew! […] Look at my dead daughter! […] Look! I killed her! Her blood is in my hands! Destroyer! Murderer! And now I must begin again. […] I must walk in weariness and bitterness […] I must open my eyes and see!62

He becomes aware of the fact that it is he himself who destroyed his daughters’

inner beauty, thus he is responsible for their physical deaths also. The realization

gives way to metaphysical anguish which opens his eyes to the reality of the

system that he is part of.

The system turns people into both victimizers and victims. Bodice taking

over the control begins to govern the country. Though she begins to pull down the

wall, it does not mean that she is less cruel than her father or Cordelia, who will

continue to build the wall in the end. Together with her sister they torture

Warrington, as if to recall Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, they cut out his

tongue and order the soldier to beat him up and jump on him, in this way they will

prevent him from speaking and making signs to reveal the truth about Bodice and

Fontanelle’s letters which asked him to betray Lear and share their beds. The

torture scene contains excessive violence which comes from Fontanelle’s orders:

FONTANELLE. Use the boot! (SOLDIER A kicks him.) Jump on him! (She

pushes SOLDIER A.) Jump on his head! SOLDIER A. Lay off lady, lay off! ‘Oo’s killin’ ‘im, me or you? BODICE (knits). One plain, two pearl, one plain. FONTANELLE. Throw him up and drop him. I want to hear him drop. […] O Christ why did I cut his tongue out? I want to hear him scream! […] O yes, tears and blood I wish my father was here. I wish he would see him. Look at his hands! (…) Smash his hands! SOLDIER A and FONTANELLE jump on WARRINGTON’s hands. Kill his hands! Kill his feet! Jump on it- all of it! Look at his hands like boiling crabs! Kill it! Kill all of it! Kill him inside! Make him dead! Father! Father! I want to sit on his lungs! […]

62 ibid., pp. 73-74.

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O let me sit on his lungs. Get them out for me.63

This violent scene also reveals that this aggression and violence does not only

derive from the anger that rises from being refused by him, but also from the hatred

they feel for their father. They see him as a substitute image for their father which

is understood when Fontanelle’s shouts at Warrington: “[F]ather! Father”. Their

violence towards him is a vent for the suppressed feelings for their father, in a way

they are taking revenge for what they have suffered. There is also another

important symbol in this scene of violence; Bodice (since her marriage) is

continually knitting, and until she uses her needles to torture Warrington, she never

stops knitting. Besides being a female activity, knitting is a way to suppress her

aggression because knitting is an activity which teaches the female to be

submissive:

The domestication of sewing was one means of inculcating femininity… And yet the feminist historian finds herself ambivalent in trying to assess how successful a means of suppression sewing actually was. The silent, hunched soldiers of the (leisured) embroiderer can be read as a posture of submission…64

Yet when she pulls the needles from the knitting and uses them to poke his ears,

the needles cease to be the signs of female submission they become the tools of

violence. In one of her articles Helga Novak draws attention to Knitting needles’

resemblance to weapons:

An army of stitches in motion. The knitting needles are the bayonets. That’s probably why they’re locked away at night, so nobody gets hurt.65

Her using the knitting needles as her tools for torture causes the running of the

knitting which symbolizes the impossibility of returning to the older state. From

now on she is also physically involved in the system. Then we see her sleeping

63 ibid., pp. 28-29. 64 Meliss Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, p. 151. 65 Helga Novak, “Palisades, or Time Spent in a Mad House”. German Feminism: Reading in Politics and Literature, ed. by Edith Hoshins, Albany, state of New York Press, 1984, p. 92.

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over a desk, and her knitting bag is full of documents66, which shows that

governing the country has replaced her female activities. It also shows that she no

longer needs a substitute object to reflect her aggression on. As the ruler of the

country now she has all the rights to do as she likes yet, she also suffers from

having to be the one in control:

BODICE. War. Power. (Off, FONTANELLE laughs briefly, and then the AIDE laughs briefly.) I’m forced to sit at this desk, work with my sister, walk beside my husband. They say decide this and that, but I don’t decide anything. My decisions are forced on me (…) I’m trapped. (…) I hated being a girl but at least I was happy sometimes. And it was better when I grew up, I could be myself (…) I was almost free! I made so many plans, one day I’d be my own master! Now I have all the power… and I’m a slave.

Bourdieu indicates that when females have the chance they use the power against

men who dominate them:

Being symbolically condemned to resignation and discretion, women can exercise some degree of power only by turning the strength of the strong against them or by accepting the need to efface themselves, and in any case, to deny a power that they can only exercise vicariously…67

However, Bodice’s outbreak shows how the system works upon the holders of

power, too. Like a corset it squeezes the ones who are subject to it and makes

breathing impossible for them and it also changes their natural shape. Though the

system gives Bodice the right to victimize others it also turns her into a victim. She

is obliged to “efface” herself in order to be able to use her power. Thus, she does

everything because she feels forced to do so. Though she has all the power she has

no chance to be free because the system she has taken over dehumanizes her as

well.

In the text, we see that it is the victimized people who later hold the title of

victimizer. Bodice and Fontanelle are victimized by their father though he does not

intend to do so, yet then they hold the power, they turn into victimizers themselves.

Another example of a victimized character that turns into a victimizer is Cordelia.

When Lear first meets the Gravedigger’s Boy and Cordelia, he actually enters a

66 Bond, op. cit., p. 69. 67 Bourdieu, op. cit. p. 32.

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world which the cruelty of the system has not yet reached physically. Dethroned by

his daughter, King Lear takes refuge in the Gravedigger’s Boy’s house and begins

to work for him by looking after the pigs. The Gravedigger’s Boy who chooses life

over death by quitting his father’s job as a gravedigger, starts his life as a farmer.

He represents innocence, the ideal model in the text, which gives without taking,

which is always optimistic and helpful. Yet Lear’s entrance in to their life changes

everything. Cordelia feels uncomfortable because of his existence around their

house, and when the Gravedigger’s Boy is down in the well she forces Lear to

leave:

WIFE (Cordelia). […] You’re not stopping here. I won’t have you. LEAR. He needs me. He said so. WIFE. I’m not having any dirty old tramps about, I’m carrying. I mustn’t let myself get upset. […] WIFE. […] Please go- and don’t tell him I made you.68

In contrast to her husband, Cordelia is not that innocent. She has a tendency to be

violent which can be gathered from her reaction to Lear. Though he is in a

miserable state Cordelia wants him to leave, there is the existence of a personal

wall that Cordelia builds around her even before she takes the control over. As

forLear, he falls to the state of the victim while he was the victimizer. Yet, even in

this state he is able to act egoistically. Personal suffering and fear is more

important than anything:

LEAR. He asked me to stay! No, I won’t go! (…) he said I could stay. He won’t break his word I’m too old to look after myself. I can’t live in ditches and barns and beg for scraps and hire myself to peasants! No, I won’t be at everyone’s call! My daughters sent you! You go! It’s you who’re destroying this place! We must get rid of you!69

Lear is an intruder in their house, yet to feel safe he wants to send away Cordelia

who is pregnant. He creates a bond with the Boy and tries to exclude Cordelia. Yet

what he says prove to be wrong, because it is Lear himself who destroys the place.

68 Bond, op. cit., p. 41. 69 Ibid, p. 41.

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The soldiers of his daughters come to find him, but they not only take Lear, but

also kill the Gravedigger’s boy and rape Cordelia. This scene contains excessive

and irrational violence. In fact, Lear’s order which gives the right to the rape and

murder of his daughters work upon the inhabitants of the house he takes refuge.

Bond tries to show that system turns people into victimizers through the behaviour

of the Soldiers. Yet we do not know what the real order that is given to them

includes. Only thing we know is they are trying to find Lear. The murder of the

Gravedigger’s boy, or the rape of Cordelia are the signs of humans’ capability of

violence, because rather than doing these as an order, they take pleasure from what

happens:

Her (Cordelia’s) head is down and she covers her face with her hands, SOLDIER D is preparing to rape her… (…) SERGEANT (to SOLDIER D). Do that inside. LEAR. She’s pregnant. SOLDIER D. It can play with the end. (…) There is blood on SOLDIER E’s face, neck, hands, clothes and boots. In the

house CORDELIA gives a high, short gasp. SOLDIER E (muttering contentedly). An’ I’ll ‘ave ‘er reekin’ a pig blood. Somethin’ t’ write ‘ome t’ tell mother.70

The soldiers in the Gravedigger’s boy are far from doing their jobs; they use

purposeless and arbitrary violence which causes the destruction of a family, which

in return comes out as mental suffering, hatred and revenge. When we take into

consideration the words of Soldier A, who tortures Warrington, these soldiers’

attitudes can be seen as their personal cruelty:

SOLDIER A. It’s all over. Walking offal! don’t blame me, I’ve got a job t’ do. If we was fightin’ again t’morra I could end up envyin’ you anytime. Come on then, less ‘ave yer. Yer’ll live if yer want to.71

While Soldier A admits that he has to do whatever he is ordered, Sergeant, Soldier

D and E are a material examples of the cruelty that is inherent to each person. The

70 Ibid, pp. 44-45. 71 Ibid, p. 30.

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materialization of cruelty through physical violence is one of the main destructive

forces in the play. When the soldiers are leaving Lear says:

LEAR (stands). O burn the house! You’ve murdered the husband, slaughtered the cattle, poisoned the well, raped the mother, killed the child – you must burn the house! You’re soldiers – you must do your duty!72

He asks them to burn the house, because the worst has happened, in deed what the

soldiers do here is similar to Lear’s orders for his daughters. He does not even give

them the rights of prisoner of war and he says that they can be raped or murdered.

