Allan Pero: "But you have
friends": Performance and the Zone between Two Deaths in the Plays of
Sarah Kane
This
paper explores the relation of the voice to what
Edward Bond calls the “Theatre-Event.” I approach the theatrical
representation
of suicide as a “Theatre-Event” in the sense that it “can’t be captured
by the
story, but must be examined ... in relation to the story” (Letters I,
43). The event is the demand of interpretation through performance. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot
theorizes that while the suicide uses techniques to construct a frame
around
death (104-05), the theatre artist searches for the space of the event.
Blanchot is not suggesting that the creative impulse is pathological,
but
saying that their respective projects test a singular form of
possibility, the
leap beyond that includes a "radical reversal" which precludes
representation - since death is final. This is precisely
what texts like Kane’s and Bond’s are attempting to find; this space,
what
Jacques Lacan calls a “zone between two deaths,” is the space of
tragedy. The
actor’s problem in performing both plays is one of listening to
the
voice without object, to the voice as an ambivalent object of desire
that
drives the different “arguments” about suicide in both plays.