Blasted Hollywood Essay

Sarah’s Kane play Blasted was first published in 1995. Kane together with her generation grew up in a time of constant troubles: not only did they saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also felt the violence of the numerous wars, like the Crimean War, through images. In her play, Kane breaks with the traditional dramatic methods by using the form as a device to convey meaning. This union of form and structure is present not only in the structure of the play but also in the way language is used by Ian. First of all, the structure of the play consists of five scenes, which are divided into two parts by the blasting of a bomb at the end of the second scene. Although the play is considered to be radical, the first two scenes resemble naturalistic

What is more, this period was marked by economic austerity, which together with the failure of the labour government to produce social changes, lead to the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. Nevertheless, Churchill wrote Top Girls as an opposition to “Thatcherism”, for this reason it comes not as a surprise that the play’s title is Top Girls, since Thatcher was believed to be the “ultimate Top Girl”. Interestingly, Churchill, like Kane, used the play’s structure and the language to create meaning. It is important to note that Top Girls, unlike Blasted does not follow a chronological order. The play starts in the middle of the story: the dinner party for Marlene’s professional promotion. By placing a latter event at the beginning, Churchill subverts the dramatic structure and violates the conventions of a fixed time and place where the action takes place, since her guests belong to different periods of time. Not only do Marlene’s guests belong to different periods of time, but also they are from different geographical contexts, hence Churchill uses them to show the connection between the past, present and future. In Act two scene two, time shifts backwards; in this scene we see how Marlene has “used Joyce as her “wife” in order to facilitate her success in the labor market” (Ammen, 1996: 93), since Joyce adopted Marlene’s daughter Angie. At last but not least, Top Girls also uses language to create

It is through the way in which Blasted was structured into two parts, divided by the blasting of a bomb at the end of scene two, that the readers can experience how in a moment everything can change. What is more, the cold and almost mechanical way in which Ian uses language to describe the events of a war evokes the period in which Kane grew up. Her upbringing was constantly bombard by images of death and destruction, which became somehow normal to most people. Therefore, the way in which Ian uses language reflects this period of time where people remained indifferent. On the other hand, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls was wrote during the feminist wave of the 70s, which is present in the structure of the play and in the way characters use language which “creates a bleak female dystopia, but hints at the possibilities of female communion” (Ammen, 1996: 87) through the figure of Dull Gret. Although Kane attempted to confront people through emotions, both playwrights – Kane and Churchill – attempted to promote the critical capacities of their audiences and readers to examine their lives, by using non-naturalistic structures and