A Director in Search of a Narrative

Abstract

This article investigates Sarah Kane’s dramaturgy and its relation to her portrayal of mental illness and madness, drawing on the performance context of Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed by the National Theatre (2016). Reading Kane’s text and Mitchell’s direction in a productive tension with one another, it suggests that Mitchell introduced new dramatic elements which radically alter the kind of mental experience presented in Kane’s play. Kane’s commitment to the enigmatic in theatre disrupts the conventions both of psychological realism, and socio-political visual practices which refuse validity to the irrational and enigmatic in British culture. This paper navigates between two poles of Kane criticism: that her work is structurally incoherent and invalid (even insane) on the one hand, and that it is sane and aesthetically pioneering on the other. I argue for a middle ground in which irrationality is situated within the context of mental illness and psychiatric experience and yet presents a valid and valuable aesthetic and socio-political field of experience.