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Performing Simulacra. Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane
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Sara Soncini
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Performing Simulacra. Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane
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               Performing Simulacra:
            Human/Animal Intersections
             in the Work of Sarah Kane

                                  Sara Soncini

Abstract

     This article looks at the presence and function of animals in the dra-
matic works of Sarah Kane. The by now massive scholarship on Kane has
tended to see her work as epitomizing the move beyond the dramatic para-
digm famously theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and as equally marked
by increasingly dehumanized constructions of subjectivity that culminate in
the disembodied theatrical landscapes of her late plays. The research pre-
sented here addresses a hitherto unexplored dimension to Kane’s joint en-
gagement with the boundaries of subjectivity and the boundaries of theatre,
namely, the pervasive presence of animals across her entire oeuvre and their
thought-provoking intersections with the human subjects with whom they
share the stage. Through a combination of textual and performance analysis,
I chart the complex, changing configurations of this relationship of co-habita-
tion and mutual implication, offering a comprehensive discussion of the role
of animals as key players in Kane’s dramaturgy of simulacra.

Keywords

     Sarah Kane; Postdramatic theatre; Contemporary drama; Posthuman,
Performance studies; Animal studies




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5192
Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane




          Performing Simulacra:
      Human/Animal Intersections in the
           Work of Sarah Kane

                                      Sara Soncini

      As amply documented by the growing body of challenging new work
produced over the past two decades or so, the posthuman turn has acted as
a powerful creative stimulus for contemporary theatre artists. More often
than not, their endeavour to give scenic shape to the demise of the anthro-
pocentric paradigm has involved a searching interrogation of theatre as
a live art form, leading them to sound the limits as well as the resources
of their medium of choice1. Governed as it is by the material presence of
the actor’s body, the field of performance might appear unhelpfully mired
in a humanist aesthetic and ontology. On the other hand, dramatists and
theatre-makers have been quick to turn the problematic physicality of per-
formance into a strategic tool for estranging and critiquing the processes
of subjectivation, pointing to the stage as an ideal space for querying and
queering existing parameters of identity.
      The work of Sarah Kane, one of the most celebrated and innovative
British dramatists to have emerged in the 1990s, is a prime case in point.
The by now massive scholarship on Kane has tended to see her writing as
epitomizing the move beyond the dramatic paradigm famously theorized
by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and as equally marked by increasingly dehu-
manized constructions of subjectivity that culminate in the disembodied


      1
        With their international reputation and circulation, the avant-garde works
of Romeo Castellucci with Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Rodrigo García with
La Carnicería Teatro are consistently singled out as the most paradigmatic ex-
amples in the critical literature. The new millennium has seen a steady rise in
scholarly research that situates itself at the intersection between Animal Studies
and Theatre and Performance Studies. A very useful review of the state of the
art is offered in Orozco & Parker-Starbuck (2015: 2-4); the theoretical framework
for my analysis draws on the essays collected in this volume as well as on the
groundwork laid by Read 2000, Chaudhury 2003, Ridout 2006, and Orozco 2013.


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theatrical landscapes of her late plays (Barnett 2008, Delgado-García 2015).
The research presented here re-routes this line of inquiry by addressing a
hitherto unexplored dimension to Kane’s joint engagement with the bound-
aries of subjectivity and the boundaries of theatre, namely, the pervasive
presence of animals across her entire oeuvre and their thought-provok-
ing intersections with the human actors with whom they share the stage2.
Through a combination of textual and performance analysis, this article
charts the complex, changing configurations of these patterns of relational-
ity, offering an extensive discussion of the role of animals as key players in
Kane’s dramaturgy of simulacra, on both the conceptual and the material
level. I begin with Blasted, the first play in her compact canon and the most
overtly political one in its twin concern with the violence of anthropocen-
trism and the violence of war. In the central section, devoted to Cleansed,
the accents falls on Kane’s investment in stage animals as a confrontational
tool that can jolt theatre into a state of reawakening and rethinking of its
representational boundaries. Finally, I turn to 4.48 Psychosis and look at the
«affirmative bond», in Braidotti’s felicitous formulation, which Kane’s last
play and artistic summation establishes with animality in order to target
the deeply imbricated ontologies of humanity and performance.

             1. The politics of humanimality: Blasted
      In Kane’s debut play, human-animal relations are tackled from a dis-
tinctly political angle. First staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre Up-
stairs in 1995, Blasted was conceived as a response to the war in the former
Yugoslavia. Kane wrote her by now legendary ‘Bosnian’ play in outrage
at the widespread othering of the Yugoslav conflict in public and media
discourse at the time—the politically expedient tendency to confine the
horrors of genocidal carnage to a supposedly non-European ‘elsewhere’
mired in atavistic hatreds and endemic nationalism. The action is set in a
hotel room in Leeds and the dramaturgy is designed to provocatively col-
lapse the distance between the perceived safety of peacetime Britain and
the chaotic violence of the Balkan war zone. Blasted begins as an eccentric
but still recognizable variation on the «chamber piece about relationships»
(Greig 2001: ix), a highly familiar dramatic fare here played out between
Ian, a middle-aged tabloid journalist, and Cate, a damaged twenty-one-


    2
       The sole, albeit limited, exception to this critical lacuna is McCorry’s in-
sightful study of meat eating and violence in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (McCorry 2017).