And what his daughters do is the same. The use of violence is like an epidemic

illness which is contaminated by interaction with the one who uses it. René Girard

directly refers to this epidemic character of violence as “contamination” and the

one who uses it as “contaminated”:

Contamination is a terrible thing, and only those who are already contaminated would wilfully expose themselves to it. If even an accidental contact with a “contaminated” being can spread the impurity, it goes without saying that a violent and hostile encounter will guarantee infection. Therefore … whenever the violence is inevitable, it is best that the victim be pure, untainted by any involvement in the dispute.73

Lear is contaminated; he killed his enemies in the battlefield and swore to kill their

sons. Bodice and Fontanelle are infected because they were the closest to him. Yet

Lear carries this infectious illness of violence wherever he goes. He not only

causes the Boy and Cordelia to suffer from violence, but also infects Cordelia with

the same disease. It is the Carpenter who kills the soldier who rapes her, and thus

becomes contaminated, too. So Cordelia, the Carpenter and the others, who suffer

from the existent government, create a rebel army and take over the country. Yet,

like the other systems, Cordelia’s system does not prove to be different; she

continues to build the wall, she executes Fontanelle and Bodice, but sets Lear free,

yet, in time, the position Lear takes begins to disturb her.

72 Ibid, pp. 43-45. 73Girard, op. cit., p. 28.

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The main problem arises when the Carpenter and the Fourth Prisoner agree

on a small experiment on Lear, though the Carpenter knows that Cordelia does not

want anything to be done to Lear. Yet the Carpenter gives permission to the

gorging out of his eyes which they call a scientific experiment. The blinded Lear’s

support is now the ghost of the Gravedigger’s Boy. Physical blindness lets Lear

gain a new insight, blindness to the physical world opens his eyes to the reality, his

physical pain alludes to the painstaking entrance into the world of reality which is

consist of cruelty, violence and suffering:

LEAR. You. (The GHOST starts to unfasten LEAR.) Tell me the pain will stop! This pain must stop! O stop, stop, stop! GHOST. It will stop. Sometimes it might come back, but you’ll learn to bear it. I can stay with you now you need me.74

The pain of realization, as the Ghost says, is something that he will learn to bear. It

will always be there, but he will learn how to cope with it.

With Lear’s realization of the cruelty of the system and the existence of the

wall, Act Three opens similar to Act One, Scene Six. Lear is again in the

Gravedigger’s Boy’s house which is now occupied by Thomas, Susan and many

others. Thomas serves the Gravedigger’s Boy’s role while the pregnant Susan

plays Cordelia’s role. But the difference is that Lear is now listened to by many

people, and he tries to open these people’s eyes to the injustice of the system,

because, as it has been said before, Cordelia’s government is in no way different

from Lear’s. The problem in Cordelia’s government is the same as in Bodice’s, for

it is based upon hatred, not on a change in the system. Cordelia herself points out

her hatred:

CORDELIA. […] To fight like us you must hate, we can’t trust a man unless he hates. Otherwise he has no use.75

A system based upon hatred creates no difference, neither for the rulers, nor the

public. Ben, who was an orderly when Lear was in prison, has now joined Lear,

74 Bond, op. cit., p. 78. 75 Ibid., p. 58.

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and he wants to give himself up to the soldiers and return to the camp of the wall

where he could try to enlighten people for a revolution. Yet Lear does not even

listen to him. Lear, in the end, goes to the wall which once belonged to him, and

begins to dig it with a shovel, and is shot to death by the farmer’s son who is a

soldier now. The act in itself carries the egoistical side of Lear. Without telling

anyone, he does go to the wall and rather than affecting multitudes, he just

completes his own development in this change. The only worker who turns his

back and looks at his body at the end of the play can be interpreted as the hope of

an awakening in people, yet as the previous examples of death on the wall show,

this scene can easily be forgotten.

When the play’s plot is taken into consideration, the vicious circle between

violence and suffering, being victim and the victimizer becomes obvious. The

personal suffering and unhappiness related to the oppression of the social and the

political system is what lies behind the text, and it comes out as physical violence

on the surface, As Innes suggests,

Repression leads to aggression, and this aggression is the driving force behind social progress. Thus, all social activity is presented as moralized violence.76

Though physical violence dominates the text on the surface, the symbolic violence

is what goes under all these violence and suffering. The socially constructed rules

are what give some characters the right to use violence; although they create

suffering and aggression in the others. The power struggle which even justifies

excessive physical violence causes suffering on both sides. Symbolic violence, as

Bourdieu points out, works upon the members of a society invisibly or one cannot

realize it because it is too familiar, but its impact is enormous:

Symbolic force is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic, without any physical constraint; but this magic works only on the basis of the dispositions deposited, like springs, at the deepest level of the body… (It is) all the more powerful because it is for the most part exerted invisibly and insidiously through insensible familiarization with a symbolically

76 Innes, op. cit., p. 160.

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structured physical world and early, prolonged experience of interactions informed by the structures of domination.77

The rules of relationships between a king and his people, father and his daughters,

males and females are all defined by the social construction. Any tension that

arises between these couples emerges because of one side’s refusal or faithfulness

to conform these rules. Bond argues here that this kind of social construction is the

main reason of violence, people become enemies, a father turns his back to his

daughters, and innocent people become the victims of violence deriving from the

power struggle of rulers. Lear reveals that, like in Endgame, suffering and

aggression are never-ending processes. And though, as said before, a worker turns

his head and looks at the dead body of Lear, the play does not represent a solution

or give a hope about future by showing that every system repeats itself. Especially

the death of the Gravedigger’s boy leaves no hope for the future of human beings,

while Endgame demonstrates the lack of emotional ties between the characters in

never-ending, self-repeating plot of the play in which nothing much happens, Lear

draws a worse picture of humanity which includes hatred, aggression and violence

at its worst even in the relationship of a father and daughter. The wall – which

represents both physical and psychological barriers between people and which is

the material symbol of violence against both human beings and nature – is the only

thing that stays on stage when the play ends.

77 Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 36.

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3. PERSONAL PROBLEMS, REPRESSION AND VIOLENCE IN A

DECADE OF TRAUMA: ANTHONY NEILSON’S PENETRATOR

“Our Century is undoubtedly the cruellest in the history of civilisation.”1

Guard 2: It’s the war, you see.

Lisa: There’s a war on? Guard 1: There’s always a war on.2

3.1. The So-called Post-Political Theatre or “In-yer-face”

At the beginning of the 1990s, many important events of the second half of

the twentieth century began to show their consequences. As David Reynolds

indicates “1989 was (…) momentous a year in European history”3. The Berlin

Wall was pulled down in 1989, and in 1990 Germany was reunited. The Cold War

between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. came to an end in the same year with the collapse of

Eastern bloc4. However, the end of the Cold War and the unity in Europe after the

pulling down of the wall did not essentially mean peace; 1990 was also the

beginning of new wars. After the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran which

began in 1980, in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait5. For the United Nations

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 challenged and tested the willingness and capacity of the United Nations to mount an effective response through collective security. The results were definitely mixed, and the reality is too recent and unresolved to yield anything as definitive as “the lessons of the Gulf War.”6

1 André Bernard, Guerre et violence dans la Grèce antique, trans. by Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, Paris, Hachette, 1999, p. 15. 2 Anthony Neilson, “The Wonderful World of Dissocia”, The Wonderful World of Dissocia & Realism, London, Methuen Drama, w. date, p. 17. 3 David Reynolds, “Europe Divided and Reunited”, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, ed. by T. C. W. Blanning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 301. 4 ibid., p. 301. 5 Alastair Finlan, The Gulf War 1991, New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 12. 6 Richard Falk, “Reflections on the Gulf War Experience”, The Gulf War and the New World Order, ed. by Tareq Y. Ismael et. al., Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1994, p. 25.

74

The United Nations’ “joint declaration” 7 was dating back to 1942. The aim of this

pact was to establish peace by joining together. The countries who signed this pact

were mostly the protagonists of the great wars of the first half of the twentieth

century. This aim to establish peace was possible if these countries were contracted

to each other with a pact which endowed them with the task to protect it. Yet, there

was another right that this pact gave them:

Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to decent life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.8

In order to establish and protect world peace, they were fighting with those who

(according to the U.N.) were brutal and savage and endangered the peace. And, in

1990, with the fear that Saddam Hussein would turn out to be another Hitler9 with

his invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. decided to give warnings to Iraq, while the U.S.A.

“troops and aircraft Desert Shield -start deploying to Saudi Arabia.”10

The Gulf War ended in 1991, but there were other wars going on in the

world. One of the most important ones for the West was the war against Bosnia-

Herzegovina which began in 1991 and continued for three years. The nightmare of

genocide was back again:

The year 1992, scheduled to be a milestone on the road to European unity, has seen Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities slowly bombarded to pieces and their inhabitants starved before the television eyes of the world. It has seen two million Bosnian Moslems threatened with Europe's first genocide since World War II, most already driven

7 A Joint Declaration by United Nations, Washington, January 1, 1942, Signed by The United States of America, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxemburg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia Source: “Joint Declaration”, War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, ed. by Louise W. Holborn, Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1943, p. 1. 8 “Joint Declaration”, War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, ed. by Louise W. Holborn, Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1943, p. 1. 9 Enid Hill, “The New World Order and the Gulf War: Rhetoric, Policy and Politics in the United States”, The Gulf War and the New World Order, ed. by Tareq Y. Ismael et. al., Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1994, p. 185. 10 Finlan, op. cit., New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 12.

