DOI 10.

1515/jcde-2013-0013 JCDE 2013; 1(1): 137–148

Maria Elena Capitani

Dealing with Bodies: The Corporeal
Dimension in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and
Martin Crimp’s The Country
Abstract: This article explores the continuities and discontinuities between Sarah
Kane’s and Martin Crimp’s approaches to corporeality. Even if they differ from a
variety of points of view, both Cleansed and The Country share a conspicuous
concern with figurations of the body as a fraught and disturbing object. Although
its horrific tortures are not meant to be performed in a realistic way, Cleansed
develops a discourse on the body which is entirely in keeping with ‘experiential’
theatre. This investment in graphic violence starkly contrasts with Crimp’s prac-
tice in The Country, in which the corporeal component is more alluded to than
openly staged. Yet, despite its allusive and symbolical import, The Country is
another viscerally physical play which subtly and disturbingly interweaves sev-
eral senses. Exemplifying two different possible treatments of the body on the
contemporary British stage, these plays make the physical hyperbolically visible
yet also remove it from sight, offering different but subtly complementary ways of
problematising corporeality and its performance.

Keywords: Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Cleansed, The Country, violence

Maria Elena Capitani: E-Mail: mary.cap@virgilio.it

Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane comfortably fit into one sentence. Apart from the
mutual esteem of the two playwrights, their dramas engage in an intertextual
dialogue.1 They share, among other things, a strong dissatisfaction with naturalis-
tic theatrical conventions, a purist attitude towards language, and a remarkable
Beckettian influence. Both playwrights explore the darker sides of the human and
the complexity as well as the deepening crisis of contemporary subjectivity, often
associated with and inscribed onto the body.
Focussing on two of their most significant plays, Cleansed (1998) and The
Country (2000), this article examines the physical from both a dramatic and a

1 For details on their points of connection, see Saunders, About Kane 49; Love Me 111; Sierz,
Crimp 168; Playwriting 233.

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138 Maria Elena Capitani

theatrical perspective in order to throw light on the significant continuities and

discontinuities between Kane’s and Crimp’s approaches to corporeality. Indeed,
even if they differ from a variety of points of view (first and foremost, in Cleansed
physicality is overtly displayed, while in The Country it seems to conceal itself in
linguistic traces), both texts share a conspicuous concern with figurations of the
body as a fraught and disturbing object.
After seeing Cleansed, John Peter of the Sunday Times wrote:

I came out of the theatre […] feeling bruised to the bone, tight in the stomach and hopeless. I
think this is what Kane intended. Cleansed […] is a nightmare of a play: like a nightmare, it
unreels somewhere between the back of your eyes and the centre of your brain with an
unpredictable but remorseless logic. As with a nightmare, you cannot shut it out because
nightmares are experienced with your whole body. (564)

The brutal stage images merge love and physical suffering. The play undermines
and deconstructs the normative boundaries between sex and gender, it experi-
ments with nudity, mutilation, and pain by explicitly staging unacceptable bodies
and intolerable actions. Although its horrific tortures are not meant to be per-
formed in a realistic way, the feeling of nausea and discomfort experienced by
Peter indicates the workings of a “theatre of sensation” (Sierz, In-Yer-Face 4). And
indeed, Kane’s third play develops a discourse on the body which is entirely in
keeping with the type of “experiential” theatre (Kane qtd. in Sierz, In-Yer-Face 92)
that aims to “put[…] you in direct physical contact with thought and feeling”
(Kane qtd. in Campbell 80).
In Cleansed, the perpetration of violence is obviously concentrated in Tinker’s
hands. This terrifying and ambiguous figure – a doctor who is not a doctor, a
strange mix between healer and dealer – tests how far the alienated inmates of a
frightening institution can go in the name of love and manipulates their related loss
of identity. In an eerie crescendo of threats which is concretely translated into ritual
mutilation, he dismembers and recomposes the patients’ bodies, thereby assuming
a sort of demiurgic connotation. Significantly, his punitive actions are highly
symbolical: in order to make him atone for lying, Tinker brutally cuts off Carl’s
tongue, then forces him to swallow Rod’s ring. Throughout Cleansed, as Stefani
Brusberg-Kiermeier remarks, “each punishment is a direct violent representation
of the corresponding ‘crime’” (86). Indeed, in scene eight, Tinker cuts off Carl’s
hands when, no longer able to speak, he writes a message in the mud for Rod; then,
in scene thirteen, Carl’s feet are amputated after having danced for his lover.
Towards the end of the play, Carl’s genitals are transplanted: he has now been
completely mutilated and dehumanised according to Tinker’s ritual design: “The
body’s desire to inscribe itself into the world is answered by the inscription of
violence on to the body” (Brusberg-Kiermeier 86). What we can assume, there-