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



year-old whom he appears to have been sexually exploiting since she was
practically a child. Kane’s desire to shatter the complacent belief that the
‘tribal’ bloodshed of ethnic violence could never happen in a civilized
Western country becomes concretized on stage in the form of the mortar
bomb that detonates midway into the play and refigures the social realistic
domesticity of the initial scenes as a surreal Balkan nightmare filled with
escalating horrors. Conceptually, Blasted asks the audience to see Ian’s rape
of Cate in the hotel room as the seed of the full-scale destruction of war,
and the unspeakable atrocities inflicted upon him by a nameless Soldier
as its brutal nemesis. Both the discourse and the performance of animality
play a key role in establishing and sustaining this symbolical continuum
between apparently discrete forms of violence: domestic and foreign, sex-
ual and political, individual and collective.
      Initially, animals appear in the play as food, meat products for hu-
man consumption. In the opening scene, Cate, an ethical vegetarian, re-
fuses to eat the ham sandwiches that Ian has ordered in their room, and
likewise rejects his sexual advances. On the following morning, post-rape,
Ian calls room service and proudly asks for «two English breakfasts» (Kane
2001: 34)3, only to plead absentmindedness when Cate turns with disgust
from the sausages and bacon on her plate. While serving as a means of
coercion and resistance in their fraught relationship, the animals’ «dead
meat» (B, 7), to use Cate’s words, becomes steadily associated to the racial
Other in Ian’s chauvinistic rhetoric. The woman’s refusal to eat ham is met
by Ian’s dismissive reply, «It’s only a pig», followed by the proposal to
«take you out for an Indian» (B, 7), with the ellipsis creating a slippage
between place and person and implying the latter’s equivalence with an-
imal meat. When he learns about Cate’s inappropriate fraternizing with
the black hotel worker who brings up food to their room, Ian’s possessive
attitude towards his girlfriend is framed as a racist anxiety about the young
woman’s supposed hunger for «a bit of black meat» (B, 17). Each time the
unseen «wog with the sarnies» (B, 6) is heard knocking on the door, Ian,
who carries a gun and purports to be working for a mysterious govern-
mental organization, appears visibly alarmed; earlier on in the dialogue,
we hear him express a racist paranoia about the outside world when, af-
ter looking out of the hotel window, he describes Leeds as a battlefield in
which «Wogs and Pakis are taking over» (B, 4). Although the actual agent


      3
        Subsequent quotations from the same edition are noted parenthetically in
the text using the abbreviations B (Blasted), C (Cleansed) and P (4.48 Psychosis).


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of destruction that eventually crosses the doorstep, plunging the room’s
enclosed space into the chaos of war, appears to have no kinship with this
post-imperial Other, the link with pigs persists. The Balkan-like atrocities
related by Kane’s deliberately nondescript Soldier—yet another «filthy»
wog in Ian’s eyes (B, 48)—include the image of refugees being «pack[ed]
into trucks like pigs» (B, 50) and crushing each other to death; and even
before that, the same animal presides over the beginning of Ian’s interac-
tion with his uninvited guest. When the Soldier breaks into the room, Ian
is still holding a rasher of bacon from his breakfast; after an initial moment
in which they stand still, staring at each other in surprise, the Soldier asks
about the food in Ian’s hand and, at the latter’s reply of «pig» (B, 36), de-
mands to be given the first morsel of what will be his increasingly grue-
some spoils of war. This exchange of meat symbolically initiates the role
reversal in the ‘Bosnian’ section of Blasted, with Ian turning from perpetra-
tor into victim as the Soldier preys upon his flesh: first sexually, by raping
him, then literally, when he sucks out his eyes and eats them one after the
other with bloodcurdling deliberateness.
       The horrible acts of violence inflicted upon Ian by the Soldier appar-
ently obey a retaliatory principle: the rape, a punishment for his abuse
of Cate and his arrogant machismo; the eye-gouging, another symbolical
castration brought about by his unethical professional blindness, by his
refusal, as a «home journalist, for Yorkshire» (B, 48), to report the Soldier’s
narrative of human suffering on account of its perceived lack of news val-
ue for British readers. At the same time, however, the reconfiguration of
Ian’s body as meat entails a significant weakening of the species barrier:
by becoming food for the ever-hungry Soldier, Ian’s human flesh finds it-
self on a par with the rasher of bacon, thereby revealing its full animal
vulnerability. Ironically, moreover, Ian’s dethronement from his human
singularity already haunts the vocabulary he employs in the first part of
the play to assert his supremacy over, at once, animals, Cate, and a whole
range of non-normative subjects including «Wogs and Pakis» (B, 4) as well
as «lesbos», «cocksuckers», «queers» (B, 19) and the mentally disabled. A
terminally ill cancer patient, Ian describes his surgically removed lung as a
«lump of rotting pork» (B, 11, emphasis added), equating his human body
to animal meat. Conversely, in his exchanges with Cate and the Soldier he
consistently refers to the varieties of animal flesh that he orders and con-
sumes as «pig». Kane infuses Ian’s discourse of human mastery with the
fraught acknowledgement of his human body as a body made from meat;
in parallel, the language he applies to the animal flesh he orders and con-
sumes unwittingly reverses the commonplace objectification of ‘pig’ into


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



‘pork’ or, more precisely, the expedient ‘prophylaxis’ whereby human lan-
guage occludes the violence involved in the production and consumption
of meat by «eras[ing] the trace of the once-living animal» (McCorry 2017:
763). By the end of the play, this form of violence becomes one with the
violence of fully-fledged warfare. Alone in the room after the Soldier has
shot himself and Cate has gone hunting for food, a blind and helpless Ian
exhumes and eats the corpse of the deceased infant rescued by Cate from
the warzone offstage, then takes the baby’s place in the makeshift tomb
under the floorboards and «dies with relief» (B, 60), only to be immediately
revived by the rain pouring over his head from a leak in the roof. Moments
later, Cate returns with gin, bread and a «large sausage» (B, 60) she has pro-
cured by selling her body to the soldiers; she eats her fill and shares the rest
with her self-interred roommate, who thanks her in return.
      The twin meat-eating scenes in the final moments of Blasted effective-
ly close the gap between the human and the animal body, foregrounding
their shared materiality and fragility. They proclaim the flimsiness of the
species barrier in a world drenched in violence in which everyone becomes
potential meat for the other, pointing to a generalized condition of social
existence that transcends geographical, as well as ontological, barriers.
Ian’s feasting on the baby’s corpse—a girl, we learn—finds a match in the
ghastly story he dictates over the phone to his editor in the first scene:

         A serial killer slaughtered British tourist Samantha Scrace, S – C – R
      – A – C – E, in a sick murder ritual comma, police revealed yesterday
      point new par. The bubbly nineteen year old from Leeds was among
      seven victims found buried in identical triangular tombs in an isolated
      New Zealand forest point new par. Each had been stabbed more than
      twenty times and placed face down comma, hands bound behind their
      backs point new par. Caps up, ashes at the site showed the maniac had
      stayed to cook a meal, caps down point new par. […] (12)

