Violence not on body but through body-image: Mark Ravenhill’s some explicit polaroids

Yıl 2015, , 1017 - 1023, 26.12.2015

Aysun Kan

https://doi.org/10.24289/ijsser.279113

Öz

In-yer-face theatre arising in the 1990s in Britain is generally renowned for displaying extreme and explicit images of violence and sexuality on stage without any censorship. This paper focusing on renowned in-yer-face playwright, Mark Ravenhill’s play, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), will attempt to eliminate the reductionist approach that in-yer-face theatre produces nothing but provocative, filthy, extreme images of violence and sexuality on the stage. Ravenhill surprisingly excludes any form of physical violence from the action on the stage; however, it should be noted that this exclusion is not done under the name of propriety or censorship; rather, it is a strategic move to attract attention to another form of violence. This play examines the concept of violence not in the form of physical violence perpetuated by an agent but as what Slavoj Zizek calls “systemic violence” caused by the current economic or political system. Ravenhill unveils the impossibility of experiencing reality in itself in a system of postmodernist global capitalism by displaying the discrepancy between the real physical body and the myth of the body or the body image that is perpetuated and acknowledged to be real for survival in the global capitalist system. Namely, this paper on Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids will focus on the mechanisms through which the social system causes victimization of the individual in a gradual and imperceptible way.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Ravenhill, In-yer-face theatre, Violence, Body-Image

Kaynakça

• Agustí, C. (2013). Martin Crimp's theatre: Collapse as resistance to late capitalist society. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. (S. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981).
• Ravenhill, M. (2001). Some explicit polaroids. In Plays, 1 (pp. 227-314). London: Methuen Drama.
• Ravenhill, M. (2005). A tear in the fabric: The James Bulger murder and new theatre Writing in the nineties. Theatreforum, 26, 85-92.
• Sierz, A. (Eds.). (2001). Modern British playwriting - the 1990s: Voices, documents, new interpretations. London: Methuen Drama.
• Suissa, A. J. (2008). Addiction to cosmetic surgery: Representations and medicalization of the body. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 6(4), 619-630.
• Williams, L. (2004). Porn studies: Proliferating pornographies on/scene: An introduction. In Linda Williams (eds.), Porn studies (pp. 1-23). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York: Picador.