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 Dealing with Bodies 139

fore, is a textualisation of bodies, which function as pages onto which torture is

inscribed.
However, the Frankenstein-like doctor’s repulsive masterpiece is not Carl’s
amputation but Grace’s sex change. The young woman loves her dead brother
Graham, and her deepest desire is to physically become him in order to overcome
the split between inside and outside:

G RAHAM /R OBIN . What would you change?

G RACE . My body. So it looked like it feels.
Graham outside like Graham inside. (Kane, Cleansed 126)

Grace’s discomfort and displacement of sexual identity is even more evident when
her yearning to be a man brings her to say “My balls hurt” (134), even though she
still has a female anatomy (“You’re a woman”; 134). After being beaten, raped,
and lobotomised, Grace’s wish is satisfied by Tinker, who surgically transforms
her body by stitching Carl’s penis on her and amputating her breasts. Never-
theless, the fulfilment of her desire is absolutely traumatic: soon after the opera-
tion, Grace is upset and almost aphasic (she is only able to say the letter F):

G RACE . F – F –
T INKER . What you wanted, I hope you –
G RACE . F – F – F – […]
G RACE . (Touches her stitched-on genitals.)
F–F–
T INKER . Do you like it?
G RACE . F –
T INKER . You’ll get used to him.
Can’t call you Grace anymore.
Call you … Graham. I’ll call you Graham. […] I’m sorry. I’m not really a doctor.
(He kisses G RACE very gently.)
T INKER /G RAHAM . Goodbye, Grace. (145–146)

Grace’s process of transformation into her brother and her resulting loss of self
are now complete: even her name changes to Graham.
In the last scene, the absolute mental/bodily fusion between brother and
sister is even more evident (Waddington 144): the stage direction significantly
says “GG RACE now looks and sounds exactly like G RAHAM ” (149), and her/his first
words are “Body perfect” (149). The double character, moreover, thanks Tinker
(“Thank you, Doctor”; 150), thus symbolically concluding the rite of passage
(Brusberg-Kiermeier 85). Nevertheless, the end of the play is extremely elusive
and prevents the audience from transferring what is going on into a meaningful
framework. Grace/Graham and (what remains of) Carl touch and seem to create a

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140 Maria Elena Capitani

common bond. Everything slips towards indecipherability. The sunlight blinds

the characters (and, metaphorically, the spectators’ ability to interpret and judge),
the rats (agents of violence throughout the play, which in this scene disturbingly
chew at the characters’ wounds) squeak louder and louder until their sound
becomes deafening, then blackness engulfs everything. Far from a holistic solu-
tion, this ambiguous end does not offer any catharsis. Instead, it suggests that
absolute love implies a dissolution of identity which, as Clare Wallace observes,
“is mapped out on the body” (94). Kane draws a parallel between disidentity2 and
dismemberment: the atomisation of self is indeed written on a body which, in
turn, is increasingly fragmented. In Cleansed, the body becomes a contested locus,
a battlefield in which the identity conflict is explicitly situated.
The fragmentation of bodies and deconstruction of meanings are closely
interwoven with stage imagery, which in Cleansed takes up a central position. In
an interview, director James Macdonald elucidated: “Cleansed confirmed for me
that the images are there to tell the story more powerfully and immediately than
the text. On the first day of rehearsal the play took half an hour to read, whereas
finally it took ninety minutes to perform, so you could say there is an hour of
imagery” (qtd. in Saunders, Love Me 122). Remarkably, “much of the imagery is set
down by Kane in copious stage directions” (Campbell 86), which – to the reader –
play the role of “a quasi-narrator” (Fordyce 112). These exhaustive indications
contribute to the fascinating paradox of Cleansed: from a physical (and emotional)
point of view, this piece is extremely brutal but at the same time structurally
harmonious. Even if its twenty short scenes could be read/seen as autonomous
images, the storylines converge towards the end of the play. Clashing with the
horrific violence of what is shown on stage, some intensely lyrical passages seem
to be choreographed like a ballet. The first part of scene five, for example, enacts
the fusion of Grace and Graham through dance and gestures, before they make
love:

G RAHAM dances – a dance of love for G RACE .