     Although the young woman in Ian’s news story is not literally con-
sumed as meat by her murderer, her killing is nonetheless framed as
«slaughter», a term that points to the translation of her death into the hack-
neyed language of tabloid journalism as a form of cannibalism, a pack-
aging of other people’s suffering as savoury news items fed to a greedy
domestic readership. A similar conflation of foreign and local violence
underpins the eating of Ian’s eyes. The Soldier presents his macabre deed
as the repetition of an identical act of violence perpetrated upon her girl-
friend by another soldier in the past («He ate her eyes. / Poor bastard. /



488
                                     Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



Poor love. / Poor fucking bastard»; B, 50). Through this comment, the au-
dience is tricked into construing the Soldier’s insanely literal application of
‘an eye for an eye’ as a Bosnian war crime. As Kane has revealed, however,
the eye-eating ritual was directly inspired by a journalistic account of foot-
ball hooliganism in the UK4: the Soldier’s Balkan-like ‘bestiality’ ultimately
turns out to be British to the bone. The overlap finds further and conclusive
endorsement in the scene’s unmistakable kinship with the horrific blinding
of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play to which Blasted is deeply
and declaredly indebted5.
      To return to the play’s closing line, Ian’s acknowledgement of ‘thanks’
to the woman he has systematically abused in the initial scenes has gen-
erally been taken to signal his recovery of a first, tentative flicker of hu-
manity, a shedding of his predatory masculinity as a result of the ordeal
he has been put through. What has generally gone unnoticed in the crit-
ical literature is the degree to which this «slow and painful education»
(Saunders 2002: 64) pivots on a critique of anthropocentrism as a means for
undermining the other manifestations of human exceptionalism to which
this mindset becomes related across the play: racist, sexist, xenophobic,
and orientalist. In this sense, the human/animal intersections in Blasted are
central to Kane’s political project, seeing that they provide a strategic tool
for questioning the boundary categories whereby we essentialize what we
understand and treat as Other, and for denouncing the violence embedded
in, and emanating from, exclusionary constructions of subjectivity.
      A further, overlooked aspect that acquires particular significance in
light of the line of argument pursued here is the heightened theatricality
that surrounds the play’s unsettling of the human/animal divide and be-
comes key to its dismissal of essentialist visions of identity. Kane presents
Ian’s rehabilitation as an embodied experience that begins with the discur-
sive and then literal animalization of his human flesh, but progressively
takes the shape of an out-and-out performance of humanimality. In the fi-
nal scene Ian’s mutilated, undignified, uncivilized body takes centre stage.
The scavenging of the baby’s carcass is preceded by a prolonged sequence
of mostly mute vignettes where he is shown masturbating, defecating,
strangling himself, crying «huge bloody tears» (B, 60)—«get[ting] as low as


    4
       This is Bill Bruford’s Among the Thugs, first published in 1990. Kane is
quoted acknowledging this source in Sierz 2001: 102-103.
     5
       On the Shakespearean palimpsest in Blasted see Saunders 2002 and Sonci-
ni 2018.


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



humanly possible» (Saunders 2002: 63), in Kane’s own summary. These
snapshots repeat, in distilled form, some of the actions performed or men-
tioned in the realistic first half of the play, while at the same time offering
a more rigorous rendition of Shakespeare’s version of «unaccommodated
man» through a ‘show’ that Kane consciously set up as an equivalent of
the storm scene in King Lear. Alone on the blasted heath, Ian puts on a
performance of man as a «poor, bare, forked animal» (Lear, 3.4.105-106);
as if responding to a prompt, he translates the words spoken by the old
Shakespearean king into an embodied performance in which language,
the prime guarantor of the species barrier, has given way to animal-like
sounds or ceased altogether.
      In his extended examination of Blasted, McCorry objects to the preva-
lent humanist interpretation of the ending, which sees Ian’s loss of human
dignity as «the tragic content of the play, while its (fragile) recovery al-
lows for something like the possibility of redemption» (2017: 755). This an-
thropocentric perspective, he observes, obfuscates Kane’s evident ethical
orientation towards the nonhuman, her specific concern with meat as an
«ontological and ethical category» that creates «the condition of possibility
for the play’s violence» (ibid.), rather than a mere analogue for infra-hu-
man forms of violence. In my view, these two readings as not necessarily
incompatible. With its combination and indeed integration of actions that
we would normally ascribe to either ‘animal’ or ‘human’ behaviour6, Ian’s
solo show comes across, pointedly, as a moment in which this distinction
no longer obtains. Through Ian’s animal act, Blasted reframes the categories
of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ as a fictive production, a part that one can
play or be made to play in the interest of various exceptionalist agendas.
      The political meaning attached to humanimal performance in Blasted
is brought into clearer view by another distinguished theatrical precedent
for Ian’s paroxysmal routine in the final scene. In addition to King Lear,
Kane has pointed to Waiting for Godot as a major influence on the composi-
tion of Blasted (Saunders 2009: 39). The Beckettian palimpsest is at its most
manifest in the bond of mutual co-dependency that locks Ian and Cate in
a love/hate relationship; and the Godot-like quality of Ian’s failed suicide


      6
       Taking issue with critical thinking that insists on Ian’s reduction to a basic
animalistic form or state in this sequence, LePage (2014) points to his burst of
hysterical laughter, his attempt to strangle himself, and the considerate burial of
the baby’s remains after the cannibalism as evidence that Ian is never fully dehu-
manized.


