Resumo

LOPEZ PENA, Laura. Witnesses Inside/Outside the Stage: The Purpose Of Representing Violence In Edward Bond's Saved (1965) And Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995). Folios [online]. 2009, n.29, pp.111-118. ISSN 0123-4870.

In spite of the thirty years span of time between the two productions, Edward Bond's Saved and Sarah Kane's Blasted provoked a similar outburst of reactions when they first opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1965 and 1995, respectively. Depicting various types of violence onstage, the two plays aim at making spectators connect different forms of cruelty so that they can be moved to react against them in real life. In order to do so, both plays highlight the question of witnessing at two levels: on the one hand, at the level of character, the plays portray individuals who witness, suffer and/or inflict brutality, becoming, thus, participants in the ongoing cycles of violence onstage; whereas, on the other hand, at the level of audience, spectators too become direct -and silent- witnesses to the plays and their depicted cruelties, at the same time that they are called to react against the horrors they have experienced in the theatrical fictional world. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to analyze how Saved and Blasted engage in arising spectators' awareness of their own passivity in front of several forms of violence, and invite their audience to actively denounce not only wars and conflicts taking place in distant places but also in their own immediate surroundings.

Palavras-chave : Contemporary British theater; Edward Bond; Sarah Kane; violence; witnessing.

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