75

deliberately from their homes by massacre, rape and terror, thrown into concentration camps, or made refugees within their own country or outside it. All this has occurred with the full knowledge of the outside world, which is also quite aware of the identity of the perpe- trator, who has been perfecting such procedures for over a year now in occupied Croatia, including in zones formally under UN jurisdic- tion.11

The desire to live in harmony was impossible; the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina

showed the rise of nationalism. It was not only in Eastern Europe that nationalism

showed itself, “[E]ven in more coherent western Europe, nationalism remained

strong.”12

All the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s have played an important

role in the change of the theatre:

By the late 1980s, several world events suggested new directions that would affect the development of theatre in the coming years. Among the most important of these was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, both of which helped to mark the end of the Cold War that had dominated European and American policies since the end of World War II. In Czechoslovakia dissident groups rose up against the Communist regime and installed a multiparty government in 1989, and in 1990 Communist dominance of Poland came to an end when Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was elected president. Also in 1990 the United States became involved in the Gulf War, which seriously affected worldwide relations with the Middle East. These and other indications of change would be reflected in theatre in the following years.13

Britain saw many trends in the theatre of the twentieth century. Yet, at the end of

the century a new trend in drama has emerged and is still visible. This trend was

born at the beginning of 1990s. It can be thought that this trend was the last shape

that British drama has taken at the end of the twentieth century. This trend reveals

ties from the past such as the use of obscene language, excessive violence and sex

scenes, with the aim of disturbing the audience. It became the new trend of

playwriting by taking the tradition of the twentieth century theatre one step further.

Many critics criticised the plays’ focus on personal issues, their characters who do

not develop throughout the play and the violence, and labelled the trend as “post-

11 Branka Magaš, “The Destruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina”, New Left Review, vol. a, no. 196, 1992, p. 102. 12 David Reynolds, op. cit., p. 303. 13 Brockett, et. al., op. cit., p. 555.

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political theatre”, because “this new form of theatre was born after the ‘official’

demise of political theatre and of politics.”14 This new trend, as Aleks Sierz also

indicates, is presented with a selection of other labels:

1 Neo-Jacobeanism; 2 New Brutalism; 3 Theatre of Urban Ennui; 4 In-Yer-Face Theatre.15

However, Sierz also explains how it would be wrong to choose the first three labels

to name the trend. “Neo-Jacobeanism” would mean claiming the importance of its

links with tradition, “New Brutalism”, would indicate that the new theatre only

focuses on brutality, and “Theatre of Urban Ennui misses the point – the youths

shown on stage in the ‘nineties are not bored, they are trying to get on with their

lives.”16 So Aleks Sierz, by choosing “in-yer-face” as the title of these new plays,

names the new trend. The definition of “in-yer-face” is something (that is)

“characterized by or expressive of bold and often defiant aggressiveness” and also

something “aggressively intrusive.”17 When considered as the name for a trend in

theatre, it is again Aleks Sierz who defines it:

The widest definition of in-yer-face theatre is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking alarm… Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown on stage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially it tells us more about who we really are.18

Though some call this new trend post-political with every element that is used in

these plays like violence, language, sex scenes, personal issues, the playwrights

create a new way of looking at the politics . The main difference from the political

14 Bérénice Hamidi-Kim, “Post-Political Theatre versus the Thearte of Political Struggle”, National Theatre Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, February 2008, p. 41. 15 Aleks Sierz, “Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation”, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 1, February 2002, p.18. 16 Sierz, op. cit., p.18. 17 “In-your-face”, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, ed. by. Frederick C. Mish, USA, Merriam-Webster, 2004, p. 660. 18 Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2001, p. 4.

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theatre is the dark realism of in-yer-face, which suggests no solutions, because it

does not believe in the existence of one. While the political theatre tries to awaken

the audience to the reality of the system they live in and aims to change something,

in-yer-face awakens the audience to her/his own being, and does not believe in the

possibility of reforming the world through political theatre:

Everywhere Evil reigns supreme. Nobody is innocent, neither individual nor society, and the future holds no promise or change. This theatre is based on the assumption that any political theatre aiming at changing the world in a radical, revolutionary way is utterly impossible. In this respect, even more than the Holocaust, it is the slow disintegration of the Marxist critical project that seems to constitute the foundation stone for post-political theatre.19

World history is full of wars, and in the twentieth century this situation reached its

peak. In a world where people witnessed more cruelty every day, the belief in the

possibility of peace or change in systems which dehumanize human beings proved

to be a fruitless hope. In the twentieth century, cruelty and violence have taken

such a shape that the reality of them begin to mean less and less within the

background of everyday life. In-yer-face theatre tries to show this cruelty and

indifference as a part of human nature. Thus, another difference between the

political theatre and in-yer-face emerges; the political theatres, especially Edward

Bond’s plays, try to show that violence and aggression are not inherent in human

beings:

The idea that human beings are necessarily violent is a political device, the modern equivalent of the doctrine of original sin.20

In-yer-face, on the other hand, does not see human violence as only a result of the

social system. If there is so much suffering and violence on earth, and if this turns

out to be a never-ending process in which individuals can become indifferent, then

this cannot only be an outside factor, and it also proves that it is unchangeable:

In-yer-face never potentializes change. The worlds are stabilized states of horror, which makes them not political but fatalistic. They offer violence on an

19 Bérénice Hamidi-Kim, op. cit., p. 42. 20 Edward Bond, “Author’s Note: On Violence”, Plays: One, London, Methuen Drama Ltd., 1991, p.10.

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archetypal level as something inherent in us, not as the consequence of a social structure, as a political play would show; instead we’re given the dramatic equivalent of a horror movie. Evil is omnipresent, and claims innocent victims. There is no escape or possibility of change, because that evil exists on a deeper level.21

The idea that there is no escape or possibility of change in this trend recalls the

plays of the Absurd theatre, especially Samuel Beckett’s. The impossibility of

change and escape with the bare or claustrophobic stage designs of Beckett’s plays,

and his characters who do not develop throughout the plays, are also employed by

the playwrights of in-yer-face.

In in-yer-face, though in many plays the characters are detached from their

social/historical background, the writers generally choose to create eccentric

characters: “New European Drama tended to represent isolated groupings. Their

often marginalized world is shown as the only possible world. Drug addicts,

prostitutes, incestuous families, crazy or lost characters are given centre stage.”22

This can also create a link between political theatre and in-yer-face; political

theatre aimed to show ordinary people who have ordinary lives. It opened a space

for working class people and tried to demonstrate how social/political systems

work upon/victimize/abuse them. The in-yer-face choice of characters shows a

different face of life but what is listed above can also be interpreted as the working

of the social system (that all these characters are in this state because of the social

structure). The use of excessive violence, rape, torture, and sex scenes which have

shocking effects were found unnecessary and extreme by many critics. Because

they thought that the main aim of using such devices was to attain public attention

and to give the public, which likes to see violence and sex, what they want. Yet the

main aim of this trend is to show people, who fill the small halls of the theatre,

their inner realities. The use of excessive violence scenes also contributes to this

aim: it is to awaken people to their nature and their environment by shocking and

disturbing the audience, which recalls Bond’s aim of using violence in his plays:

21 Sanja Nikcevic, “British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director”, National Theatre Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, August 2005, p. 264. 22 ibid., p. 269.

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In fact the change from bleak realism in Saved to the Grand Guignol of Early

Morning or Lear is only a response to the public’s capacity for accommodating themselves to violence. As Bond admits: ‘If I went on stoning babies in every play then nobody would notice it anymore. I had to find [continually new] ways of making people notice, of making those things effective.’ This is what he has labelled ‘the aggro-effect’ in deliberate distinction from the Brechtian ‘alienation effect’.23

The desire to disturb the audience has it roots in Artaud’s Theatre of

Cruelty. It can be said that what Artaud declared in Theatre and Its Double is

realized in in-yer-face theatre: “Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea

of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt.”24 Aleks

Sierz also explains that the plays of in-yer-face disturb us because they leave us

face to face with the reality we avoid to encounter:

In-yer-face theatre always forces us to look at the ideas and feelings we would normally avoid because they are too painful, too frightening, too unpleasant or too acute. We avoid them for good reason – what they have to tell us is bad news: they remind us of the awful things human beings are capable of, and of the limits of our self-control.25

Thus, rather than being a part of popular culture, these plays confront us with those

things we like to avoid, and put them on stage and let them speak directly to us.

One can avoid these disturbing scenes if one does not read newspapers or watch

television and one can develop protection mechanisms or get more and more

indifferent to the news, because any means of getting information is detached from

the real event; the writings on the paper, the images on the screen, and thus

removes the individual one step far from the reality of the events, and reduces its

effects. However, one cannot stay indifferent to witness excessive violence and

torture scenes on stage which happen in front of her/him even though s/he is aware

of the fact that it is a play:

23 Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 169. 24 Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre and Cruelty”, The Theater and Its Double, New York, Grove Press Inc., 1958, p. 85. 25 Sierz, op. cit., p. 6.

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Live performance heightens awareness, increases potential embarrassment, and can make the representation of private pain on a public stage almost unendurable. But theatre depends not only on willing suspension of disbelief but also on empathy. For while no one believes literally in what is shown onstage – no actual atrocity is actually being committed – many spectators will invest emotionally in it. Although what is shown is make-believe, they take it close to their hearts. And because the actors are always real people breathing the same air as the audience, the public tends to empathize strongly with them.26

Screen violence justifies the use of violence by creating an unrest, a challenge

between good and bad, and when the good ones use physical violence it is thought

to be rightful. However, in the plays of in-yer-face, as Aleks Sierz points out, too,

there is also the disturbance of “catch(ing) ourselves enjoying the violence

vicariously.”27 Thus, what are we trying to avoid every day can be our unconscious

desire to watch violence on stage and enjoy it would exactly reveal us something

about our own nature. At the same time Ken Urban also discusses the use of

violence in all these plays and he comes to the conclusion that what is common in

all these plays is cruelty:

Rather than violence, the unifying feature is cruelty. Though sometimes associated with sadistic pleasure, cruelty is primarily characterized as the wilful causing of pain. In each of the four examples, one individual causes another to suffer. While it may seem a mere adjectival substitution to move from violent to cruel, on the contrary it opens these plays up to a larger conversation that a focus on violence alone forecloses.28

In in-yer-face, the use of scenes of violence, torture, rape, all are dramatic

tools to materialize the feeling of suffering and violence in order to disturb the

audience, and to open their eyes to a new reality. From the very beginning in these

plays, the tension begins to rise and the number of the scenes in which we see

physical/verbal violence, torture, and cruelty gradually increases. In-yer-face

theatre does not present the audience a time of pleasure to spend in the theatre hall.

