Reopening Sarah Kane’s “Chamber of Horrors”: Blasted as Gothic Drama

Abstract

This article seeks to reclaim the maligned term Gothic for contemporary theatre in a feminist and postcolonial context. It does so by offering a feminist, postcolonial Gothic reading of Sarah Kane’s controversial first play, Blasted (1995). Gothic hermeneutics make clear the often overlooked feminist and postcolonial critiques embedded in Blasted’s apparent inconsistencies, its bloody imagery, its hybridization of known forms and influences, its innovative slippage between mimetic and metaphorical registers, and its sensational national and global politics. The article focuses on Kane’s reinvention of four iconic Gothic conventions: the chamber, the ruin, the unspeakable narrative, and the vampire. Analysing these features, I demonstrate that the Gothic offers an illuminating approach to Kane’s work that situates her in an important genealogy, one with significant potential for feminist theatre and performance in the twenty-first century.

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