490
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has been duly noted by critics. To the current list of acknowledged echoes I
would however also add Lucky’s turn as Pozzo’s performing animal. Upon
(re-)reading Beckett’s play, Kane would hardly have missed the overlap
between interspecies and interracial abjection in Godot, where Pozzo’s co-
lonial perspective constructs his (Irish) subjects as less than human: a con-
dition typified by, but not limited to, his servant Lucky, as is apparent from
the landlord’s initial reluctance, when he first sees Vladimir and Estragon,
to grant them membership in «the same species as myself» (Beckett 1990:
24). The intertextual link between Lucky’s and Ian’s respective ‘shows’ is
activated by Kane’s choice of pig as the prime animal presence in Blasted.
From the ham sandwiches in the opening moments of the play down to
the visually prominent, «large» (B, 60) sausage in its final sequence, pig (or
rather its meat) is rarely absent from Ian’s language or actions. In Beckett,
Lucky’s animal status is symbolized by the dog leash that binds him to
his master, but since his very first appearance Pozzo’s slave is consistently
addressed as a «pig» (Beckett 1990: 30, 31), «swine» (32) or «hog» (39); most
notably, his coerced performance as a thinking device mounted on a cap-
tive animal body is prompted by his master’s order to «Think, pig!» (41).
Lucky’s virtuoso performance presents a human character who imperson-
ates an animal that, in turn, plays a sentient human being. An awareness
of this Beckettian antecedent contributes to elucidate the meaning of Ian’s
animal act, likewise presented as an accomplished performance of hum-
animality rewarded with a hard-earned sausage and closed by a «Thank
you» that suggests an actor’s bow to the audience. With its interspecies
oscillations, the Godot palimpsest throws into further relief the theatricality
of Ian’s process of ‘becoming animal’, pointing to the binaries he embodies
as performative, reversible, and fundamentally interchangeable.

                   2. Sharing the stage: Cleansed
     In the rest of Kane’s in-yer-face production it is the animals’ turn to
take centre stage and graduate to actors in their own right. Animal acts fig-
ure prominently among the admittedly «impossible» (Saunders 2009: 93)
stage directions that punctuate Phaedra’s Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998),
impressing a distinctly self-conscious twist to Kane’s trademark provo-
cation. Going one step further than Blasted, animals are here enlisted as
collaborators in a theatre of extremes that elevates unstageability to a dra-
maturgical strategy with a view to pushing the boundaries of theatre as
a representational medium. A commission from London’s Gate Theatre,



                                                                                 491
Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



Phaedra’s Love rewrites Seneca’s plot with the declared intention of offer-
ing an unashamedly graphic portrayal of the violence and sexual content
that remained mostly hidden from view in classical tragedy. In Cleansed,
presented at the Royal Court Theatre in 1998, the dialogue is almost out-
weighed by stage directions covering a whole range of Kane’s by then fa-
miliar theatrical impossibilities. These include, in addition to graphic sex,
a gang rape, a hanging, several ghastly mutilations, and torture by electro-
shock and impalement—a hyperbolic display of violence perpetrated on
the human body that entails an equally conspicuous disclosure of theatri-
cal artifice. In point of unstageability, however, the palm goes to the actions
performed by animals, such as the dog and vulture that take active part in
the dismemberment of Hippolytus’ body in Phaedra’s Love, or the notorious
rats that haunt the stage in Cleansed and have come to epitomize the gaunt-
let thrown by Kane to the performers and producers of her drama.
      Initially conceived as a sequel to Blasted in a war trilogy that was nev-
er brought to completion, Cleansed is a complex, enigmatic play in which
fully rounded characters give way to «states of being» (Saunders 2002: 88)
and narrative recedes in favour of a kaleidoscope of viscerally powerful
images. The play’s polysemous title alludes to ethnic cleansing, in conti-
nuity with the preceding Bosnian play, but also to the treatment of drug
addiction (Graham, the first character we encounter, is a junkie) and other
perceived ‘deviances’ such as homosexuality and gender instabilities and,
finally, to the ritual purging or purification of emotions through theatrical
catharsis. The play’s setting is equally, and eerily, multifunctional. Accord-
ing to Kane’s stage directions, the story takes place in a university, but
the unfolding events generate a crossover between prison, concentration
camp, mental institution, scientific laboratory and slaughterhouse. Over
the course of twenty scenes that do not build up to a plot, we watch a
group of patients/prisoners undergo a series of brutal, sadistic experiments
conducted or supervised by a character called Tinker. Kane’s master of
ceremonies is himself an agglomerate of roles: doctor, surgeon and drug
dealer, therapist, interrogator and torturer, Good Samaritan and sexual ex-
ploiter, a mad scientist or the sinister agent of a totalitarian regime, while
possibly also himself an inmate. Tinker’s methods and behaviours vary
accordingly, but the overall aim and rationale of his proceedings is, osten-
sibly, to test the limits of love and its chances of survival under conditions
of extreme brutality and utter dehumanization.
      A similar uncertainty surrounds the status and function of the rats that
make their first, timid appearance almost midway into the play but soon
rise to a prominent presence. Within the story, it remains unclear whether


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we should see these pests as simply part of the environment or as enlisted
collaborators in Tinker’s project; in Scene Eight, an allusion is made to rat
torture of the kind described in George Orwell’s 1984, but the actual ordeal
threatened by Tinker in order to extort from Carl a Winston-like betrayal
of his lover is, instead, a slow death by impalement7. In Kane’s theatrical
project, however, the rats are undoubtedly cast as active participants, giv-
en that her script requires them to accomplish actions that go well beyond
mere presence. The more complex stage business is that of Scene Thirteen,
when Carl’s feet are amputated by Tinker and carried away by a pack of
rodents. Through this attribution of agency, Kane’s animals fully qualify
as performers, on a par with the other, human actors on stage. The erosion
of human monopoly over theatre is echoed in the play’s closing image of
Carl and Grace, by then two human wrecks, sitting next to each other in
silence while «the sun gets brighter and brighter, the squealing of the rats louder
and louder, until the light is blinding and the sound deafening» (C, 151).
      In preparation for this final takeover of representational space, with
human language muted and replaced by animal sound, the play works in
more than one way to close the distance between its human and nonhu-
man characters. For one, the rats’ turns imagined by Kane always involve
some form of interaction with and modification of the human body: stage
directions depict them eating the characters’ severed limbs, or chewing
at their wounds. In this respect, the rats’ behaviour seems to extend or
even duplicate Tinker’s penchant for ‘tinkering’ with the inmates’ identi-
ties through the insane, butchery medical experiments that culminate in
his uncouth mending of Grace’s gender dysphoria through the stitching of
Carl’s male genitals onto her groin. As the rats’ trespass into human space
grows ever more substantial, we are left to muse upon their role in the
characters’ transformations under the pressure of Tinker’s experiments.
What will they do with Carl’s feet offstage? Will they eat them, as we have
seen them doing with his hand, or will they follow Tinker’s example and
use his limbs prosthetically to concoct a hybrid humanimal body? Is this
one of the intended outcomes of Carl’s gradual pruning to a dumb torso?



