UNIT 4.

The Radical Stage: Doing Theatre in the 1990s

In-Yer-Face Theatre: The Shocking New Face of Political Drama?
Chapter 3 from Contemporary British Drama by Catherine Rees.

 Introduction - What is “In-Yer-Face” theatre?

It was a form of theatre that enjoyed dominance in the 1990s. It is a theatre of extremes. The
end of the 1990s saw a shift in theatre from state of the nation political grandstanding to more
personal and experiential drama with an emphasis on extreme depictions of sex, violence and
behaviour.

The analysis of In-Yer-Face theatre remains a controversial area. The critic most associated
with this theatre and who coined the name is Aleks Sierz. In-Yer-Face theatre changed the
theatrical landscape of the 1990s and Sierz in his 2001 book suggests that it was “the dominant
theatrical style of the decade”. He describes it as a revolution and controversially claims that it
saved British theatre.

Although Sierz rejected describing In-yer-Face theatre as a movement, others have referred to
it as simply a “form” or “style”.

Sierz’s definition is something like “the language is usually filthy, characters talk about
unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each other, experience
umpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent, etc”.

Moreover, such drama employs explicit shock tactics to question moral norms, taboos and
create discomfort. In-Yer-Face theatre is experiential rather than contemplative. It prioritises
feeling above thought and the plays explore politics in a more detached or abstract way than
plays of the previous decade, gesturing speculatively and subjectively towards feelings and
emotions, rather than principles and philosophies.

This theatre had a significant impact, but surprisingly it was not around for very long. David
Lane suggests it was dominant for a period of just four years and Sierz agrees it had a “short
shelf-life” rapidly losing its energy, since audiences were no longer surprised or uncomfortable
by the extremity of its sexual and violent content. The movement ended more or less at the
turn of the new millennium.

It started with the first performance of Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) being Kane considered a
definitive example of In-Yer-Face theatre. It is not coincidental that the movement began to
fizzle out by the end of 1999, the year of her death.

 Where did it come from, and was it political?

In-Yer-Face theatre responded to a crisis in British theatre in the early 1990s marked by “a
decline in both the quality and number of new plays produced”. In-Yer-Face theatre was the
antithesis of that form of political playwriting seen as a fracture in the progression of political
theatre. Represented in studio spaces with small casts, their political vision is not usually direct
or based in real-world events or debates.

Elizabeth Sakellaridou argues that the rise and fall of political theatre was unnecessarily
dramatic and that In-Yer-Face dramatists mark the new style of writing of a socially and
politically motivated theatre.

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These playwrights have been condemned by critics for not offering plays with an explicit moral
message, but “their work is a product of a society that no longer engages with big political
messages and is instead the product of an amoral world of brutal physical and visual violence,
arid consumerism, free trade in sex and drugs, unethical use of technology, unemployment
and a general degradation of basic human decency and emotional stability.”

Saunders agrees that this theatre is not unpolitical, but instead engages with a different form
of politics, borne out of “the impact of globalisation, technology, and theories posited by
postmodernist thinkers who questioned the nature and veracity of reality”.

In-Yer-Face theatre is then a product of a different form of politics, a more fragmentary and
personal engagement with social issues. Sierz agrees that it is political theatre, creating a
resurgence in new writing and engaging with politics on a personal level, offering a subjective
account of individual experience.

 Thinking about the name “In-Yer-Face”

Sierz created this name for this new genre. The choice was selected because the other options
– Neo-Jacobeanism; New Brutalism; Theatre of the Urban Ennui – were all too partial, and only
this label fully expresses the newness and experience of witnessing shocking plays. Sierz
recognises that it is also a political choice. Playwrights and critics started to see work in
accordance to or against that specific labelling, and that helps understand how plays become
canonised. Branding a form of theatre in this way is political because it adjusts the way we
read those plays and make sense of them as part of theatre history. These terms can be
contested and they can be controversial and Sierz’s gathering of playwrights under his In-Yer-
Face umbrella, in much the same way as Martin Esslin did for Theatre of the Absurd
dramatists, can have negative implications and when asked about the name, Kane herself was
dismissive of being part of the movement.

Sierz himself also criticised his own practice because his initial exploration of the form omitted
several key writers dealing only with white writers and not enough engaged with feminist
dramatists. The creation of the genre was just one memory, just as history is written by the
winners, so theatre history can be dominated by the acceptance of a single perspective which
is then concreted as the final narrative of events. This way, the late nineties were dominated
by a specific form of extreme and challenging experiential theatre.

Two of the writers selected here might be considered emblematic but the final one is more
marginal in the narrative of 1990s extreme theatre. Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill are more
prototypical of this category while Martin McDonagh is considered as marginal. Critics have a
wide range of responses to these plays as examples of 1990s new brutalism or Neo-
Jacobeanism, In-Yer-Face form.