The aim is rather to keep it on pins and needles through the experience of watching

26 Sierz, op. cit., p. 7. 27 ibid., p. 9. 28 Ken Urban, “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ‘Nineties”, National Theatre Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3, November 2004, p. 361.

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the play. As Sierz points out, these writers “want to question current ideas of what

is normal, what it means to be human, what is natural or what is real.”29

3.2. Verbal and Physical Violence and Traumatic Past

Memories in Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator

Penetrator30, Anthony Neilson’s one act play was written shortly after the

Gulf War, and first performed in 1993. Neilson puts on stage an evening when old

friends come together. He employs obscene language, verbal violence, sexual

symbols, disturbing childhood memories and stage violence, which are all typical

elements of in-yer-face theatre. Thus he tries to show the nature of human

relationships and the traumatic human memories of war and violence in the late

twentieth-century. Neilson’s use of silences, mimicry and symbolism in the stage

setting refers to the aggression and violent feelings that have become part of daily

life and human relations in the late twentieth century.

In contrast to Endgame and Lear, characters are not overwhelmed by a

catastrophic background or dark symbolism/realism. People now fight in distant

lands, experience traumatic events, and return home traumatized. Those who stay

at home continue their daily lives, personal issues are much more important. They

learn everything from television or the newspapers and the impact of the events in

a far-off place begins to be regarded as ordinary. People start to be indifferent to

what they witness from the screen.

The play starts with a soldier, Tadge who waits for a car to stop and take

him home. In the background, Max is in his house, masturbating. Then Alan, his

roommate, comes home and they continue with their daily routine and their happy

relationship is disturbed by the visit of Tadge, Max’s childhood friend, who acts in

a strange way. The tension of the play continually rises due to the silences and the

strange behaviour of Tadge. At the end of the play, Tadge threatens Alan with a

knife and releases him when Max accepts Tadge’s order to recall a rather traumatic

29 Sierz, op. cit., p. 5. 30 Figures 16&17.

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childhood memory he preferred to forget. The play ends when Max learns that

Alan has slept with his girl friend. He asks him to leave and the play ends with

Tadge and Max sitting in the living room and humming a tune.

Penetrator, similar to the two other plays studied here, conforms to the

classifications of violence and suffering. What Neilson highlights in the play is the

use of verbal violence that seems to create no effect because the obscene language

is seen as a part of the daily life of the characters. Yet verbal violence, on some

instances, reveals some problems about the past and when it is mingled with

physical humiliation it creates mental suffering. There is also symbolic violence

which takes its fuel from the society and the social norms, thus, it also causes a

suffering that comes from the others. The other here represents the society in

general and the suffering derives from it is mental. This mental suffering includes

the individual’s repression of his real self and his choices. The physical violence

used in this play does not create physical pain as we see in Lear, yet it leaves the

characters face to face with their repressed desires and secrets, which make them

suffer mentally again.

The verbal violence begins with the title of the play. The very title of the

play, as its significance is also revealed throughout the play, includes violence. In

the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the word “penetrate” means to “go into

or through something, especially with force or effort.” The same word has also a

sexual connotation which means to “insert the penis into the vagina or anus of a

sexual partner”31. Thus, when we take into consideration that the very title also

refers to Tadge’s paranoia and traumatic memories about the army, it stands as the

symbol of the violence going on in the play.

In scenes “One” and “Three” we see a young man (Tadge) on the street.

There are only lights from passing cars, “[H]is actions are slow and dreamlike,”32

and there is a “subhuman” voice-over. The voice-over’s speech and the action of

the scene oppose each other. What the subhuman voice tells the audience is about

a guy who hitch-hikes and meets a woman who offers him a ride (it is actually a

31 “Penetrator”, Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 751. 32Anthony Neilson, “Penetrator”, Plays: One. London, Methuen Drama, 1998, p. 61.

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pornographic story that Max has been reading as the audience watches Tadge’s

scene of hitch-hiking), but only at the end of the scene, Tadge moves, when a car

stops in front of him. The language used is obscene and the tone is violent in both

scenes. It is the same hormones that violence and desire for sex derive from, and it

is obvious that the tone in these scenes is violent more than sexual. The repetition

of the word “shoot” used for sexual intercourse refers to the anger and violence of

the character, rather than his sexual desire.

The use of language does not change when the two roommates in scene

“Two” begin their conversation. When Alan comes in:

Max: Arsehole. Alan: Fuckface. How’s life?33

The simple conversation between them includes filthiness and anger though they

do not have any problem with each other. The words they choose to salute each

other refer to penetration again. When we take into consideration Max’s choice of

a pornographic story which includes sentences like “[F]uck me with your big

tool”34 or “I want you to shoot me”35, these examples reveal the desire to prove

their manliness by using words with allusions to penetration or reading stories that

boost the male ego by glorifying the male sexual organ/capacity.

However, the incomprehensible side of their conversation is this angry tone

of their speech, when Alan just says that he “refuse(s) to believe that Starsky and

Hutch was shite”36 Max’s reaction first comes as a normal joke; “Rrrriiinnngg!!

This is Your Wake-Up Call. It was shite (…)” but it takes a more angry tone:

Max (…) It was shite than and it’s shite now. It was all shite. The Persuaders, The Protectors, The Invaders, The Avengers, The fucking Waltons,

Thunder-fucking-birds, The Man from Bollocks, The Hair-Bear Fucks, Mary

Mango and fucking Midge, all of it – shite. 37

Alan’s finding the TV show fascinating can be seen as expressing his childish

innocence, for he takes a childish pleasure from the show, yet Max uses “shite”

33 ibid., p. 63. 34 ibid., p. 61. 35 ibid., p. 62. 36 ibid., p. 66. 37 ibid., p. 66.

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five times and fucking three times in one and the same sentence for the same show.

His tone gets more angry; considering that all this stuff he talks about are the TV

shows from his childhood, his reaction can also be interpreted as his anger at

childhood memories or childhood innocence. When Alan begins to talk about Dr

Who this becomes more obvious:

Alan Dr Who was good. The Jon Pertwee ones. Max Dr Who was shite, for buck-toothed fucks in parkas. (…) Alan I thought you used to like it. (Pause.) You told me you liked it. (…)

Max I used to like Creamola Foam38, but when I walk into a pub I

expect beer.39

Max himself hints at the reason for his anger at all this old stuff. It is like

adolescent hatred of childhood habits; still liking those shows which were

fascinating in his childhood would make him a child like person, but he has to

show that he is a grown up man, he goes to pubs and he wants beer, not the stuff

only children like. Professor Jeffrey Fagan summarizes the reasons of adolescent

violence summarized in an article:

The most compelling function that violence served in the lives of respondents was to achieve and maintain status as a "tough" person - a reputation that conferred social power and dominance and protected the young men against victimization. Violence was also seen as a means to [...] control or humiliate another person, defy authority...attain retribution... and respond to challenges to one's manhood.40

Thus, Max’s excessive reaction, to the things that remind childhood, is in fact a

desire to prove that he is a grown up man. This is why he likes to humiliate Alan or

talk about the TV shows aggressively; he just thinks that this kind of behaviour

makes him more powerful and manlier in his relationship with Alan, whereas Alan

seems to be a child who has not reached his adolescence yet in the beginning of the

38 From writer’s own note on the text: “Creamola Foam was the kind of gassy chemical drink that only kids like.” (118) ibid., p.118. 39 ibid., p. 66. 40 Jeffrey Fagan, “Adolescent Violence: View From the Street”, January 1998, http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/fs000189.txt , 20.05.2008.

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play. He likes the old TV shows and he does not like Max’s making the “teddies

fuck”:

Alan I think they’ve had enough! Max […] You’re too sentimental. The teddies like to fuck. Alan They don’t. Max What do you think they do on their picnics? […] They’re beasts of the wild. Alan They are not beasts of the wild. They’re part of the family. Max Families are built on fucking. Fucking and secrets. (Pause) When I became a man, I put away childish things.41

Max in a way makes fun of Alan’s childish behaviour and Alan pretends as if he

does not know that animals and human beings do have sexual intercourse. Neilson

admits that “In any domestic routine, even when it’s just men together, someone

always takes the traditionally feminine part”42, indicating Alan’s role in the play. It

is true that until the end of the play Alan plays the feminine part not only by acting

out the wife’s duties in the house such as washing and taking out the laundry. He is

also like a mother who reminds Max of political correctness, or how to behave

himself:

Alan […] He watches Max squeeze the tea bag with his fingers.

Ever heard of a teaspoon?43

Besides reminding him of how he should behave, he also does not approve of his

way of talking about the war. As said before, this play was written soon after the

Gulf War, but the action of the play takes place during the war. When all this talk

about TV is going on, Max says:

Max If they’d just start bombing again we could have some decent telly. Alan You sick bastard.44

41 Neilson, op. cit., p. 74. 42 quoted in Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Kent, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2001, p. 77. 43 Neilson, op. cit., p. 67. 44 ibid., p. 67.

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Max takes some words literally and as insults when they are directed to him. Yet

when he uses filthy words even when he is talking to other girls, he wonders why

they take offence:

Alan […] What was she saying? Max Basically that because I use the word cunt, I’m a potential rapist. Alan She was offended. Max She didn’t seem to mind using the word dickhead. (Pause.) She didn’t seem to mind using the word bastard, and think about the meaning of that. Alan Yes but nobody uses that literally. Max (nods) The same with cunt. If I wanted to insult someone, why would I compare them to a vagina? It happens to be a part of the anatomy that I’m quite fond off, you know?45

“Cunt” is “slang for the female genitals, and one of very few swearwords in British

English to retain as full offensive power in most situations. It (is) used mainly as an

insult”46 yet Max gets angry because of its being taken so seriously. He puts the

blame on the girl’s being a lesbian and he reveals his anger of feminists and

homosexuals:

Max […] No, it’s bullshit. She was just another one of these fanny-bashers that Mikey collects so he can feel all right on. Alan furrows his brow at the ‘fanny-basher’ comment.

