Phaedra's Love (review)
2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tj.2003.0072
ISSN1086-332X
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoThe brief career of British playwright Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, divided her critics into two camps: those who believed that her dark and brutal plays were unflinchingly honest portraits of human relationships, and those who found her work to be childish and disgusting, all shock and no substance. Her five plays are known for being difficult to stage and even more challenging to watch; in Kane's worlds, characters are raped, mutilated, dismembered, and psychologically tortured. Phaedra's Love draws on Seneca's version of the Phaedra story, but with certain key differences. Kane places the off-stage violence of the classical theatre front and center, with a final bloodbath featuring the rape and murder of Phaedra's daughter Strophe, the castration and disembowelment of Hippolytus, and the suicide of Theseus. The play's final image is of the vultures descending to feast on the remains of the royal family. Further, Kane's Hippolytus is not the aloof virgin of the original myth, but a bored youth who engages in compulsive sex, lies around watching violent films and eating hamburgers, and masturbates into his dirty socks, all entirely without pleasure. The play, for all its explicit sex and violence, is a darkly humorous exploration of the place of love in a godless, celebrity-obsessed materialist society.
Referência(s)