staging violence in sarah kane’s blasted & ali abdulnebi al ziadi’s fourth generation: a comparative study

Abstract

Violence occurs as a daily human action all over the world; it may cause so many kinds of damage to individuals as well as to society: physical, psychological, or both. Many literary authors of different genres have tried their best to portray violence by showing its negative effects, especially playwrights because they have the chance to show people the dangers of violence through performance on stage to warn them against such negatively affected action. It has been a human action since the beginning of human life on this planet when the first crime happened on earth when Cane killed his brother Abel. In our modern world, people are witnessing daily violent actions as a result of destructive wars that turned the humans into brutal beings. This paper deals with violence as it occurred as a result of the atrocities of wars in two different societies during the same period of the 1990s: A European country (probably Bosnia or Britain), as reflected in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), and Iraqi, as shown by Ali Abdulnebi Al Zaidi’s Fourth Generation (1997). Although violence takes different shapes, still it has the same destructive effects on the life of people who are involved in. The researcher tries to show how both writers have staged violence during the performances of their plays.