G RACE dances opposite him, copying his movements.
Gradually, she takes on the masculinity of his movement, his facial expression. Finally, she no
longer has to watch him – she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time.
When she speaks, her voice is more like his. […]
They begin to dance slowly, very close together.
They sing the first verse of “You Are My Sunshine” by Jim Davis and Charles Mitchell.
Their voices trail off and they stand staring at each other. (119)

2 Élisabeth Angel-Perez borrows the term “désidentité” (162) from Évelyne Grossman, while
Laurens De Vos opts for “de-subjectivity” (131).

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 Dealing with Bodies 141

Conversely, the lines spoken by the characters are much less eloquent than the
stage directions. Kane indeed opts for strict verbal compression, verging on
minimalism: “I wanted to strip everything down. I wanted it to be as small – when
I say small I mean minimal and poetic, and I didn’t want to waste any words” (qtd.
in Saunders, Love Me 88).
Although, in a sense, bodily action takes centre stage at the expense of
dialogue, it is also worth noting that, to a certain extent, Kane explores the
physical through textual/linguistic strategies. For instance, on a couple of occa-
sions, male characters use rhetorical figures to refer to Grace. Graham metaphori-
cally calls his beloved sister “Sunshine” (118), while Robin has recourse to a simile
in the line “She smells like a flower” (129). Grace herself compares Graham’s
beauty to that of a celestial creature: “You’ve always been an angel” (119; see also
De Vos 128).
Moreover, the meaningful reiteration (and alliteration) of the letter/sound F
and the subsequent repetition of “felt”/“feel” in the final scene underline the
prominence of physical experience:

G RACE /G RAHAM . Felt it.

Here. Inside. Here.

And when I don’t feel it, it’s pointless.

Think about getting up it’s pointless.
Think about eating it’s pointless.
Think about dressing it’s pointless.
Think about speaking it’s pointless.
Think about dying only it’s totally fucking pointless. (150)

In general terms, Kane’s investment in graphic violence starkly contrasts with

Crimp’s practice in The Country, first performed at the Royal Court two years after
Cleansed, in which the corporeal component is more alluded to than openly
staged. The male protagonist Richard is a doubtful doctor and recovering drug
addict who has recently left London and moved to the country with his wife
Corinne and their children to start afresh. One night, he brings home a beautiful
American girl, saying he found her unconscious by the roadside. In actual fact,
overlooking his professional duty, he has induced Rebecca, who will turn out to
be his patient/lover, to overdose.
“On one level,” as director Katie Mitchell points out,

The Country is about what people do with their bodies: sticking syringes full of heroin into
them or fucking each other, with all the mental effects of betrayal and confusion that that
involves. Although the children never appear onstage, the minute that Corinne feels a real

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142 Maria Elena Capitani

threat, she ships them bodily off to a safe place. Bodies: whether you put pure water into
your body or have an alcoholic drink. It’s a very visceral play. If you go through it carefully,
there are countless moments when touch, or taste, or smell is mentioned. All the senses are
engaged. (qtd. in Sierz, Crimp 203)

Rebecca’s sensual body, in particular, is a pivotal dramatic and theatrical object

from the outset. The Country starts in medias res: the first of the five (short) acts
opens with a domestic conversation between Richard and his wife, who is
nervously cutting out “some pictures to go round the cot” (291). The first sinister
reference to Rebecca appears after a few lines, when Corinne begins to question
her husband about the mysterious stranger: “This … person. Is she asleep? When
will she wake up?” (292). Although Richard affirms that he saved the young
woman in the name of his (medical) profession, Corinne becomes more and more
suspicious. Towards the end of the first act, she ironically compares Rebecca’s
harmonious physical appearance to a heavenly “vision,” a sort of ideal which
sharply contrasts with the leaking male body subsequently evoked:

– […] If instead of some frail young … slim young … abandoned at the / side of a road. […] If
instead of this … vision, this victim of some unspecified, some undiagnosed … misfortune,
let’s say it had been some man you had found, some man perhaps crawling out of a ditch
with his clothes covered in muck …
– No one – I’m sorry – but no one was crawling / out of any ditch.
– Well all right then – not crawling, but unconscious. You round the bend and instead of
that, that … person, it’s a man who’s drunk himself into a stupor and he’s lying there in his
own sick and he’s wet himself. Would you really have lifted this man into your car? Would
you have driven him all this way to your own house where your children are sleeping? (304;
emphasis in the text)

The degraded male figure described by Corinne could be seen as an example of

a grotesque body defined by extremes, in the sense of both ingestion and
excretion, blurring boundaries: “All these convexities and orifices have a com-
mon characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and
between the body and the world are overcome” (Bakhtin 317). This emphasis on
the instability of its physical margins is diametrically opposed to the perfection
and completeness of the classical image of the body, a self-contained system
with a “closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface” (Bakhtin 317), totally isolated
from the outer reality.
Equally pertinent from a corporeal point of view is the opening of the second
act. Here, in true detective style, Corinne examines Rebecca’s gold watch and
confesses to Richard her urge to touch the intruder’s body: “I wanted to touch
her. […] To see if she was hot” (306). The adjective “hot,” which at first might

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 Dealing with Bodies 143

simply be related to Rebecca’s physical temperature and state of health, hints at

her magnetic sensuality:

– […] Why did you uncover her?

– I was curious about her arms, actually. Have you looked at her arms?
– No, I haven’t looked at her arms.
– Her legs, then. Have you looked at her face? Haven’t you looked at her? Haven’t you
looked at any part of her?
Pause.
Aren’t you curious? (306–307)

Corinne examines every single part of her rival’s appealing body in order to grasp
its deepest secrets. At the same time, she obviously provokes Richard in order to
catch him at fault. As for the mise en scène of the first two acts, two different
paths can be followed: some directors keep Rebecca’s body offstage until the third
act, while others prefer showing her sleeping figure from the very beginning of
the play – that was the case in the Zurich and Manchester productions in 2001
and 2005 respectively (Buse 154).
Remarkably, storytelling features as a powerful strategy to conjure up, and
therefore mediate, the physical. Sierz has observed that “The plot progresses very
elegantly through the stories that the characters tell each other” (“Scribbling”
213). In the fourth act, the corporeal is translated into words by Richard’s young
lover, and the narrative starts flowing from this verbal transposition. Here,
Rebecca opts for the structure – for example, typical opening formula and reitera-
tion of the vocative “children” to attract the (absent) intradiegetic listeners’
attention – and dreamlike imagery of a fairy tale to describe her medical/sexual
encounters with the doctor:

Well once upon a time, children, there was a girl, there was a bright young girl, and she
was sick, and she needed some medicine. So she went to a doctor – […] and she said,
doctor, doctor, it hurts, I need some medicine. But the doctor wouldn’t give her any. He
said, go away – don’t waste my time – I have no medicine. So she went back again and
she said, doctor, doctor, it really hurts, I need some medicine. And this time the doctor
went to the door. He locked the door. He said: I need to take a history – roll up your
sleeve. So she rolled up her sleeve and the doctor took a history. Then, children, he got
one instrument to look into her eyes. And another instrument to listen to her heart. And
when he’d looked into her eyes and listened to her heart, he asked her to undress. […]
And when she’d undressed, he said: I see now how very sick you are – you need some
medicine. She said: Doctor, am I going to die? He said: No, it’s simply that your eyes are
very dark and your skin is very pale. Your skin is so thin that when I touch it like this with
my lips I can feel the blood moving underneath. You’re sick, that’s all. You need some
medicine. So the treatment began.

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144 Maria Elena Capitani

The treatment was wild, children. It could take place at any time of day or night. In any
part of the city. In any part of her body. Her body … became the city. The doctor learned how
to unfold her – like a map. (341–342)

This passage is marked by a noticeable shift in register. While in the first part the
medical examination is described in more pragmatic terms (the doctor takes a
history, investigates Rebecca’s body for signs of disease, arrives at a diagnosis,
and recommends treatment to reduce pain), the last segment progressively veers
towards symbolism (intriguingly, the girl’s body represents the urban, as a
metaphor of moral corruption; Capitani, “Treatment”).
In addition to its allusive and symbolic import, The Country is a play which
subtly and disturbingly interweaves different senses. Corinne explores Rebecca’s
body through touch and sight and, as Sam Marlowe says, “sniffs at him [Richard]
for tell-tale bodily odours” (616). An even more explicit instance is provided by a
debate between husband and wife about the flavour of the local water. Here, the
insistent reiteration of the word taste stresses the extent to which the senses
pervade the play:

– Taste this.
– What?
– Taste it.
He sips the water.
– I can’t taste anything.
– But there’s a taste of something.
– What?
– Something … I don’t know … purity. D’you think it’s safe? […]
– It’s water – it’s pure – and so perhaps it has a taste.
– You can taste it then?
– I can’t taste anything. It has no taste. It tastes of nothing. But perhaps that taste of nothing
is what you can taste. (294–295; my emphasis)

In the last act, the term taste is repeated another nine times (347), reinforcing the
importance of the sensory dimension.
Language plays a crucial role in The Country. As has been frequently noted,
Crimp’s dialogue shares many features with Harold Pinter’s, especially the ability
to conceal the characters’ real emotions. This has led William McEvoy to argue
that “In the duologues between Richard and Corinne, language screens off emo-
tion: its surface meaning is unsteady and opaque, opening up a gap for secondary
(and often sexual) meanings to proliferate” (618). Crimp is a master of subtext.
Strong sensual undercurrents trouble the characters’ seemingly banal and de-
tached verbal exchanges. It should also be noted that, paradoxically, “the more
you talk, the less you say” (328), as Rebecca observes in the third act. Thus, the

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 Dealing with Bodies 145

frequent pauses (Crimp’s quintessential stage directions) are more meaningful

than spoken words.
If Cleansed is deeply rooted in physical action and visual theatricality, The
Country – Crimp’s most traditional piece – is basically a static conversation play
(Buse 166), in which the physical is mainly evoked through words. Subsequently,
onstage bodily contact is reduced to a minimum. Richard, for instance, repeatedly
refuses to kiss his wife –3 this is particularly significant near the conclusion of the
play, which, as Martin Middeke observes, “ends in a Beckettian fashion as a cul-
de-sac situation of paralysis” (93):

 – […] Kiss me.

The phone continues to ring.

– I have kissed you.
Pause.
– I have kissed you.
– Then kiss me again.
Neither moves. The phone continues to ring. (366)

Interestingly, the only remarkable exception appears in the fourth act, in which
Rebecca, who “personifies destructive sexual and deadly drives” (Buse 166; my
translation), grips the doctor’s hand to cut it with a pair of tiny scissors,4 sensually
sucks his wound, and “lets his fingers rest there a moment, then breaks away, and
wipes her mouth on her sleeve” (340).
Here, Rebecca’s visceral instincts seem to overcome verbal mediation: the
concrete bodily act replaces its discursive transformation. Broadly speaking,
however, Crimp demonstrates how the seeming absence of the body speaks as
loud as its presence. Indeed, textual/linguistic games intriguingly conjure up the
physical, stressing that (not only bodies but also) words ‘matter’ in the double
sense of the term, bearing importance from a lexical and semantic perspective,
but having an intrinsically physical substance as well. In general terms, Cleansed
has an irresistible impact on the spectators’ bodies, while The Country refrains
from invading their physical space, even if deep sexual tensions lurk under its
surface.
To conclude, the comparative close reading of these two texts can only
benefit from some wider deliberations on the corporeal dimension in Kane’s and

3 Richard kisses Corinne (on the back of her neck) only once, while she is talking to the woman
who sometimes looks after their children on the phone (355).
4 The scissors are an inherently dangerous object throughout the play: at the end of the first act,
Corinne inadvertently cuts herself, then sucks her bleeding finger, in a sense anticipating this
sequence.