 Sarah Kane – The enfant terrible of In-Yer-Face

The story of In-Yer-Face theatre is often considered to be synonymous with Kane’s own career.
Although Sierz cautioned that we should not see the movement starting with the premier of
her 1995 play Blasted, in 2001 he reflected in the Telegraph that the play was “an event that
unleashed half-a-decade on “In-yer-Face” theatre and concluded that “Sarah Kane committed
suicide, an act that seemed to close an era” in 1999.

We are going to see how strikingly critical response changed from when it was first performed
in 1995 to when Kane’s suicide, perhaps triggering guilt in journalists who had savaged the play

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just six years earlier. The considerable press outrage that accompanied the first performance
and chart the shifting critical appreciation of Kane from this moment in the late 1990s, from
enfant terrible and persona non grata of the theatre world to canonisation as a theatrical
genius.

The plot of Blasted is about Ian, a middle-aged journalist, and Cate, a much younger and naïve
young woman that arrive in a hotel room in Leeds. Ian rapes Cate and she escapes through the
window. Suddenly the room is blown apart by a bomb and the play’s naturalistic veneer is
shattered. A soldier, who has apparently been fighting on the streets, arrives in the room,
giving accounts of terrible traumas he has both witnessed and perpetrated. The soldier repeats
some of these traumas to Ian, raping him and sucking out his eyes, and then shoots himself.
Cate returns with a dead baby, which she buries in the ruins, and then leaves again. Alone and
blinded, Ian is left in crisis, and in a series of theatrical tableaus, he masturbates, defecates,
tries to kill himself and then finally digs up the dead infant and eats it. Cate returns in the final
moments of the play with food and shares it with Ian. The final words are Ian’s thanks to cate
and then it rains.

Blasted was inspired by the siege of Srebrenica in 1992. The play makes the connection
between the horrific violence of warfare and the domestic violence suffered by Cate at the
start of the play, suggesting that one is the instigator of the other. Violence associated with
foreign warfare could have a place in contemporary Britain, which marks it out as a political
play that generates experiences of horror rather than narrates them from a critical and
detached distance. Kane appeared to anticipate a zeitgeist for extreme violence on stage, yet
the critics were not ready for the unleashing of this new theatrical style. Sierz describes
Blasted generating “some of the most aggressive reviews of the decade”. Although there were
positive voices among the general savagery, the play received some very hostile criticism; from
Paul Taylor who claimed that Blasted “is a little like having your face rammed into an
overflowing ashtray” to Wardle who wrote that he “cannot recall having seen an uglier play”.
Jack Tinker’s review classified it as this disgusting piece of filth”. Kane responded by assigning
the name of Tinker to the sadist torturer in her later play Cleansed, commenting that the
concept of a “good theatre critic” as “an oxymoron for me”.

However, playwrights supported Kane and wrote to the papers to defend the play such as
Caryl Churchill and David Greig, who later wrote the introduction to Kane’s collected works.
Even the Rev. Bob Vernon wrote to the Guardian saying that he “applaud her courage, and
that of the Royal Court, in bringing the play to our stage” demonstrating that not all
stereotypes proved accurate in the frenzied response to the play’s first performance.

Some of the hostile critical response took a rather patronising attitude towards both the play
and Kane herself and others mentioned her age for her inexperienced and adolescent “desire
to shock”.

Moreover, Kane’s less than favourable depiction of Ian as a racist, homophobic journalist,
sexually aggressive, and as an abject victim and perpetrator of great violence, might have been
annoying for the critics and for the press in general. Kane herself suggested that the play hit a
nerve amongst newspaper writers; and she also reflected about what that could tell us about
the ethics of the play. She besides put the example that in that same moment in the year 1995
“a 15-year-old girl has just been raped in a wood, but there’s more space in the tabloids about
my play than about this brutal act. That’s the kind of journalism that the play absolutely
condemns”. So, she is reflecting back attention onto the newspaper industry and probing its

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ethical position. Where the newspapers have found her play lacking in ethical direction, she
finds their approach morality deficient. In giving Ian a role as a journalist, Kane is inviting the
newspapers to reflect on their own practice in response to this play.

Critics also suggested that she did not deserve a premiere at the well-respected Royal Court
and that she played no part in the theatrical establishment. The critics dismissal of her as an
inexperienced and naïve youngster allowed them to disregard and ignore her work reducing
Blasted to a series of hysterical hyperbolic soundbites. In the gendered response to Kane´s
work, Elaine Aston detected some “curious tensions”. To Aston, during her life she was cast as
an “honorary male”, grouped as an “In-Yer-Face” writer in a form dominated by male
dramatists, and yet also chastised as a mischievous and rebellious girl, writing about topics not
wholly suitable for a young woman.

