Dealing with Bodies: The Corporeal Dimension in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Martin Crimp’s The Country

Abstract

This article explores the continuities and discontinuities between Sarah Kane's and Martin Crimp's approaches to corporeality. Even if they differ from a variety of points of view, both Cleansed and The Country share a conspicuous concern with figurations of the body as a fraught and disturbing object. Although its horrific tortures are not meant to be performed in a realistic way, Cleansed develops a discourse on the body which is entirely in keeping with 'experiential' theatre. This investment in graphic violence starkly contrasts with Crimp's practice in The Country, in which the corporeal component is more alluded to than openly staged. Yet, despite its allusive and symbolical import, The Country is another viscerally physical play which subtly and disturbingly interweaves several senses. Exemplifying two different possible treatments of the body on the contemporary British stage, these plays make the physical hyperbolically visible yet also remove it from sight, offering different but subtly complementary ways of problematising corporeality and its performance.