![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Notes
Andrew Hammond identifies four major tropes which characterise traditional Balkanism: ‘obfuscation, savagery, discord and backwardness’. Andrew Hammond, ‘The Danger Zone of Europe: Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/11’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8 (May 2005), 135–51 (p. 136).
Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). A year previously, Maria Todorova published Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) in which she expounded her notion of Balkanism. Though seemingly unaware of each other's work, both Todorova and Goldsworthy refer to the original proposition of Balkanism as a term inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism in Milica Bakic-Hayden's ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54.4 (Winter 1995), 917–31.
Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 9.
Boris Buden, What to Do with the Question ‘What Will the Balkans Look Like in 2020?’, <http://www.bcchallenge.org/general/main.php?akcija=news_detail&id=228> [accessed 28 November 2011] (p. 4).
Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) p. xxi.
Hammond, ‘The Danger Zone’, p. 135.
Andrew Hammond, ‘Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to the EU’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 3.3 (2006), 6–26 (pp. 19–20).
A most interesting challenge to this melodramatic depiction of the real life protagonists of war was presented to us through the 2008 arrest of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. The former psychiatrist and poet, and multiple indicted war criminal, was finally found to be leading a very public life under a false identity, as an alternative medicine practitioner and ‘healer’.
Differences and similarities between Croatian and Serbian have been disputed for years and the 2010 book Jezik i nacionalizam (Language and Nationalism) by Snježana Kordić (Zagreb: Durieux, 2010), has once again provoked a debate in Croatia. Based in Germany, the Croatian philologist advocates the thesis that Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin (the latter two of which have only recently been proclaimed as languages) are varieties of the same language. This perspective seems very plausible from the outside looking in.
As pointed out by one of the readers of this article, it is worth highlighting another perspective on the causes of the breakdown of Yugoslavia as being rooted in economic rather than ideological problems.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents and Other Works (London: Vintage, Hogarth Press, 1930/2001), p. 111.
Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 162.
This was a view originally expressed by the Croatian writer Slobodan Šnajder which formed the basis for my article, ‘The Alchemy of Power and Freedom: A Contextualisation of Slobodan Šnajder's Hrvatski Faust (The Croatian Faust)’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 19(4 2009), 428–48.
Pentecost was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in October 1994. Meanwhile David Greig's Europe, which was also seen to be thematically linked to the events in the region, but not explicitly set in the Balkans, premiered in the same month at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.
Another great play, which followed Kane's in 1996, would also follow Kane's suit in its use of the analogy between the Balkan war and a dysfunctional romantic relationship – Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes (1996). Screen fictions, meanwhile, routinely continued to deploy black-and-white characterisations as a means of encoding the narrative for a western viewer (as with Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997).
Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 100–01.
Mira Furlan, ‘A Letter to My Co-Citizens’, Performing Arts Journal, 53.18 (1996), 20–24 (p. 20).
Furlan is better known in the United States as the star of Babylon 5 and Lost.
Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 97; Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 54 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
‘She talked enthusiastically about football and indie music but also about plays and literature. She was the best-read young playwright I knew – well aware of the influences on her work of Bond, Beckett and Barker. “Only playwrights with a B surname?” I teased. “Definitely”, she replied.’ Mark Ravenhill, ‘The Beauty of Brutality’, Guardian, 28 October 2006, <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/artsandentertainment/story/0,,1933492,00.html> [accessed 20 October 2007] (para. 8).
Kane, cited in Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 98. Helen Iball highlights that in 2003 Saunders re-qualified this claim asserting that Kane's drama is only ‘“partly experiential” because of a “strict formal control” she asserts over a performance text’. Helen Iball, ‘Room Service: En Suite on the Blasted Frontline’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 15 (August 2005), 320–29 (p. 322).
Kane in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 27.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 36.
Ibid.
Kane quoted in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 10.
Kane quoted in Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 98.
Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 4.
Helen Iball too focuses on the significance of this ‘telescoping of frames’ in the play's opening line. Iball, ‘Room Service’, p. 325.