Other critiques based their arguments on the fact that the play lacked a coherent context,
explanation or authorial voice, suggesting that it failed to operate as a convincing political play.

Kingston bemoans that the final scenes in which Ian reaches his moments of crisis climaxing in
the consumption of the child Kane does not clarify her intentions portraying this. Billington’s
review agrees, but Churchill argues that she found the play coherent and logical; and Grieg
points out that much great drama - Becket, Artaud, Sartre, and almost all Greek tragedy rejects
the premise of social realism. Kane’s refusal to mark characters and actions out in believable
social and moral contexts represents a fracture from the sort of political theatre already seen,
with the exception of Saved which also takes a more ambivalent stance on the behaviour of its
protagonists. In Blasted, Kane suspends authorial judgement and lets the characters and their
actions speak for themselves. We might condemn Ian for his behaviour but he, in turn, is also a
victim we may pity, and the soldier we may judge for his torture of Ian is himself the victim of
terrible trauma. One way of thinking about Blasted is to reject categorisation and binaries
because the play suspends moral judgement and blurs the role of victim/perpetrator not being
very clear-cut.

As aforementioned, Blasted forced newspapers to reflect on their own practice, presumptions

and prejudices, and the mirror to the journalism profession and its damning reflection was
certainly noisily rejected by the critics.

The Royal Court staged a retrospective of all Kane’s plays in 2001 and the critical reception two
years after her death dramatically changed. The first significant variance is that many critics
mentioned Kane’s death and reflected on whether or not this makes a difference to
perceptions of her plays. Nightingale and Billington very critical at first, reflect on the
perspective of Kane’s tragically short career. Andrew Smith in the Observer suggests that her
“lonely death suggests that the torment in the play was about more than enthusiastic
extrapolation from the world outside her window. It was also an expression of some dark,
internal process”. Now, Blasted was more easily understood because now it was possible to
interpret the bleakness of the play through its author’s own mental health struggles not
appreciated at the time. It places her within a tradition that glorifies the early death of writers
and artists “mythologised after death” including legends such as Marilyn Monroe or Kurt
Cobain.

Sierz argues that “when she was alive, the poser of her stage images tended to detract from
the depth of her writing; now that she’s dead, the fact that she killed herself threatens once
more to obscure her achievements”.

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Along with a tendency to see Blasted as a precursor of her own depression, critics expressed
guilt at not recognising the play’s dramatic worth. Now critics sought to understand it, a
challenging and difficult play, by understanding Kane’s life and comparing her to other writers
they felt more comfortable discussing. This led to some guilty reflecting on their own
shortcomings. Her work now occupies a canonical place in British theatre.

In 1995 for instance, Mary Braid predicted that “Blasted might yet find itself on the school
syllabus”, and she was right.

The hostility with which Blasted was met in some ways softened the ground for later In-Yer-
Face plays. Kane’s critical mauling did lead to a greater critical acceptance and understanding
of extreme and experiential British theatre in the 1990s. She even rejected the label saying in
1999 that she did not believe in movements and also rejected comparisons, but the inclination
to draw playwrights together under a common umbrella is a compelling one and “In-Yer-Face”
label was still very much alive and kicking in 1996.

 Shopping and Fucking – In-Yer-Face becomes commercial

This play by Mark Ravenhill centres on four young people adrift in society – Mark, Lulu, Robbie
and Gary (named after members of boy band Take That and their collaborator popstar Lulu) –
and explores their exchanges and interactions within a society that is portrayed as exploitative
and consumerist. There is little structure plot. Mark is a junkie and wants to get off heroin. Lulu
sekss a job but is asked to strip during the interview. She ends up selling drugs instead. She
witnesses a stabbing in a shop but does nothing to intervene, stealing chocolate instead. Mark
meets Gary, a rent boy, and it transpires that Gary was abused as a small child. Robbie gives
away all the drugs Lulu had to sell and they construct a telephone sex business to raise enough
money to pay back the dangerous gangster, Brian. The four play a game of truth or dare,
fantasies of sex with the royal family and ending with Gary demanding to be anally raped with
a knife. He does not appear again, and his fate remains unclear. The play ends with Robbie,
Mark and Lulu feeding each other with microwavable ready meals, an echo of the end of
Kane’s Blasted. The play explores the relationship between intimacy, individualism and
transactions, and mediates on the function of love and of the traumatising effect of abuse.