    7
        Carl’s frantic plea to his torturer in this scene, «Not me please not me
don’t kill me Rod not me don’t kill me ROD NOT ME ROD NOT ME» (C, 117),
is an unmistakable echo of Winston’s «Do it to Julia! (...) Not me! Julia! Not me!»
in Orwell’s dystopia. In a subsequent vis-a-vis with his lover, after his tongue has
been cut out, Carl writes in the mud «and the rats eat my face» (C, 129), again
recalling the climactic episode in O’Brien’s torture chamber.


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



While potentially filling the role of Tinker’s emissaries or even analogues,
however, as typical laboratory animals the rats are also clearly affiliated
with the human guinea pigs used in Tinker’s experiments. This kinship
finds apparent confirmation in a scene of mass extermination which indi-
cates them as pests, a plague to be eradicated just like the other, human
undesirables around the compound.
       As undoubtedly predicted by the dramatist, these human/animal in-
teractions have proven a prime stumbling block for producers who have
risen to the challenge of staging Cleansed. One of the first and most illus-
trious victims was the revered German director, Peter Zadek. Resolved to
confront head on the play’s impossible stage directions, Zadek opted for
an uncompromisingly literal, realistic rendition of Kane’s script in his 1998
production for the Hamburger Kammerspiele. Having spent months try-
ing to coax his animal actors into taking direction, he finally threw in the
towel and decided to cut the rats altogether at dress rehearsal8. Earlier in
the same year, in an interview given on the eve of the British premiere,
Kane dismissed the question of how James Macdonald, the Royal Court
director, was going to deal with the rats with a cheeky «I’m glad it’s not
my problem», followed by the observation that «Shakespeare has a bear
running across the stage in A Winter’s Tale, and his stagecraft was perfect,
so I don’t know why I can’t have rats» (Saunders 2009: 93-94).
       The implications of Kane’s reference to Shakespeare’s «Exit pursued by
a bear», the quintessence of impossible stage directions, are worth discuss-
ing in some detail. When seen in the context of the troubled reception of
her earlier work, Kane’s mention of the bear act in The Winter’s Tale is eas-
ily explained as an appeal to authoritative precedent. The Shakespearean
parallel appears particularly apposite if one recalls that during the critical
controversy surrounding Blasted, reviewers who had depicted Kane as an
immature, unskilled writer had often relied on disparaging comparisons
between the «adolescent desire to shock» (Spenser 1995) driving her theatre
of extremes and Shakespeare’s serious, expert handling of stage violence.
(It is probably no coincidence that the ur-villain in Cleansed bears the same
name as Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail, who provided Blasted with its most
vicious review.) Arguably, however, the dramatist’s reasons for bringing
Shakespeare’s bear into the conversation were not purely expedient. Con-
sidering especially that Cleansed is Kane’s most overtly Shakespearean and


      Zadek’s debacle is reported by Niels Tabert, who collaborated on the Ger-
      8

man translation of Cleansed, in Saunders 2002: 141.


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Jacobean play (Saunders 2009: 29)—with motifs and images from Web-
ster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore woven into a
Shakespearean blend of Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ti-
tus Andronicus—one can confidently assume that its rat scenes are likewise
informed by an awareness of the deeper meaning and function of the bear
act in The Winter’s Tale. Similarly to Kane with her rats, there can be little
doubt that Shakespeare had a bear appear on stage for the specific purpose
of raising the issue of (un)stageability: Quigley (2020: 47) rightly remarks
upon the lack of necessity to the plot of the complicated business of Antigo-
nus’ pursuit, considering that the king’s servant could conveniently have
died offstage with the other mariners on the voyage back to Sicily. The
actual method for performing the bear scene in Shakespeare’s times is still
open to much speculation. The options explored by scholars range from
an actor in bear costume, to rudimentary special effects, down to the use
of a live animal: bear-baiting was a highly popular form of entertainment
in early modern London, the site of the first purpose-built playhouses but
also of the first baiting arenas9. Shakespeare knew that the same audience
that came to see his plays enjoyed watching animals tear each other to piec-
es in the nearby baiting pits; indeed, as has been suggested, the proximity
and «active collusion» between the practices of theatre and animal fight-
ing «crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the nature and
workings of humanness as a psychological, ethical, and political category»
(Höfele 2011: 1-2). On one level, then, the animal act in The Winter’s Tale im-
plies an acknowledgement of, and commentary upon, these synergies. To
this one must add the fact that the bear, more than any other wild beast or
fighting animal, lends itself to probing—and staging—human/animal in-
tersections. Bears are capable of upright posture and this makes them into
potentially humanoid figures, easily impersonated by a human actor. With
its potential or actual hybridity, then, the bear act can be seen to partake
of the pervasive desire for liminality across The Winter’s Tale, the same that
finds epitomic expression in Hermione’s statue coming to life—yet another
performative investigation of the boundaries of the human.
      While unquestioningly raising the bar of unstageability, in scripting
the animal acts in Cleansed Kane followed her predecessor’s approach and
refrained from providing any indications about how to perform them,


    9
        Other likely candidates for the part of the bear are the two polar cubs gi-
ven to James I, the patron of Shakespeare’s company, following an expedition to
the Arctic in 1609: see Quigley 2020: 47.


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



leaving it to her directors to grapple with the practical, aesthetic as well
as ethical implications of having the rats «share the space» (C, 135) with the
human characters onstage. In the play’s performance history, no option
has gone untried: from live animals, as discussed above, to inanimate sim-
ulacra, to disembodied light and sound effects10. The first production at the
Royal Court Theatre used toy rats, in line with James Macdonald’s over-
all symbolical, ritualized approach to the other outrages committed on-
stage11. Further to risking a trivialization of the rats as a comical curiosity,
however, these mechanical replicas proved no less reluctant to cooperate
than their live counterparts in Zadek’s production: Stuart McQuarry, who
played Tinker under Macdonald’s direction, recollects that «they never re-
ally worked, sometimes they moved about, but more often they wouldn’t»
(Saunders 2009: 185). In 2016 it was Katie Mitchell’s turn to concede de-
feat. Confiding in the National Theatre’s impressive stage machinery, the
celebrated director set about proving that it was in fact possible to stage
the impossible. Her production managed an utterly naturalistic, aestheti-
cally impeccable realization of Kane’s entire repertory of extremes—with
the notable exception of the rat scenes. On the National Theatre stage, her
animal performers were actively barred from entering the space of perfor-
mance, let alone sharing it with its human residents and interacting with
their bodies. Kane’s rats only manifested themselves through a squealing
sound that triggered a «rat alarm»; at which, intermittent lights came on as
Tinker’s assistants fired shots into the wings, went out to fetch the dead in-
truders, and laid their bodies on Tinker’s table. In the infamous mutilation
scene, Carl’s severed feet remained inside Tinker’s macabre «amputation
machine»12 and it was now the turn of the dead animals to be wheeled out
with the table at scene change. Demoted from the role of active partici-
pants into that of hapless victims, or lifeless extras, the rats became irrele-