Max Don’t you start… I don’t give a rat’s arsehole what anybody does. But she’s got fuck all to do with her time, so she’s a professional feminist, just like Mel’s a professional poof. I’m sick of these fuckers. What do they want?47

Though he says that he does not care what anybody does like their sexual choices,

he does not like what they do, especially when it affects his life too. He uses the

word “fanny-bashers” instead of lesbians and it is Alan again who does not find the

use of that word appropriate which is understood from his frowning upon hearing

the word.

The relationship between Alan and Max is similar to the relationship

between Clov and Hamm in Endgame. Alan is similar to Clov who acted the role

of the female figure in the home, called the kitchen “my kitchen” and tried to

45 ibid., p. 70. 46 David Else, “Cunt”, British Language and Culture, Victoria, Lonely Planet, 2007, p. 141. 47 Neilson, op. cit., p. 70.

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establish an order by putting things in order. Max, who messes around and has all

his needs supplied by Alan, is more like Hamm. This relationship between them,

their daily speech and joking includes aggression, though they regard this as

normal, yet like Clov, Alan also gets exhausted of Max’s behaviour:

[…] the door bell rings. They look at each other, horrified. Alan Who’s that? Max I don’t know, do I? I haven’t got X-ray fucking eyes! Alan Are you expecting anybody? Max shakes his head. Max Answer it, then. Alan You answer it. Max (pause) What if it’s Laura? […] You answer it. Alan I always have to answer it! […] He gets up sighing. […] Alan What if it is Laura? Are you in? Max (shakes head) No! Alan turns to the door.

Max Yes! Alan turns back to him again, looking exasperated.

Max (pause) No. I’m not in. No. Sighing, he goes to the door.

48

Now Alan seems to be the one who is more mature in the play and it is Max, who

acts more like a child. Neilson creates a character who tries to escape from his past,

yet still encounters with it by behaving childishly. Max makes the “teddies fuck”49,

and as Alan reminds him, he gives his giraffe over to Laura, for it is she who burns

it:

Max […] When I became a man, I put away childish things. Alan You didn’t put anything away. You gave that giraffe thing to Laura and she set fire to it. Pause. Max goes back to the sette, sits down, drinks some beer and starts to

roll another joint. Alan sits the teddies down, somewhere safe. He sits down

too.

Alan I’m sorry. Max (nods) It’s all right.50

48 ibid., pp. 76-77. 49 ibid., p. 69. 50 ibid., pp. 74-75.

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It is understood that Max really feels upset about the subject, for in this scene he is

like a child who had to give up his toy. His childish tone continues when Tadge

visits them. Max asks him “[H]ow’s the army life? Did you see the world, meet

new people, blew their brains out and all that?”51 He talks about a violent act as if

it was a normal thing that happens in one’s life, and he seems to derive a childish

pleasure he gets from it. However, he does this because again, he thinks violence is

something that belongs to the world of adult men, so liking violence and talking

about it distances him from childhood, makes him an appropriate man according to

the society he lives in. He does not even focus on the problem that Tadge has a

blood stain on his jacket, which he (Tadge) indifferently passes over by saying

“[I]t’s not mine.”52 He also does not care about the fact that Tadge acts a bit

strange. Alan says that this could be because of being brainwashed in the army,

yet, the point Max is concerned about is Tadge’s father’s not being his real father.

It is understood that Max takes the word “bastard” literally by saying “[S]he didn’t

seem to mind using the word bastard, and think about the meaning of that”53

though the word is “now a general insult”54. His being concerned about Tadge’s

father issue and his reaction to the word “bastard” show that he puts so much

importance to the father-son relationship. The possibility of Tadge’s being a

“bastard” is disturbing and it is more important than the fact that Tadge is dispelled

from the army and he has blood stain on his jacket. When we consider Max’s

desire to prove his manliness, the importance of the father figure begins to make

sense. Father is the role-model for the son; son learns to be man from his father.

Any disturbance in this relationship creates problems in son’s becoming a proper

male:

MAS writing has often called up an anecdotal evidence to suggest the son’s masculinity is solely derived through his father’s role and sensibility. Academic research has also concentrated upon the father-son relationship as the primary conveyor of masculinity across generations.55

51 ibid., p. 78. 52 ibid., p. 77. 53 ibid., p. 70. 54 Else, op. cit., p. 140. 55 Jonathan Rutherford, Men’s Silences: Predicaments in Masculinity, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 19.

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The absence of a (desired) father figure reflects itself as the loss of identity in the

individual as we see in Tadge’s situation. Tadge believes that Ronnie is not his

father. Yet his saying “[H]e’s not my dad”56 also sounds like he does not want him

as a father figure, which is clearly understood from his choice of a name for his

“real” father:

Tadge […] But I can have anything I want see. On account of my dad. Alan I thought you didn’t know who he was. Tadge nods. Max Who? Tadge (pause) Norman Schwarzkopf. A long pause. Alan smiles.

Alan Stormin’ Norman? Tadge nods. […] Tadge Seriously. I found it all out. My mum was over in America before she had me. That’s when it happened. […]57

Norman Schwarzkopf58 was an American general in both the Gulf War and in

Vietnam who was also referred as Stormin’ Norman and he is remembered as a

battlefield hero after the Operation Desert Storm.59 Tadge’s choosing Stormin’

Norman as his imaginary father shows that through the relationship with a father

figure who is powerful and masculine, he desires to be a proper male or to show

that he is already one. His being in the army also shows this desire to be the

powerful man, yet we learn that he is discharged from the army which raises

questions about his appropriateness as a male. His imaginary father can move these

questions away. Stormin’ Norman’s being a war hero is also important in another

context; he symbolizes the violent, destructive power of masculinity which is

closely connected with the idea of being a real man.

Tadge’s imaginary father, his joining to the army, Max’s childish

behaviour, his aggression against anything that belongs to his childhood, his insults

56 Neilson, op. cit., p. 80. 57 ibid., p. 89. 58 “[…] as this play is not really about the army, it’s not absolutely vital that Tadge’s imaginary father is a military man, just that he’s a public figure. However, it makes more thematic sense that he is.” From writer’s own note on the text: Neilson, op. cit., p. 119. 59 Harry J. Maihafer, Brave Decisions: Fifteen Profiles in Courage and Character from American Military History, Virginia, Brassey’s ,1999, p. 226.

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and humiliations draw the attention to a problem about masculinity and childhood

that is deep inside both Tadge’s and Max’s psyche. Its hints are also given in the

tensioned encounter of two old friends. When Tadge enters the stage, “Max (is)

surprised”60 to see him. He welcomes and shows his astonishment by using words

like “[Y]ou squaddie bastard,” “[W]hat the fuck are you doing here?”61 As well as

being surprised to see him in his home (because he was in the army), he is also

surprised to see an old friend from his past. Tadge reminds Max of his childhood

which he tries to suppress into his unconscious; as we have seen, Max does not

even like the TV shows of his childhood. Yet unlike those TV shows, Max desires

to see Tadge and also does not want to remember his past with him. Tadge is a

childhood friend with whom he shared lots of things and in Sierz words, he

somewhat symbolizes the childhood innocence62. Yet, at the same time he is a part

of his past that he tries to forget, for some of his memories show that childhood is

not a period that is innocent and devoid of sexual awareness. When the three begin

to talk about Tadge and Max’s childhood memories, the play takes its course

towards an unavoidable end which is somewhat sensed through the development of

the play since the entrance of Tadge. As it is seen Tadge acts strangely all through

the play and even the stage directions indicate his strangeness: “Tadge stares at

them, smiling, looking quite mad.”63 Before the final speech of the play, we learn

lots of things about Tadge both from himself and from what Max and Alan tell to

each other. Max tells Alan why he is called Tadge, a memory that is based on

sexuality and sexual humiliation:

Max: So we were all in the showers after swimming and these primary seven boys came in looking for him. Alan: […] Max: […] Anyway they were all dancing round him like twats, gobbing and slapping him with towels, snapping the elastic on his trunks, all that stuff. There were too many of them to do anything. Anyway – just one of those things, hot water, blood pumping – he got a… Indicates erection. Alan winces.

[…]

60 Neilson, op. cit., p. 77. 61 ibid., p. 77. 62 Sierz, op. cit., p. 78. 63 Neilson, op. cit., p. 83.

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Max: […] So when they saw this… A fucking gift. Pissing themselves, pointing, chanting, and there he was in the corner. But it wouldn’t go down. It just stayed there. […] Max: So people started calling him Tadger, behind his back first, because he tried to beat up anyone who did, but sheer weight of numbers won out, and it just stuck through secondary until nobody remembered how it had ever started. Alan: Apart from you. Max: Apart from me. (Pause.) But it worked out OK because by fourth year all the girls thought he was called Tadger because he had such a big one.64

While Neilson creates a background for Tadge, he also reveals the layers of

violence, which began in early childhood; bullying each other at school, especially

a gang of boys’ bullying all the other children who seem to be weaker, has no

apparent reason at all. It is just for the sake of being violent which makes them feel

more like a grown-up. Yet at the same time Neilson draws the attention towards

sexuality. The problematic memory is set in a shower room where they also feel

insecure for being naked, and the humiliation in the showers ends up with an

undesired outcome, he has an erection and begins to be called “Tadger” from that

day on. “Tadger” is a word used in slang meaning “a penis”. Being called Tadge

for years continually reminds him of that day in the showers. He has an erection

because of the guys who are laughing and dancing around him and there is also a

fear of being “misunderstood”, a fear of being regarded as a “homosexual”. This

incident also reveals something about Max, for everybody forgets about this

incident, except him and it is Alan who indicates this point. It is not only because

of being close friends that he is the only one who remembers the event, but also it

shows that he also identified himself with Tadge. Max’s desire to prove his

manhood also carries the same anxiety of being humiliated and despised if he is

thought to be a homosexual which is not yet revealed. Yet Max also makes fun of

the event while he tells the story to Alan, they laugh together, and later they feel

sorry for laughing. This shows that they do not care so much about an event that

made the other person suffer besides signifying Max’s continual effort to act like a

heterosexual young man would.

