(Source: 3swallows, via jadegiorno)
(Source: thort0ise, via fuckyesjamesmcavoy)
"I am alone in a hostile world."
- Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)
I don’t usually do this on my Tumblr but I really wanted to put this into words, to put it out there and I didn’t know where else to put it. Sarah Kane is my favourite playwright. I love her, I am in love with her, and I think her work is the most important I have ever read. She wrote this play called Blasted that is about war. It is a graphic play in its depiction of violence. It pains me to do this but to get my point across: the play graphically portrays rape, people sucking other people’s eyes as well as people eating buried corpses. Those are very extreme horrors to depict, no doubt, but the play is much more than that. If you want to believe the play is only about that, go ahead, but know that you are wrong. It’s an extreme play, because it depicts the horrors of war. The play was heavily criticised in its day because what kind of a mind would write that? What kind of a mind would want to write that? She was accused of being morbid, of having a sick mind, of portraying violence just for pure entertainment, to glorify it, to trivialise it.
Today while I was cooking lunch, I heard on the news the story about a Syrian rebel eating a soldier’s heart. I was obviously quite shaken at the news. Not only because the news’ channel decided to play the video without warning, but because I couldn’t actually believe what I was seeing. Don’t get me wrong, I am not as naive as to overlook the true horrors of war. Ironically enough, I think all of the times I’ve read Blasted and read as well as written on it have prepared me for that. It wasn’t that. I think what affected me the most today was that I felt I was witnessing how real her fiction truly is - well, really, I was realising how her fiction was never fiction to begin with, and I was suddenly reminded of all of those academics saying her portrayal of war was not realistic, that her writing wasn’t realistic because that wasn’t how life worked. I kept remembering how she kept on having to defend her work and the ways in which war does not operate within our established ideals of “realism”. How war suddenly happens and destroys everything around you, without warning. And yes, rebels will eat other people’s hearts, because they are mad, because war has destroyed them as it will continue to. And an act that seems so outrageous to me, as I pleasantly cook my lunch, is in no doubt a extreme act that has been triggered by a smaller one, and all of those things Kane attempted to put across on so many occasions.
Kane once said she would rather “experience overdose in the theatre than in life”. I always thought that was one of her most brilliantly put sentences.
Girls
Girls first caught my attention with its trailer for the first season. I remember watching it and duly noting I would watch the pilot, and give the show a chance. It was mainly because it was a cas…Check out our latest article on HBO’s Girls and the grey areas that it creates. Written by Cristina (theworldoccurred)!