      10
        While acknowledging that «there are real differences between live animal
presence and other forms of animal presentation» and that these differences in
performance approaches are worth of consideration, Orozco (2013: 50) argues
that qua «human creations, either imagined or performing under [...] human con-
trol», all forms of animal presence on stage automatically turn the spot onto a
representation of the other that is rooted in anthropocentrism.
     11
        The mutilation scenes, for example, were consistently stylized through the
use of red cloth to signify Carl’s tongue and the blood streaming from his ampu-
tated hands and feet.
     12
        The terms «rat alarm» and «amputation machine» appear in the pro-
duction notes held at the National Theatre archive (National Theatre 2016).


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vant and, tellingly, they were cut altogether from the production’s finale:
matching their complete loss of agency in human space and over the hu-
man body, instead of stealing the scene, in the closing moments of the play
they just quietly vanished from the picture.
      Mitchell has made no mystery about her frustration with the rat
scenes13. If her production strove to «bring stage action as close to natural as
possible in order to expose the ultimate futility of the attempt», thereby re-
flecting the play’s concern with «doubling and the non-identity of things»14,
the failure to also include animal action in the attempt constituted a missed
opportunity to fully engage with Kane’s investigation of theatricality. The
rehearsal notes in the production’s prompt script (National Theatre 2016)
show considerable evidence of the director and her team grappling with
the play’s scenes of torture and mutilation with painstaking attention to
detail, admittedly with a view to exposing the inherent duplicity of the
human subject on stage: at once actor and character, person and persona,
substance and sign or simulacrum. The strange and estranging presence of
the rats would have made for a heightened awareness of this double mode
of presence, of the interconnected simultaneity of the natural and the arti-
ficial body on stage.
      Like the directorial debacles mentioned earlier, then, Mitchell’s pro-
duction confirms James Macdonald’s perception of Kane’s rats as her
«pièce de résistance» (Gardner 1999): the chief unstageables in Cleansed but
also, in a more literal sense, the ultimate form of resistance that her writing
poses to theatre. One is hardly surprised to find that the image of human
and nonhuman characters «shar[ing] the space» (C, 135) envisaged by Kane
has failed to find a match in the play’s performance history: the very lack
of reciprocity that surrounds human/animal interaction in the script seem-
ingly prefigures this impossibility. In Cleansed, the inmates never appear
to register the rats’ presence on stage. Their obdurate blindness is not lim-
ited to the animals’ «scuttl[ing] around» (C, 129) or their more conspicuous
poaching and even eating of amputated limbs, but likewise extends to sit-
uations of actual physical interaction, such as for instance when they are

    13
        For example, during this talk with Matt Trueman: “Katie Mitchell on Cle-
ansed”, National Theatre live platform, 7 March 2016, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=5LizhtwXP8A (last accessed 5 April 2022).
     14
        This is according to Dan Rebellato, a prominent Kane scholar and the
compiler of the programme note for the National Theatre production. The quota-
tion is taken from his blog: http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/spilledink/2016/2/24/
cleansed (last accessed 4 April 2022).


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



described chewing at Grace’s and Carl’s wounds in the final moments of
the play. In this context, the verb ‘share’ that the dramatist uses to describe
her intended human/animal intersections is probably best understood as,
precisely, an intention: a call to imaginatively extend theatrical citizenship
to nonhuman performers and, relatedly, an embedded profession of faith
in the animal as an agent of resistance that can work as a compelling and
creative force in theatre-making.

                     3. «Accord body»: 4.48 Psychosis
     Kane’s parallel explorations of the boundaries of the human and the
boundaries of theatre find their point of convergence and culmination in
4.48 Psychosis. In her fifth and final play, now widely regarded as her artis-
tic manifesto, the writer strove to give scenic shape to the psychotic condi-
tion or, to quote from an interview given during the composition process,

         what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which
      distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination
      completely disappear, so that you no longer know the difference
      between your waking life and your dream life. And also you no longer
      know where you stop and the world starts. (Saunders 2002: 111-112)

       In order to thematize psychosis as a boundary-breaking experience,
Kane set out to break a number of formal boundaries as well, engaging in a
radical redefinition of the very nature of drama and theatre. On the page,
4.48 Psychosis consists of twenty-four fragments, each separated by a line of
five dashes and offering a wide variety of textures that are not ascribed to a
particular individual and are only occasionally woven into a dialogical pat-
tern. The script has no stipulation of personnel on stage, their gender, how
many performers there should be; no setting, action or time frame is given
or implied; text is unallocated and at times it becomes unclear not only how
it is to be spoken but, indeed, whether it is meant to be spoken at all (this
is notably the case with the two fragments consisting entirely of numbers).
Kane’s relentless erosion of the very constituents of drama extends to the
ultimate barrier, namely, the ontological distinction between art and life.
4.48 Psychosis was written «in the almost certain knowledge that it would
be performed posthumously» (Greig 2001: xvi); a couple of days after com-
pleting the play, Kane took her life while she was in hospital following an
earlier suicide attempt, thereby enacting in real life the journey towards
self-annihilation described by the voice(s) that inhabit her text.