The roots of Max and Tadge’s friendship go back to the years when they

were kids:

64 ibid., p. 92.

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Max [...] First time I ever met him, I was five years old, I had a toy rifle. He asked me for a shot but I said no, and he punched me in the fucking gob. (Smiles.) Naturally we became great friends” 65

As little boys they are introduced to violence, Max’s toy is a rifle, and Tadge

punches him because Max refuses to give it to him. Though they fight the first time

they meet, they become good friends. Yet, it also shows that their relationship is

based on this power struggle. While Tadge symbolizes physical power, Max

symbolizes the brain as Tadge himself indicates:

Tadge You were the brains, eh? Max (nods) And you were the brawn.66

As brain and brawn they constitute an entity, yet as being the brain Max chooses to

go to college and breaks the entity, and makes new friends like Alan. Being the

physically powerful one, Tadge joins the army and as Alan says he is brainwashed

or adapted to the system:

Tadge Have you got a problem? Alan (pause) Not with you, Tadge. Tadge Who with then? Alan (a long pause) The army. […] Tadge Would you like it if Saddam Hussein was running the country? Alan Of course not… Tadge (shakes head) We know everything about him. We’ve got stuff you wouldn’t believe. We could kill him any time we like without going anywhere near him.67

Tadge, in fact, breaks the everyday routine of Alan and Max’s lives. Alan and Max

constitute a couple who live together and continue their daily routine of laundry,

card playing, smoking marijuana, nagging at each other about the house, or

gossiping about the relationships with women. They watch the news about the war

on television and as stated before they feel indifferent to what is really going on. It

is a kind of entertainment for Max to watch the bombings in Baghdad. In fact what

65 ibid., p. 93. 66 ibid., p. 110. 67 ibid., p. 83.

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he reflects is his anger and personal pain that he suffers from because of the

breaking up. Sierz also refers to the personal pain:

Penetrator has its origins in personal pain […] (it) is firstly about ‘how sexuality can be transformed into a hugely destructive force’. It is also a play about male company. ‘There’s nothing like the ending of a long-term relationship with a woman to make you appreciate men; one tends to retreat to the cocoon of male companionship.’68

Max after his break up, returns to his life with his home mate. The trauma of this

break up becomes the focal point of their daily routine. It can be read as a criticism

of the society on the writer’s part; though in the background we hear the news from

Baghdad, Max continues masturbating, jokes with Alan and complains about his

relationship. The little problems of daily life seem to be more important. But this

can also be read as the writer’s revealing the truth about the modern world in

which people are indifferent to serious events like war as long as they do not

concern them personally.

Yet Tadge’s entrance into this safe little world forces them to face the

reality outside. He makes Max remember the undesired childhood memories,

disturbs Alan’s peace and makes them face the truth of what happens to people out

there. As the title suggests, Tadge’s entering their world can be seen as a

penetration, for he enters their life with force and effort. Talking of personal pain

and suffering, it can be said that it is Tadge who really and seriously suffers from

what he has experienced. Though Alan and Max think that he is acting strange

because of what has happened to him in the army, the truth is much different. As

said before, Tadge joins the army after Max goes to college. Though they were

close friends once, Max in his new life meets other people, too. As Sierz also

suggests, what Tadge feels for Alan is jealousy, “Tadge is jealous of Alan’s

friendship with Max”69, he is jealous of him because he has taken his place in

Max’s life. His jealousy adds up to the tension of the play. Tadge continually looks

at Alan, and when he wants to lie down, he refuses to sleep in Max’s room and

68 Sierz, op. cit., p. 76.. 69 ibid., p. 78.

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asks Alan “[W]hich one’s yours?”70 It can easily be understood that Tadge suffers

because of losing that old bond with Max. However, it is not only the lost

memories of childhood that create suffering but it is also what those memories hide

behind.

Tadge is discharged from the army, is paranoid and undergoes a trauma. He

believes that there are people who are looking for him, because he has run away

from “[T]he Penetrators.”71 He makes up a story which he himself really believes:

Tadge […] They’ll find me and they’ll kill me so I can never tell. And then they’ll destroy all my files like I was never here. They can do that… […] They stick thing up you. (Pause) Up your arse. […] they stick things up you. All sorts of things. I found out about them and they kept me in this… black room, it was a… just a black room. They drugged me. I never saw their faces. They’d bring me round every now and then so they could do more things to me. It must have been weeks. I don’t know how long. Maybe months.72

What he makes up is about being tortured; he believes he was in a black room

where he physically and psychologically suffered. Alan is not surprised to hear

this, because he says “I’ve heard stories like that before.”73 Yet both Max and Alan

do not actually believe him, they think that the army made him go mad. As Alan

says “[H]e’s been out there learning to kill people” and according to Alan this

changed Tadge. Yet, as Sierz also indicates, it is not only the army that drives him

mad:

The army doesn’t drive Tadge mad, but his own unreconciled impulses do. Penetrator shows how sexual repression can turn into violence. But […] Tadge can only express his feelings through pornographic fantasies and violent imaginings about Penetrators…74

70 Neilson, op. cit., p. 90. 71 ibid., p. 84. 72 ibid., p. 84-85. 73 ibid., p. 85. 74 Sierz, op. cit., p. 78.

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However, these imaginings lead him to act like a psychopath; he takes out a knife

from his bag and goes into “exaggerated poses with it.”75 Then he sees Alan’s

teddies and the tension continues to rise:

He sees the teddies and grabs one of them, holding the knife at its throat. Max

finds this amusing.

Alan What is it everyone’s got against my fucking teddies?! Tadge (in funny voice) Confess or the teddy gets his head fucked off. Confess. He grins at Max, nodding ‘shall I?’ Max laughs, giving teddy the thumbs

down.

Alan (weary) Oh don’t… Tadge Then confess. Confess or the teddy bleeds like an Arab. Confess.[ … Max You better confess. Alan Confess to what? … Tadge You have until five to confess. One. The teddy will die. Confess. Two. Teddy gets it up the arse. Three. Confess. … Tadge Confess, Penetrator. Four. He holds teddy up.

Last chance. Last chance to save teddy. Confess. Alan (acting bored) Please forgive me, teddy, I’m innocent. Tadge Five. And with a slight nod of reluctance, he tears the teddy to shreds. It is a vicious

and frightening action, all humour going from his face. He finishes, red in the

face from effort, and drops the disembowelled teddy on the ground. Pause.76

Tadge’s holding the knife to the throat of a teddy bear draws a connection between

him and Max in their aggression towards their childhood. Tadge’s mood changes

towards anger. At the same time, his choosing Alan’s teddy, and his threatening

him show his anger for him as well. The next thing he does is to point “the knife

square at Alan’s chest.”77 It is important that until Tadge enters, all violence has

been verbal. After Tadge makes his appearance the tension rises not only in the

action, but also in the silent pauses. Yet in the knife scene the tension reaches its

climax. Neilson indicates that,

[O]nce the teddy had been cut to pieces, it signalled that anything was possible. After all, this was a literal symbol of the destruction of childhood.78

75 Neilson, op. cit., p. 104-5. 76 ibid., pp. 105-106. 77 ibid., p. 106. 78 Quoted in Aleks Sierz, op. cit., p. 79.

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The threatening of the teddy, which was regarded as a joke, suddenly turns into a

serious problem. When the knife is pointed at Alan’s chest, fear overcomes Max

and Alan while Tadge is threatening Max with killing Alan if he does not tell their

childhood memories. Tadge who believes that his father is not his real father, and

who is bored of his nick name “Tadger” is in search of his identity. What creates

insanity, frustration and aggression in Tadge is not having a life of his own. He

does not want to be called Tadge, but he also does not remember his real name:

Max […] I don’t know what to believe, Tadge. Tadge Don’t call me that! I don’t want to be called that any more! Max (pause) That’s fine by me. Tadge It’s not my name! Max (nods) I know. (Pause.) I won’t call you it again. I’ll call you Ronnie. Tadge That’s not my name either! Max (pause) Not Ronnie Junior!? Tadge No! That’s not my name! Max […] What is your name? Tadge (pause) I don’t know, do I? I don’t have a name!79

This loss of identity is one of the main reasons why he forces Max to tell him their

childhood memories which Max does not like to remember. As Neilson suggests,

this is also “a penetration through the depths of memory”80. Remembrance of these

uncanny memories will finally release the tension that is rising continually.

When Max begins to tell those memories forced by Tadge, it is revealed

that why they feel aggression against their childhood:

Tadge […] Tell me about before. Tell me about the woods. […] Max The woods – what about the woods? Tadge The night we stayed out. […] Max The Woods! The Woods! (Pause.) It turned dark on us. We got lost. It was past nine and we couldn’t get home… […] Tadge We built a bivouac. […] Tadge You were scared. Max So were you. […] It got really cold. Tadge What did we do? Max (pause) We uh… we huddled together. To keep warm.81

79 Neilson, op. cit., p. 98. 80 Quoted in Aleks Sierz, op. cit., p. 78. 81 Neilson, op. cit., pp. 109-111.

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It takes two pages of conversation to bring Max to the point when he really begins

to talk about what Tadge exactly wants to hear. Max first says that he does not

“remember” and tries to change Tadge’s mind about it. Naomi Norguay indicates

that:

What is remembered and what is forgotten are always in relation to each other […] What is worth remembering and what is not are up to negotiation. This suggests that forgetting is the effect of an active process which can involve denial, refusal, discrediting, silencing, omitting. This process produces forgetting because it is possible to forget what one has decided to deny, refuse, omit.82

Max seems like he has forgotten the memories that Tadge asks him to tell, because

he tries to refuse the traumatic memory. In addition, he keeps his silence about the

subject in the beginning and when he begins to tell it, he tells the story by omitting.

