“It was like lightning”: the theatrical resonances of Sarah Kane in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2013, Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was published to much critical acclaim. Commentators were quick to highlight McBride’s Joycean influences – but just as McBride is indebted to her Irish literary predecessor, so too is British playwright Sarah Kane a major influence. The strong resonances between the plays of Sarah Kane and A Girl serve to highlight the theatrical nuance of McBride’s original work. This article will investigate the thematic links of sibling love, grief and guilt in McBride’s novel and Kane’s Cleansed (1996), and the linguistic parallels with 4.48 Psychosis (1998). McBride’s experience as a trained actor encouraged a form of “method-writing” which I contend contributes to the inherent theatricality of her writing. This article ventures to uncover a small part of the huge scholarly potential which lies in the works of Eimear McBride, whose writing brings a uniquely theatrical style to Irish modernism.