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     Whereas the imbrication of the posthuman and the postdramatic in
4.48 Psychosis has been promptly registered in Kane scholarship (see e.g.
Barnett 2008), it is rather surprising to find no acknowledgement, in the
vast amount of critical literature generated by her testament play, of its
extensive, and cognate, engagement with the human/animal divide. Time
and again, the text brings forth hybrid combinations between a human self,
alternatively characterized as a «mind», «consciousness», or simply an «I»,
and various forms of animal life, beginning with this passage taken from
the opening of the second fragment:

       a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting
       hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten
       thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all
       thoughts unite in an instant of accord body no longer expellent
       as the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever utters

             I had a night in which everything was revealed to me.
             How can I speak again?

       the broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself alone finds the
       room in reality teeming and begs never to wake from the
       nightmare (P, 205)

      This occupation of the human mind by a swarm of cockroaches is the
first of Kane’s powerful, surreally vivid images across the play, marking
a striking tonal shift from the more mundane doctor/patient conversation
that opens the play. Central to this first instance of interspecies entangle-
ment is the longing for an «accord body», a locution that can be extrap-
olated from Kane’s stream of consciousness above through alternative
syntactic segmentation of the fourth line: a pluralist, hospitable body («no
longer expellent»), a place of encounter, coexistence and indeed continuity
between (human) self and (nonhuman) other. Across the rest of the play,
the trespass of the species barrier is typically contiguous with the destabili-
zation of gender binaries, as already clear from this early instance, or of the
normative opposition between the sane and insane—the signal political
gestures of 4.48 Psychosis.
      Marking a sharp departure from Kane’s earlier work, the human/an-
imal intersections contained in 4.48 Psychosis are of an exclusively virtual
nature: like everything else in her last play, animals are only made present
on stage by way of their verbal simulacra. With her postdramatic master-



                                                                                 499
Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



piece, Kane brings to consummation the turn towards a non-representa-
tional form of theatre already inaugurated with Crave (1998), a quartet of
nameless voices «speak[ing] in a void» (Saunders 2002: 158). In 4.48 Psycho-
sis, language becomes further autonomized in that it is not only uprooted
from a fictional situation, but also effectively disengaged from its speak-
er(s). Kane’s dramaturgy here is clearly designed to foreclose identification
of the speaker as the originator of the discourses that populate the text,
resulting in a thorough «removal of the individual from the performance»
(Barnett 2008: 22). This divorce of language from self finds a counterpart in
the mind-body split which the play thematizes as the defining feature of
the psychotic experience, as in

         Here am I
         and there is my body

                 dancing on glass (P, 230)

      The recurring self-description, in 4.48 Psychosis, of the ‘I’ as disem-
bodied cogito appears wholly consonant with the posthumanist or, even,
transhumanist notion of human identity consisting of an informational
pattern that no longer depends on the body as its exclusive material sup-
port (Hayles 1999). Once the play is lifted from the page and produced on
a theatre stage, however, the human body inevitably re-enters the picture
with all its cumbersome, unhelpful physicality. The performers’ all-too
human presence is clearly at variance with the de-individualized «constel-
lations of language» (Barnett 2008: 23) presented in 4.48 Psychosis. In this
respect, Kane’s concomitant move towards the postdramatic and the post-
human elevates unrepresentability to an overall dramaturgical principle,
rather than a problem arising from specific stage actions and/or images:
with its resistance to, and indeed refusal of, embodiment, 4.48 Psychosis
is—even more than Cleansed—a conceptually unstageable text. And yet, at
the same time, this is a text that demands to be staged: Kane first, and
her heirs later, have always been adamant that her dramatic oeuvre must
never be reproduced in a medium other than the theatre (Saunders 2002:
150). Quite appropriately for such an inveterate saboteur of dramatic form,
Kane’s artistic testament is a play that inherently defies theatricalization,
yet can only be realized as theatre; a play built on the fundamental aporia
of staging the self as simulacrum, of embodying scenically the disembod-
ied presence which is indexed by the speaker’s phantasmal deixis in the



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passage quoted above («Here am I / and there is my body»)15.
      While tasking theatre-makers with imagining new performance pos-
sibilities, Kane’s dramaturgy of simulacra points to animals as potential
collaborators in the creative endeavour of bringing on stage the posthu-
man subject. The forms of interspecies ‘accord’ alluded to in 4.48 Psychosis
extend to a theatrical partnership which sees human and nonhuman play-
ers finally ‘sharing the space’ and concurring in the (virtual) performance
of a pluralist, hybrid self. The resulting interspecies act enables Kane to
turn the spot onto theatre and selfhood as mutually constructing catego-
ries mired in an anthropocentric bias that we are asked to reconsider and
reverse.
      The human/animal performance in question is produced by way of
intertextuality, through the multiple references activated by a cryptic pair
of lines in the play’s final fragment, just before the suicidal «I» announces
their (impossible) vanishing act:

         the chicken’s still dancing
         the chicken won’t stop (P, 243)

      The primary source for this compulsively dancing chicken is the
notorious closing sequence of Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek, a bit-
ter parable about the dehumanizing effects of capitalism starring Bruno
S[chleinstein], a musician, street artist and mental patient before he became
the German director’s cult actor. The end of the film creates an implicit
identification between Stroszek’s inexorable defeat following his emigra-
tion to America and the dire predicament of various animal performers
trapped in a Wisconsin amusement park. The star attraction among them
is a chicken confined to a slot machine with an electrified floor; when a coin
activates the current, the caged animal starts to ‘dance’ in tortured circles.
Before heading to his self-inflicted death, Stroszek involuntarily shorts out
the fuse-box and in this way condemns the chicken to an endless perfor-
mance: «We can’t stop the dancing chicken», one of the Native American
policemen called to the scene reports into his walkie-talkie.
      Kane’s referencing of Herzog’s chicken is mediated by a second, more
direct, source. Legend has it that Strozsek was the last film seen by Joy Di-
vision frontman, Ian Curtis before he took his own life at the age of twen-


