Depictions of violence in theater: Revelation, not nihilism
Critic's Notebook: Disturbing actions can awake an audience's empathy, but lines blur if events tip into a mere celebration of destruction.
In one of the most infamous scenes in modern drama, a group of young men in a London park stone a baby to death in its carriage. What begins as roughhousing escalates to all-out sadism until a rock is thrown at point blank range, ending the child's pitiful cries for good.
Edward Bond's "Saved" provoked outrage when it was produced in 1965 by the Royal Court Theatre as a private club offering, a designation used to slip past the Lord Chamberlain's Office. Although "Saved" isn't revived often, it's considered a modern classic, and not just because it was instrumental in overturning Britain's strict theater censorship laws.
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The bone-crunching, hand-burning comedies of McDonagh are undeniably hilarious, but they are part of a disturbing trend that celebrates work more for its style than for its mind, more for its artistry than for its artistic vision. The scene in Letts' "Killer Joe" in which the title character sexually assaults a double-dealing woman with a drumstick is one that might have impressed the playwright's 17th century English forebears, but the theater is on a slippery slope when it tries to compete with the lurid tactics of moviemaking. (No surprise that William Friedkin exploited the moment in his film version for all its animal ferocity.)
Theater is fundamentally a metaphorical space, one inviting critical inquiry. Words have an equal footing with images, unlike in film, and the very limitations of the stage open up intellectual advantages.
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