It is difficult for Max to tell what happened in the past:

Tadge And then what happened? Max doesn’t answer. Tadge What happened?! Max You know what happened. Tadge Tell me! Max You took my trousers down. Tadge And then? Max My pants. A long pause.

I lay down on the leaves. (Pause.) You pulled my shirt up. You listened to my heart. […] Tadge And I touched you. […] Tadge Where did I touch you? Max You touched my balls… you turned me over and spread my arse. […] Max […] And then they came… […] Tadge It was better before they came.83

We learn that back in the past, when they were children, they had a homosexual

experience, though Neilson indicates that this is the time of childish innocence

82 Naomi Norguay, “Identity and Forgetting”, The Oral History Review, Vol. 26/1, Gale Group, 1999, p. 3. 83 Neilson, op. cit., p. 111-112..

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when “sexuality […] (does not) dominate their lives”84. This memory haunts them

in their present lives. The reason for Max’s aggression towards male and female

homosexuality is explained and now Tadge’s fantasies gain meaning. They both

see homosexuality as something they have to deny because they were probably

found out in that peculiar situation or just got embarrassed thinking that people saw

them in that situation. As in this way Max covers his anxieties, he always makes

jokes about Alan’s possibility of being a homosexual and Tadge has wild fantasies

about being penetrated with a “wooden pole”85 or a knife.

To the question why Max forgets or seems to forget what happened in the

past has its answer in the society he lives in, as Norguay indicates,

The imperative to forget may not be one’s own choice; forgetting is often socially organized. What is worth remembering and what is remembered can be determined and regulated by larger social forces and structured and maintained through authoritative discourses.86

In fact, everything Max and Tadge do is an outcome of the symbolic violence of

the system and the society that works upon them. As Bourdieu indicates:

Male privilege is also a trap, and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances… Manliness, understood as sexual or social reproductive capacity, but also as the capacity to fight and to exercise violence […], is first and foremost duty.87

Homosexuality is not accepted by the society, the patriarchal system they live in

forces them to fit into the socially defined role of the man which includes being

heterosexual. Thus, though there is no physical interaction from any authority

figure from society in their experience, the symbolic existence of the rules and

expectations force them to forget or try to live as nothing has happened. Yet their

actions reveal that how they try to repress their homosexuality, and act like a

heterosexual man. Even Tadge’s joining the army is to prove his being a “normal”,

powerful man. Thus, this repression and effort to be someone they are really not

84 quoted in Sierz, op. cit., p. 78. 85 Neilson, op. cit., p. 85. 86 Norguay, op. cit., p. 4. 87 Bourdieu, op. cit., pp. 50-51.

99

causes them to suffer, which conforms to the third level of suffering in Freud’s

classification, caused by the society’s invisible oppression. This mental suffering

and the repression of desires for years cause aggression, as Freud says, “the more a

man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense become the aggressive

tendencies”88, and thus the tension of the play rises.

However, after the hidden past is revealed, the tension returns to normal for

Tadge and Max; Tadge lets go off the knife and after the relief of confession and

Max and Tadge “just sit there.”89 At this point Alan loses his nerve; since his

entrance on the stage, Tadge has disturbed Alan’s peace. It is Alan who he terrified

and threatened with the knife which led Alan to lose his nerves:

Alan He comes here – this bastard comes here – spouting all this shit about Penetrators and Storming Fucking Norman – he rips my fucking teddy to pieces and then he sticks a fucking knife in my throat whilst I listen to the two of you recount some dull commonplace little Doctor game – ! […] I don’t care about you Tadger fucking Tadger! You were a fucking bully then, you’re a bully now and you fucking joined up and so maybe you got fucked up the arse maybe you didn’t but whatever you get you fucking deserve! (To Max.) And what are you just some fucking henchman to this moron! Well I want him out, I want him out now and I don’t want to ever see his ugly face again unless he has a muzzle on him do you fucking hear me???!!!90

Alan, who has always tried to be calm and behave politically correct, reveals that

now he has to suppress his aggression. Yet when he shows his anger, Max

confesses that he knows about the affair he had with his girlfriend Laura. And,

rather than asking Tadge to leave, he wants Alan to go:

Max Get out, Alan. Just go. Alan (pause) Where can I go? Max I don’t give a fuck. Just go. Go before I… Alan Before you what? Kick my cunt in? Max (pause) I wouldn’t do that. I’m not that sort of guy. Alan (softly) No. I know you’re not. Max (pause) But I’d get Tadge to do it.91

88 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. by Joan Riviere, London, L & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1927, p. 79. 89 Neilson, op. cit., p. 112. 90 ibid., p. 113. 91 ibid., p. 115.

100

Thus Max chooses his childhood friend with whom he has a secret past, over Alan.

It can be seen that to Max the betrayal of a friend is more important and

unacceptable than the psychopathic behaviour of an old friend with whom he had

an experience he does not want to remember. Sierz makes such a comment on

these three men:

[…] despite the fact that he plays the female role, Alan is the most heterosexual of the three men. Unlike Max and Tadge, he is untouched by homoeroticism. At the end, the revelation of Alan’s betrayal of Max turns the play upside-down. It amounts to a satire on men: ‘It takes this horrendous situation at knife-point to get Max to admit he’s had even a vaguely homosexual experience. Then this is completely cancelled by his knowledge of Alan and Laura’s infidelity.’ Neilson sees this as ‘true of men’s priorities’. Sexual betrayal ranks high in male psyche.92

To betray one’s trust is something irreparable according to Neilson. Yet what Max

does here is not only about betrayal’s importance in male psyche. The problem is

the love between men does not conform to the rules of society. Homosexual love

has to be replaced by love for women which turn men into rivals. Rather than a

relationship which is based upon rivalry, Max chooses to put an end to this

friendship. The very end of the play where he chooses Tadge over Alan and begin

to “munch on the Rolos”93 can be interpreted as a return to their childhood

friendship. The scene resembles “Scene two”, in which Alan and Max were

chatting, smoking marijuana and playing cards, though Neilson leaves it open if

this repression will continue or not, the only change in this scene is Alan’s being

replaced by Tadge. And this scene makes one wonder if the play is returned where

it started.

The play demonstrates the tensioned relationship between friends, and the

traumatic memories’ effects on these friendly ties. As the tradition of in-yer-face

requires, in Penetrator, the daily lives and personal issues of characters seem more

important than what is going around them in the world. Their aggression, use of

violence seem to occur from unnecessary things going on in their lives, yet

underneath this surface appearance, there lies a criticism of society which forces

92 Sierz, op. cit., p. 77. 93 ibid., p. 116.

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its individuals to accept certain kinds of norms, rejecting the existence of other

possible choices that an individual makes for her/himself. Neilson emphasizes that

socially constructed masculinity leads the characters to violence which was also

dominant in Bond’s Lear. Moreover, the idea of conforming to this social

construction which is the representative of symbolic violence in the play causes the

characters to repress their desires and suffer mentally which is the reason of

aggression that comes out as verbal or physical violence in the play.

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CONCLUSION

The contemporary trends in theatre break the traditional rules of drama by

not conforming to the technical rules of playwriting. Their characters go through a

suffering which comes out as nothing in the end. The plays lack a climax in the

traditional sense. Yet, all demonstrate the situation of human beings in the modern

age of atom bombs, world wars, gender and race issues and the struggle for power.

What is central to these three plays is the use of violence and pain as the

main plot. Everything in the texts, including stage directions, stage setting, pauses,

silences, conversations, soliloquies, and the physical actions symbolize or openly

mean violence or suffering. All of them present us some familiar binary

oppositions like victim/victimizer, master/slave, sane/insane. Yet, each of them

also blur the clash between them, and change the balance in the oppositions by

questioning the relationship between both sides.

Beckett’s Endgame one of the examples of the Absurd Drama, which

arises right after the Second World War, shows the psychological effects of

genocide and holocaust. The play is set in a claustrophobic interior, and in a

catastrophic background. The personal suffering and aggression is present from the

very first sentence of the play. The violence in the play is mainly limited to verbal

and symbolic violence; the setting and stage directions create aggression for the

audience. The characters do not develop throughout the play and nothing changes,

everything returns to its former state at the end.

In many ways, Beckett seems the characteristic dramatist of the 1950s, a decade made anxious by the threat of holocaust. In fact Beckett’s characters often seem to have been set down to in a world already ravaged by some disaster which threatens human survival Beckett is not so much concerned with people as social and political creatures as with the human condition in a metaphysical sense.1

1 Brockett, et. al., op. cit., p. 474.

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In Beckett’s Endgame, each part of Freud’s classification of suffering is apparent.

Characters suffer because of their own bodies and because of the external world,

yet, what is dominant to the text is the suffering that comes from their relationship

with each other.

Bond’s Lear on the other hand presents the audience with Lear’s

development and Bond is concerned about the people as social and political beings.

Similar to the plot of a classical tragedy, king Lear is dethroned by his daughters,

begins to take care of pigs in a farmer boy’s house where he brings destruction.

Then he is first sent to prison by his daughters, and then by Cordelia, where he is

blinded. This blindness enables him to see the social and political system in a new

light. Yet, his development is not an optimistic one as his death in the end also

suggests. His development, hence, is a development in suffering and aggression.

While the physical violence is dominant to the text, it also reveals the symbolic

violence because the victimizer/oppressor uses the power that s/he takes from the

culturally established titles like being a king or a soldier. Thus, this use of violence

causes both physical and mental suffering. The suffering that comes from other

men represents also the suffering that is caused by the individual’s relationship

with society and the system. So, Freud’s classification’s third part is dominant in

this play, furthermore, what Bond creates in this play makes the suffering that

comes from our body and the external world, parts of this last and the worst kind of

suffering. The physical pain caused by torture or the natural conditions are directly

connected with the relationship between the characters and their direct and

physical attempts to nature. Bond presents the audience, the use of violence, torture

and rape as political means, and suffering as the result of repression. However, as

the one act play of Beckett ends as it begins, Lear also draws vicious circles in

itself.