    15
       On the stunning variety of scenic embodiments generated by Kane’s script
see Soncini 2020.


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Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



ty-three. The band’s posthumous double album, Still, bears the inscription
«the chicken won’t stop»—the second line in Kane’s pair—in the dead wax
of the first side; the second and third side contain etchings of chicken tracks,
while the fourth closes the series with «the chicken stops here». Joy Divi-
sion was declaredly Kane’s favourite band; both Kane and Curtis died very
young; both suffered from depression; both killed themselves by hanging.
Kane’s exact quotation of the first phrase on the album is a token of her
intense identification with her fellow artist; the second phrase is, however,
changed into «the chicken’s still dancing», thereby proclaiming the play’s
two-fold connection to both sources, the Joy Division album («still») and
Herzog’s film («dancing»). In this way, the chicken evoked in 4.48 Psychosis
is made to act as a catalyst for «a kind of palimpsest of suicides: Bruno S.
in Herzog’s film, Curtis, and Kane», as Harries (2017: 10) observes in his
penetrating analysis of these intertextual links. As a dancing chicken, more-
over, Kane’s animal activates a second set of associations that pivot on per-
formance, rather than suicide, as a trait d’union. The hieroglyphs stamped
into the vinyl of Joy Division’s Still allude to the kinship between the grim
chicken act in Stroszek and Ian Curtis’s unique performance style during
the band’s live concerts, an equally compulsive, manic dance that some
have traced to the singer’s increasingly frequent epileptic seizures during
the late part of his brief career (ibid.).
      Further adding to the multiplying identities, the palimpsest of «bod-
ies compelled to move» (ibid.) generated by the dancing chicken is wholly
consonant with the play’s sustained theatricalization of its central self or
selves, an «I» who not only sees their body «dancing on glass» (P, 230), but
recurrently assumes the identity of an unwilling performer, a «fragmented
puppet» (P, 229) whose movements appear to be induced and orchestrat-
ed by an external force. This compulsive kinesis is experienced as a form
of punishment or torture and is at times suggestive of a sadistic director,
while at others pointing to the controlling power of language over the
human body. The latter is best exemplified in the sequence immediately
following the image of the ‘I-as-dancer’, a block of repeated action verbs
borrowed (with some significant variations) from the analysis of human
motion developed by Rudolf Laban in the context of his seminal dance
theory:

         flash flicker slash burn wring press dab slash
         flash flicker punch burn float flicker dab flicker
         punch flicker flash burn dab press wring press
         punch flicker float burn flash flicker burn (P, 231)



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      The sequence is given five successive iterations, conveying the idea of
a never-ending ordeal that reprises and substantiates the speaker’s obses-
sive question, in fragment 15, of «How do I stop?» (P, 226).
      By foregrounding a common element of coercion, the theatrical iso-
topy surrounding the play’s ‘I’ contributes to blur the distinction between
the human performances inscribed in the text and the chicken’s animal
act. This distinction is traditionally rooted in notions of intention and
self-consciousness: one must intend to perform in order to be considered
a performer. Because intention is an exclusively human prerogative, the
only animal that can truly aspire to the status of performer is the human
animal. As Cull (2015: 21) observes, this assumption has formed the basis
of much theoretical thinking about the nature of theatre and is still wide-
ly current today. For its part, the notion of performance as a human-only
venue is tightly intertwined with the basic definition of human subjectivity
in Western thought. From Aristotle onwards, the distinctiveness of the hu-
man species has been located in man’s ability to reason and, consequently,
act in accordance with (moral) judgement: for Descartes, animals’ inability
to think and feel puts them on a par with automata; Kant identifies will-
ingness as the quality that distinguishes human from animal action and
confers intrinsic value upon the (human) subject16. Conversely, within the
then nascent discipline of performance studies Victor Turner famously de-
fined the human as homo performans (Turner 1986: 81): to adapt Descartes’
maxim, «I act, therefore I am».
      Challenging these axioms, the ‘accord body’ that Kane conjures up
through her dancing chicken invites circumspection about ascribing inten-
tion to human performance. Curtis’s onstage movement is emphasized as a
mechanical, automatic response to a physical stimulus; seen in this light, the
Joy Division singer appears no less ‘animal’ than the chicken compulsively
dancing in its coin-operated machine. The trained, disciplined performing
body that the play’s voice(s) claim as their own is similarly marked by an
evident lack of ‘willingness’, perhaps reflecting a more general economy of
dehumanization at work in the theatre: the actor’s body reified into a sign
in order to produce meaning on stage; the subjugation of the living/human
body to the semantic/artificial body in order to maximize its efficiency as a
signifier. This reversal of perspective enables, in turn, a recognition of the
dancing chicken in Herzog’s film as a «paradigmatic performer» (Harries


    16
       A concise review of evolving conceptualizations of human-animal rela-
tions in Western philosophy is provided in Orozco (2013: 21-25).


                                                                                503
Sara Soncini, Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane



2017: 12): an animal body enlivened by an external source of energy that
obliges it to ‘act’.
     In the final moments of 4.48 Psychosis, the ‘I’ takes leave from the play
with the revelation «It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on
the underside of my mind» (P, 245). In its attempt to stage an encounter
with «the human as (an)Other» (Micali 2019: 30), to simultaneously extend
the boundaries of subjectivity and the boundaries of representation, Kane
elevates the various forms of interspecies ‘accord’ scattered across her dra-
maturgy of simulacra to a prime conceptual and artistic ally.




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                                       The author
      Sara Soncini is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Uni-
versity of Pisa. Her main research interests lie in contemporary British and
Irish drama, modern-day reproductions of Shakespeare (performances,
translations, adaptations), Restoration and 18th-century theatre culture.
Her publications include Playing with(in) the Restoration (ESI 1999, on
20th-century rewritings of Restoration drama), Forms of Conflict: Contem-
porary Wars on the British Stage (University of Exeter Press 2015) and The
School for Scandal. Superfici (Mimesis 2022, with S. Greenup). She has en-
gaged extensively with Sarah Kane’s work, publishing articles in scholarly
journals (Altre Modernità, Critical Survey) and edited volumes (The Palgrave
Handbook of Theatre Censorship, forthcoming) in addition to a book-length
study on the Italian afterlife of 4.48 Psychosis (Pisa University Press 2020).

      Email: sara.soncini@unipi.it




506
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                                The article
     Date sent: 31/03/2022
     Date accepted: 31/07/2022
     Date published: 30/11/2022



                        How to cite this article
      Soncini, Sara, “Performing Simulacra: Human/Animal Intersections
in the Work of Sarah Kane”, Entering the Simulacra World, Eds. A. Ghezza-
ni - L. Giovannelli - F. Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24 (2022): 483-507,
www.betweenjournal.it




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