Kane is ambivalent about her characters. ‘I really like Ian. I think he is funny. I can see that other people think he's a bastard. And I knew that they would. But I think he's extremely funny.’ His character is based on a terrible moral dilemma that arose ‘when a man I knew who was dying of lung cancer was terribly ill, and started telling me the most appalling racist jokes I've ever heard’. And Cate is naïve ‘And yes, very fucking stupid: I mean what's she doing in a hotel room in the first place? Of course she's going to get raped.’ Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 103.
Kane, Complete Plays, pp. 19–20.
James Montague, ‘Five Games That Changed the World’, CNN, 13 January 2011, <http://edition.cnn.com/2011/SPORT/football/01/05/iraq.asia.six.games/index.html> [accessed 12 June 2011].
The moment Kane has identified as ‘a kind of castration’ of Ian (Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 54) is famously inspired by a real life account of football hooliganism in Bill Bruford's Among the Thugs – ‘I couldn't believe that a human being could do this to another person. I put it in a play and everyone was shocked.’ Kane in Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 103. Sierz also reads this moment as symbolic of ‘the media's moral blindness’ (p. 107).
Kane, Complete Plays, p. 33.
Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, pp. 52–53.
Kane, Complete Plays, p. 40.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (London: Hogarth Press, 1940), pp. 55–57.
Kane, Complete Plays, p. 43.
Kane, Complete Plays, p. 48.
Here I mean Ian's protracted suffering contained in a non-verbal sequence of tableaux. Kane herself has been quoted by Saunders as saying that the point where Ian's blood is washed away by the rain struck her in performance as being ‘Christ-like’. Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 17.
Kane, Complete Plays, p. 55.
On an additional level, Iball in ‘Room Service’ identifies the way in which Kane taps into the cyclical nature of ‘theatrical radicalism’, p. 327 and returns to the primacy of the ‘theatrical image’, p. 329.
Bond, cited in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 49.
Iball, ‘Room Service’, p. 321.
Added to this is also Blasted's conscious referencing and paraphrasing of various classics including Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's King Lear, Strindberg's Miss Julie as well as Bond's Saved and Brenton's Romans in Britain, in whose controversial steps it has followed.
Kane, cited in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, pp. 27–28.
This might also be seen as a feature of the Eastern European ‘other’ especially in the discussion by Boris Buden of the views of Slovenian philosopher Rastko Močnik who is quoted as saying: ‘An identity is the ambiguous privilege of those doomed to remain local, particular, peripheral: it is a euphemism for the incapacity to attain the serene firmament of universality.’ Močnik in Buden, What to Do with the Question, p. 6.
Hammond, ‘Balkanism’, p. 21.
‘If I was going to rewrite it I'd try the purifying images even more, and I'd cut even more words out if such a thing is possible, because for me the language of theatre is image.’ Kane, cited in Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 50.
Nebojša Romčević, ‘Slučaj Sare Kejn’, Scena, 38 (2002), 75–76 (p. 76), <http://www.komunikacija.org.yu/komunikacija/casopisi/scena/XXXVIII_2/d17/download_ser_lat> [accessed 21 July 2008]. My translation.
Darka Šešlija, ‘Moj Ugao: Noćna mora Sare Kejn’, B92 Kultura, 26 April 2005, <http://www.b92.net/kultura_old/index.php?view=70&did=9152&plim=110> [accessed 21 July 2008]. My translation.
Interview with Paulina Manov and Daniel Sič, Beogradsko Dramsko Pozorište, 17 May 2010, organised thanks to Maša Stokić.
Ana Tasić, ‘Sara Kejn konačno medju Srbima’, Ludus, (2005), 120–21, <http://ludus.sdus.org.yu/content/view/24/48/> [accessed 21 July 2008] (p. 4, para 4). My translation.
Tatomir Toroman, ‘Novi uspeh Biljane Srbljanović’, B92, 31 August 2006, <http://www.b92.net/kultura/pozoriste/o_predstavi.php?nav_id=237370> [accessed 21 July 2008] (para. 1). My translation.
