Comparing Violence in Kane's Blasted, Bond's Lear and Pinter's The Homecoming

Displays of Violence in Kane's Blasted, Bond's Lear and Pinter's The Homecoming

In Sarah Kane's Blasted, a woman and a man are raped on stage, eyeballs and dead babies are consumed and a man shoots himself through the head. In Edward Bond's Lear, several men and women are shot, a man is severly beaten and another is blinded, and the body of a woman is disected on stage. Both Kane and Bond claim that the use of violence on stage is vital for the message they want to get across. Harold Pinter, however, seems to deliver the same message by referring to violence without actually displaying it on stage. By looking at the authors' reasons for staging violence, questioning the effect on the play's audience and the plausability and necessity of the violent acts on stage, it can be said that the portrayal of physical violence on stage is a hallmark of shallow melodrama, gratuitously pandering to the sensationalism of the audience.

Sarah Kane's intention was to present her audience with the horrors of real life : war, cruelty and death, in the hope to bring it closer to the audience and to get people to think about what was happening beyond their safe homes, for instance in Jugoslawia, by drawing comparisons between local and global violence. She felt the horror of the war in Jugoslawia very strongly herself, and suffered from depressions that drove her to suicide in 1999. In the preface to Lear, Edward Bond says that it would be 'immoral not to write about violence' (v). He claims that violence originates through unnatural circumstances, and that this can be proven by comparing the behaviour of animals in their natural surroundings with animals in captivity. '[...] in normal surroundings and conditions, members of the same spec...

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...al executions on stage would hade made : it shows the human side of violence, namely that of the victims.

As a conclusion it can be said that, although the violence itself is well-argumented by the authors and serves its purpose in the plot, the actual act of violence needs not be shown on stage. It does not contribute to the plot, and its shockeffects are questionable. Furthermore, it might even make people aggressive. Staging violence turns the action into melodrama : it can no longer be distuinguised from the violent actionfilms meant to entertain and lure people to the cinema.

Works Cited

Bond, Edward. Lear. London : Eyre Methuen LTD, 1972.

Abelard. Children and Television Violence ; Gerbner. Online. Internet. 2 July 2002.

Kane, Sarah. Blasted. London : Eyre Methuen LTD, 1995.

Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. London : Eyre Methuen LTD, 1965.