Neilson’s Penetrator, which is more contemporary, makes a comment

upon the personal issues’ gaining more importance in the lives of individuals.

What would be called indecent and violent becomes the daily language between

friends. But, he also does not forget to set his play in the background of the Gulf

War to show the indifference to the war. Penetrator is the only play in this study in

which verbal violence reaches its peak, and physical violence is also dominant in

104

the text as well as symbolic violence. When it comes to suffering though Neilson

does not use the suffering that comes from both the external world and the

individual’s body, he focuses on the suffering that comes from the relationship

with other people. Repeating Bond’s pattern, he shows this kind of suffering as the

outcome of the individual’s relation with society and the system as well as her/his

relationship with people around. Neilson explores the tensioned relationships

between old friends, and shows how the suppression of sexual feelings can come

out as aggression, even more as insanity and violence.

One of the most important things about these plays is that all of them are

written in the different times of the second half of the twentieth century, yet all of

them are written in the shadow of different wars that affected the world. Thus, each

of them portrays characters that are at a loss. Violence has coined the century, and

it coins the plays too, and suffering is another word that describes both the century

and the plays. The characters are not able to end their sufferings as long as they do

not choose death, and for example in Endgame, choosing death is even not

possible because taking action is not possible, either:

The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different […] It is not up to the individual sufferer to abolish suffering or mitigate it to a degree which theory cannot anticipate, to which it can set no limit.2

As well as suffering, there is no end to violence, too. As mentioned before

suffering and violence together create unbreakable vicious circles. Though Girard

suggests that there is always a reason for violence though it cannot be “taken

seriously”3, the rootless violence in these plays for whatever reason it is justified,

show the irrationality of violence. However, the irrationality of violence does not

change the fact that the aggressor always finds someone to reflect his aggression

on:

Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these

2 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ed. by E. B. Ashton, London, Routlegde, 1990, p. 203. 3 Girard, op. cit., p. 2.

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reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.4

As we have seen in the relationship between Hamm and Clov in Endgame or Lear

and the Third Worker in Lear, or Tadge and the Teddy or Alan, the aggression

caused by others can be reflected upon some other people; like Hamm’s treating

Clov cruelly because of his own childhood which was devoid of love and affection

from his parents or as we have seen in Lear that Lear’s frustration to hear that his

daughters are marrying his enemies is reflected to the Third Worker, because he

cannot kill his daughters, his aggression finds another victim for himself.

What is also common to these plays is the use of violence, suffering and

disturbing elements as a part of the stage design which enables the playwright to

disturb the audience. The three trends that these plays are taken, try to awaken the

individual and make her/him aware of one’s existence. And also make one aware

of what is going around; especially Bond’s Lear and Neilson’s Penetrator

coincide in this use of excessive violence scenes to break the familiarity of the

audience to the violence by disturbing them.

When Aristotle’s idea of catharsis is taken into consideration, these plays

lack characters who reach their catharsis; there is no chance of release of powerful

feelings though the plot reaches to its climax. Eagleton points out that “If tragic

heroes meet with a fall, Beckett’s figures fail to rise to a height from which a fall

would be possible.”5 Thus, that makes it impossible to feel relieved, either, because

as well as Beckett’s Endgame, the other two plays, too, rather than desiring to

enable a catharsis for the audience, they aim to disturb them. While for Aristotle

the confrontation with the powerful feelings should be left in the theatre while

leaving the play, the contemporary trends aim the contrary. Bond wants his

audience to carry this experience even after leaving the theatre, so is Neilson’s aim,

which connects them with Brecht, as Eagleton indicates “Brecht believed that the

audience should check in their excessively tender feelings with their hats and

4 ibid., p. 2. 5 Eagleton, op. cit., p.67.

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coats”6. Eagleton also remarks that while watching tragedy “[W]e feel fear, but are

not inspired to run away. We are so to speak, shaken but not stirred.”7 The

contemporary drama changes this idea too, the audience feels so disturbed while

watching especially the plays which belong to the Political theatre and “in-yer-

face” that they hardly bear this experience in the theatre hall or leave the play.

Aleks Sierz informs his reader about the audience’s reaction to an in-yer-face play

Snatch:

With a full-on play such as this, you expect an emotional reaction from the audience. When Beth mutilated ‘her’ manhood, there were gasps. Some people hid their eyes. Next to me, two young women squirmed. Men instinctively squeezed their thighs together. There were groans. When the play was over, and the audience began to leave, some people complained about the play’s viciousness, others hated its brutal images, but a few were excited by its emotional punch. 8

These plays shock, disturb and haunt the audience with their use of violence and

pain. By using these three consecutive plays, my aim was to draw a connection

between them in terms of violence and pain. Consequently what we gather from

these plays is the change of tone and criticism in each play. Yet, in their attitude to

their historical background the loose ends meet up. The psychology of wars, world

events, tensioned relationships between powerful countries create hopelessness

about a peaceful future. Paranoia and trauma reigns after the wars, and this dark

imaginings are reflected to the plays. Beckett chooses not to comment upon the

individual’s social and political identity but he chooses to create a dystopia where

human beings are stuck in a vicious routine. Bond reacts to these unending process

of wars by creating a play in which the power struggle, hatred and suffering

continually create new wars. Neilson shows how the individual is detached from

the rest of the world and became familiar with and indifferent to unending wars

around the world by enclosing her/himself to his own world of personal sufferings

and experience. Each playwright shows that socially constructed systems, one’s

relationship with other people around her/him are the things that lie in the core of

6 ibid., p. 154. 7 ibid., p. 153. 8 Sierz, op. cit., p. 3.

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all pain and they also multiplies human being’s capacity of being violent, because

it is these relationships which constitute the society and turn it into a mechanic,

self-repeating machine.

Another point they highlight is that the violence mainly associated with the

male gender, the great oppressors, victimizers, torturers are mainly the male

characters in these plays. Lear’s cruel daughters and Cordelia in Lear, though their

violence cannot be justified, just reflects what is reflected upon them, each learns

to be cruel and merciless from their fathers or from becoming a victim of violence.

However, each play shows that both males and females, torturers and the tortured

ones are victims to the time and the social system they live in, which unceasingly

dehumanizes individuals by forcing them to conform to certain and strict rules.

For each playwright, the future of human beings is in danger as long as they

continue to suppress their feelings and desires which will in one way or other come

up as violence. In each play violence is being used to fight with violence, as Innes

suggests,

Using force to counter this violence only perpetuates a vicious circle that, in the atomic age, will inevitably lead to the annihilation of mankind.9

To see the change and development of the theme of violence and pain in

British Drama in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, the works of

Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Philip Ridley can be studied. Each of these

writers, whose writings belong to the tradition of in-yer-face, continue to discuss

the violence and suffering reigns the individual’s psyche and the world s/he lives

in.

9 Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 155.

108

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Fig. 1. Ellie Kurttz, Hitomi Manaka in Ninagawa Company’s Titus Andronicus, 2006.10

Fig. 2. Tom Holte, Image from Titus Andronicus, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1972.11

10http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/theater/08bran.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin , 30.05.2008. 11

http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/dccocroot/shakespeare/imagedetails.do?imageId=15559 , 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 3. Manuel Harlan, Image from King Lear, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007.12

Fig. 4. Donald Cooper, Image from King Lear, Peter Hall Company, 1997.13

12 http://www.mckellen.com/stage/lear07/photos.htm , 30.05.2008. 13 http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/docroot/shakespeare/imagedetails.do?imageId=17301, 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 5. Image from Waiting for Godot.14

Fig. 6. Dana Adams, Image from Waiting for Godot, Waterfront Theatre, 2007.15

14 http://www.linuxgreenhouse.org/blog/tim/-b-samuel-beckett--slapstick-of-the-mind--b--.html, 30.05.2008. 15 http://www.beckettinvermont.org/waiting_for_godot/ , 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 7. John Haynes, Image from Happy Days.16

Fig. 8. Kirk Markley, Image from Happy Days, Infernal Bridegroom Productions, 2000.17

16 http://www.beckettfoundation.org.uk/collection/access.html , 30.05.2008. 17 http://www.kirkmarkley.com/Theatre/HappyDays/ , 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 9. Stage design model for Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Villanova Theater,

February 2000.18

Fig. 10. Image from Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Villanova Theater, February 2000.19

18 http://www.brynmawr.edu/arts/hiwasaki/endgame00/endgame00.html , 30.05.2008. 19 http://www.brynmawr.edu/arts/hiwasaki/endgame00/endgame00.html , 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 11. Image from Endgame, Phoenix Theatre, 2001.20

Fig. 12. Image from Endgame, Phoenix Theatre, 2001.21

20 http://finearts.uvic.ca/theatre/season/2001-2002/endgame/ , 30.05.2008. 21 http://finearts.uvic.ca/theatre/season/2001-2002/endgame/ , 30.05.2008.

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Fig. 13. Donald Cooper, Image from Edward Bond’s Saved, The Royal Court Theatre,

1984.22

Fig. 14. Catherine Ashmore, Image from Bond’s Lear, Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre,

2005.23

22 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/jan/21/edwardbond?picture=332156056 , 01.06.2008. 23 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/jan/21/edwardbond?picture=332156047 , 01.06.2008.

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Fig. 15. Image from Bond’s Lear, The Royal Court Theatre, 1972.24

24 http://www.amrep.org/articles/3_3a/bond.html , 01.06.2008.

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Fig. 16. Image from Penetrator, The American Place Theatre, 2007.25

25

http://www.workingmansclothes.com/aboutus/Fra4me11previousproductionspage11.html?refresh=1208808266463, 01.06.2008.

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Fig. 17. Image from Penetrator, 1993.26

26 http://erewhon.ticonuno.it/riv/arte/london/theatre1.htm , 01.06.2008.