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146 Maria Elena Capitani

Crimp’s dramatic output. As several scholars have pointed out, Kane’s work can
be divided into two parts: her first three plays (Blasted, 1995, Phaedra’s Love,
1996, and Cleansed) and the last two pieces (Crave, 1998, and 4.48 Psychosis,
2000). If, in the first cluster, the body is ostensibly exposed and brutally tortured
(“the reified, martyred, humiliated body becomes the locus of pain”; Angel-Perez
154; my translation), the plays belonging to her “linguistic turn” (Voigts-Virchow
204) deal with the progressive and irreversible dissolution of the self through
voices, “replac[ing] the visual impact of her cruelty with language” (De Vos 148).5
In doing so, “They not only depict the body on the verge of disintegration under
the pressure of jouissance, but the body of the text is under attack as well” (De
Vos 148). Indeed, in 4.48 Psychosis, the syntax progressively collapses and, near
the end, language tends to fade out, mirroring the breakdown of an alienated
subject whose body “can never be married” (Kane, 4.48 212) to the soul: here, in a
sense, words seem to swing between a corporeal status and an immaterial one.
Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997) can be read as a template for Crave and
4.48 Psychosis (Saunders, Love Me 111). His most famous and innovative piece, as
Crimp himself affirms, is “clearly about stories” (qtd. in Sierz, Crimp 103), that is
to say, words forming narratives about its elusive and protean offstage title
character. Interestingly, during his career, he has

consciously developed two methods of dramatic writing: one is the making of scenes in
which characters enact a story in the conventional way – for example my play The Country –
the other is a form of narrated drama in which the act of story-telling is itself dramatised –
as in Attempts on Her Life, or Fewer Emergencies […]. In this second kind of writing, the
dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one. (qtd. in Ayache)

Thus, even more explicitly than in The Country, in these notably (experi)mental
works the physical can be staged through language. In Attempts on Her Life, the
polymorphous protagonist Anne (also named Annie, Anya, Anny, Annushka) is
bodily absent, while anonymous speakers tell the multifaceted (and incongruous)
story/ies of her life from different points of view. Similarly, in the short plays
forming the trilogy Fewer Emergencies (2005), “the story events are narrated,
haltingly, without being enacted; the principal characters are absent” (Sierz,
“Form” 377). However, these ambiguous texts based on a corporeal void create
some horrific images whose protagonists are children (and their bodies): Face to
the Wall (2002), for instance, is about a school massacre, while in the conclusion

5 According to De Vos, Kane already “experiments with the embodiment of language” (139) in
Cleansed when the female protagonist is “beaten by an unseen group of men whose V OICES we
hear” (Kane, Cleansed 130) and sexually abused by one of them. In this scene, “Language thus
becomes carnalized; it is turned into a body itself” (De Vos 139).

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 Dealing with Bodies 147

of the piece which gives the trilogy its name little Bobby is hit by a bullet coming
from outside the kitchen window (Angel-Perez 206). Even in his earlier plays,
Crimp experiments with physical ellipses: in Dealing with Clair (1988), the epon-
ymous estate agent mysteriously vanishes, while Getting Attention (1991) is “an
extremely disturbing play where the abused child never appears onstage, so that
the audience is forced to imagine the brutal details of the violence she undergoes”
(Capitani, “Blurring” 67). Moreover, many Crimpian characters are significantly
invisible (e.g., Corinne and Richard’s children, his senior partner Morris, and the
babysitter in The Country). The only Crimp play which confronts the audience
with explicit images (fellatio, brutal sex, eye-gouging) is probably The Treatment,
a precursor of in-yer-face drama and theatre. In sum, Crimp and Kane seem to
meet in their dramatic extremes: logocentrism and explicit provocation. Exempli-
fying two different possible treatments of bodies on stage, these playwrights
make the physical hyperbolically visible yet also remove it from sight, as they
offer different but subtly complementary ways of problematising corporeality and
its performance.

Works Cited
Primary Literature

Crimp, Martin. The Country. Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. 285–366.
Kane, Sarah. Cleansed. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. 105–151.
– 4.48 Psychosis. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. 203–245.

Secondary Literature

Angel-Perez, Élisabeth. Voyages au bout du possible: Les Théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel

Beckett à Sarah Kane. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006.
Ayache, Solange. “Theatre and Psychoanalysis: Or Jung on Martin Crimp’s Stage. ‘100 Words.’”
Sillages critiques 10 (2009). 30 August 2012 <http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/
1838.html>.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1984.
Brusberg-Kiermeier, Stefani. “Cruelty, Violence and Rituals in Sarah Kane’s Plays.” Sarah Kane
in Context. Eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010.
80–87.
Buse, Peter. “Sollicitations téléphoniques: La Campagne de Martin Crimp.” Le Théâtre anglais
contemporain: 1985–2005. Eds. Élisabeth Angel-Perez and Nicole Boireau. Paris: Klinck-
sieck, 2007. 153–168.

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148 Maria Elena Capitani

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