V. Seksan, ‘Psihoza Sarah Kane’, Dani Online, 4 May 2001, <http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/204/opservatorij.shtml> [accessed 21 July 2008] (para. 6). My translation.
Nikčević, ‘British Brutalism’, p. 264.
Kane's other plays including Crave and Phaedra's Love were also staged in various theatres in the region – most recently, Phaedra's Love had a notable production in Belgrade in 2008 and in Zagreb in 2011.
Sanja Nikčević, ‘British Brutalism, the “New European Drama”, and the Role of the Director’, New Theatre Quarterly, 21 (August 2005), 255–72 (p. 261).
Nikčević, ‘British Brutalism’, p. 270.
For example, it does not seem to be fully understood that the British theatre tradition is more biased towards the playwright than the director and that the British director (particularly a new writing director) has less of an authorial role than the case might be elsewhere in Europe; while, in addition to that, Kane's own sensibility as a playwright – through its explicit concern with theatrical image – is atypical of the British tradition.
‘When Jonathan Miller went, he found tabloid journalists trying to squeeze “shock-horror” quotes from Middle-Englanders. Eavesdropping on one interview, he heard a “lecturer from a college of further education” explaining “how he thought the play a metaphor for our indifference to Bosnia”.’ Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 97.
‘Balkan film-makers prefer to depict their own cultures through the eyes of Westerners and that travelogue style of narration is still prevalent in Balkan film-making. Ingenious imagery is offered, but the way it is used often just mirrors established stereotypes.’ Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and Media (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. 64.
‘[Emir Kusturica's film] Underground is thus the ultimate ideological product of Western liberal multiculturalism: what [it offers] to the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in the Balkan war – the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions, in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life.’ Žižek, The Universal Exception, p. 163.
It is interesting that of all Emir Kusturica's films, the least known is Arizona Dream (1993), featuring Johnny Depp in the lead, alongside Faye Dunaway and Jerry Lewis.
Hammond, ‘The Danger Zone’, p. 135.
If the recent proposition by Tim Judah is to be believed, economic pressures in the Balkan region have meanwhile led to the formation of a concept of the ‘Yugosphere’ involving all former Yugoslav republics. Tim Judah, ‘Good News from the Western Balkans: Yugoslavia Is Dead, Long Live the Yugosphere’, available at: <http://www2. lse.ac.uk/european institute/research/ LSEE/PDF%20Files/Publications/ Yugosphere.pdf.
Žižek, Violence, p. 34.
Nikčević, ‘British Brutalism’, p. 264.
Freud's elaboration of the ‘death instinct’ as an instinctive urge of humans to return to ‘their primaeval, inorganic state’ (Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 118–19) began with his consideration of the post-World War I traumas experienced by soldiers who survived – in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London & Vienna: International Psycho-Analytical, 1922) – and grew from his observation that traumatic events are often re-enacted over and over again (even in child-play). Hence, perhaps, the indication of a cyclical nature of both the violence in the Balkans and Kane's own play. It is almost as though Kane's obsession with Thanatos is an exploration of a hypothetical trauma caused by intense love and a manifestation of a desire to return to an ‘original state’ of Eros.
Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 93.
The impaling of Carl on a pole is chosen by Kane as a torture technique used in the Balkans in the 1400s. Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me, p. 90.
Her later play Crave does this too in its use of the Serbo-Croatian language. However, in a typical Kaneian twist, she will transcend any potential Balkanist mode of this gesture by also using Spanish and German phrases in the same way, thus simply absorbing Serbo-Croatian into the European linguistic landscape.
I would like to thank students and staff at the University of Bristol Drama Department for their help in developing this paper, a version of which was first presented at the Sarah Kane: A Reassessment Conference, University of Cambridge, 16 February 2008. I am grateful to Maša Stokić, Paulina Manov and Daniel Sič for their time and insights, and to Beogradsko Dramsko Pozorište for providing archive photographs and reviews of their production of Blasted. My thanks are due to the editors of the volume and various anonymous readers of this article for their comments.