Is Hope for Humanity Bad for Theater?

"The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies. They were told the best thing was not to have been born, but, if that misfortune struck them, the next best thing was to die young. And they all said, 'Hurrah,' and went down to their city rejoicing. Why? Because they'd faced the extreme situation, not at Auschwitz but at the Theatre Royal… If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself." —Edward Bond

"I do not think I’ve yet seen a play that can beat Sarah Kane’s sustained onslaught on the sensibilities for shear unadulterated brutalism." –The Evening Standard on Sarah Kane’s Blasted


Edward Bond and Sarah Kane represent two of the most unforgiving playwrights in the history of modern theater. They both, as Bond says in the above quote, put Hiroshima up on stage and make no apologies for what that might do to the audience. Good productions of their work are extremely powerful, even devastating. Ideally, audience members leave the theater shaken, with disturbing images seared into their brains. Bond’s play Saved caused an uproar in 1965 when he staged the stoning of a baby in its pram by a group of London youths. Kane’s Blasted, written in reaction to the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, features on-stage anal rape, the eating of eyeballs, and cannibalism of a dead baby (among other horrors). It caused a similar sensation when it premiered in 1995.

I had the pleasure (if you can call it that) of seeing a production of Blasted at the Soho Rep in New York a few months ago. The following week, I saw Robert Woodruff’s production of Bond’s latest play, Chair, at Theater for a New Audience. As a believer in these two playwright’s take-no-prisoners style of theater, I wasn’t let down by these two powerful and disturbing productions.

But as I watched each play, I was surprised and a little embarrassed to find myself disaffected at times in spite of the shocking nature of what was happening on stage. While watching Blasted, there was a point at which I thought: “Okay, I get it: Hiroshima.” Not even Kane’s beautifully minimalist and poetic language could give me reason enough to care about what was happening to the characters.

Upon further reflection on my experience, and after a bit of googling, I came to this paradoxical conclusion: it’s difficult for Kane and Bond to hold the audience engaged because the playwrights tell their stories from a point of view that maintains unyielding faith in the potential for human goodness and human transcendence. Their anger at how humans fail to live up to these lofty expectations leads them to show in their plays how humans (and the governmental institutions human create) mess everything up. By showing these horrors, they might help humanity to choose a less-cruel path in the future. They believe in preventing the next Hiroshima…through theater.

But this form has its limits once the audience catches on to the underlying idea. Kane in particular gets into trouble when she does too much result-oriented showing of what a corrupted human soul looks like and not enough showing of how humans fight against that corruption. Seeing characters struggle to maintain their humanity is much more interesting—and ultimately more human—than seeing characters, who have already succumbed to the evils within and without, go about destroying each other and the world.

Looking at Samuel Beckett, the godfather of bleak existence, will help with what I’m getting at with Bond and Kane. Bond called Beckett “basically antihuman.” I suspect Bond believes this because the worlds that Beckett’s characters inhabit leave no potential for humans to find meaning in life and there is zero chance that the characters might create a brighter future for themselves. But by creating the huge obstacle of a dark lifeless meaningless world, Beckett gives his characters the opportunity to push against that world and TRY to create an inhabitable space in which to occupy their time (although we know all along it’s quite hopeless). Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days, may be buried up to her neck in sand the entire play, but that sure as heck won’t stop her from going about her daily business with as much cheer as she can muster. This allows Beckett to humorously and tragically portray Winnie in all her absurd human glory. Winnie says, "That is what I find so wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions." And that is what the audience finds so funny and so interesting: the way Winnie pushes against the obvious reality that she is buried neck deep in sand.

Beckett shows us humans trying to cope with an empty and destroyed world, while Bond and Kane—because they don’t accept Becket’s worldview that life is essentially meaningless—tend to show the audience the process or the result of the world being destroyed. Winnie seems all too pathetically human; but the soldier in Blasted, who has been turned into a monster by years of endless wars, is virtually unrecognizable as human, and therefore less demanding of our attention and sympathy.

Although their worldviews may clash, all three playwrights are remarkable for how they passionately express to the audience an honest vision of what the world looks like through their eyes (which ought to be the driving purpose behind any work of art). Regardless of whether or not these plays help us fend off the coming Hiroshimas, I’m grateful to the intrepid theater artists who choose to bring these three playwright’s visions to life on stage.