Shopping and Fucking was, Like Blasted before it, a play of the In-Yer-Face genre; defining the
form – extreme violence, blood, sex, unpleasantness, swearing, characters adrift from society –
and yet it was surprisingly embraced by the critics, despite the experience of Blasted less than
two years before. Ravenhill believed that Blasted “softened up the critics”. Sakellaridou argues
that “the two place present the same and it seems unfair that Kane’s play should have become
the target of a savage critical attack whereas Ravenhill’s was almost unanimously well-
received. Kane’s depiction of war horrors in a recognisably British context was taboo, whereas
the gay scene depicted by Ravenhill was more remote for critics, and the critics were less
forgiving of a young woman’s engagement with such extreme theatrical images whereas this
sort of play from a man in his 30s was more acceptable.

Jack Tinker, so outraged by Blasted, writes “I led the chorus of disapproval when the Royal
Court staged Sarah Kane’s now notorious Blasted, I can only applaud its courage in staging this
dangerous and offensive work”.

David Benedict reflected on the two plays and concluded that Ravenhill’s was “equally
shocking”. Was Blasted singled out for opprobrium because it was written by a woman? It
might be too simplistic to conclude that Shopping and Fucking was received more

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sympathetically entirely due to the gender of its author, but certainly it was compared to
Blasted very favourably.

Whatever the reason in 1996, the newspaper reviews of Ravenhill’s play were markedly more
positive than previous In-Yer-Face performances. John Peter had also been dismissive of
Kane’s Blasted and describes this play as “compassionate, shocking and callously witty”.

However, the title caused issues in widely discussing the play, or indeed publicising it. Sierz
recounts that the title of the play “could not appear on posters or in adverts”. The wording of
the title was thus obscured or the offensive letters were replaced by asterisks in official
material. The title also caused a problem for the papers, struggling to find accounts of the play
through archival searches. Nightingale explains “the title of Mark Ravenhill’s first play is not
publishable in full in a nice family newspaper”. Coveney’s review makes the observation that
the play is known “in polite circles” as Shopping and Flower Arranging”. This controversy
helped the play develop a certain notoriety and a reputation for being risky, exciting and
alternative upsetting the establishment with a provocative title. It also helped more easily to
reach younger audiences.

The play critiques contemporary Britain’s dependence on consumerism and analyses the
relationship between the myth of freedom and capitalist society.

Ravenhill also helped crystallise the IN-Yer-Face movement into a categorizable genre.
Nightingale describes the play as “the latest contribution to a growing genre, the drama of
disenchantment, the theatre of urban ennui”. As the critics become accustomed to the new
style, they too start to formulate a language with which to make sense of what might have
appeared initially to be shocking and alienating. When the language and terminology
developed around this type of theatre, so did its critical acceptance. This was predicted by
Kane in 1995.

On the other side, Sierz’s definition of IN-Yer-Face theatre includes performances in “small
studio spaces with audiences of between 50 and 200 people. This “hot” form of theatre is
literally “In-Yer-Face”, since the action occurs just feet away from you, intensifying the
discomfort, heightening the emotional response and forcing the audience to confront the
difficult or traumatic events on stage. Where the action involves nudity or violence,
theatregoers are confronted with intimate or violent acts in very close physical proximity. The
aesthetic function this generates is precisely the audience’s discomfort causing them anxiety
and to confront them with their own prejudices and taboos in a confrontational and
challenging form.

These reviews, however, prefer the distance generated in the larger theatre space with a
visible and tangible separation between the audience and the action. This distance makes the
experience more enjoyable for some audience members used to a more conventional theatre
structure. So, in the case of Shopping and Fucking, by transferring it to a larger theatre such as
the West End undermined that new form in-yer-face diluting the intensity of the genre.
However, the play this way could reach greater audiences in contrast to Blasted which was
seen by only around 1100 people in its first production, but even this way, it was one of the
most talked about but lest seen British plays of the nineties. Offering Shopping and Fucking a
Est End transfer might have lessened the purity of the play’s In-Yer-Face experience but it also
created a larger audience for the genre and helped widen its appeal in younger audiences. This
is an irony in itself, as Shopping and Fucking examines the value and meaning of commercial

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transactions, analysing what is lost and gained in consumerism and free markets. Is it really a
gain or a loss for this kind of theatre?

Although the critical reception was softened compared to Blasted, Ravenhill’s play also
received critiques against it. More conservative critics saw that the play was in fact the product
of a leftist elite where there was dissent. The play is indeed reflective of overtly liberal values.
Paul Johnson for instance, describes it as “obscene art”, a “horrible play about sex,
homosexuality and social deprivation” arguing that left-wing values and gay culture is taking
over politics and art. He even condemned figures as Oscar Wilde of being a paedophile and
rues what he sees as his beatification by the progressive press as a martyr to the liberal cause.
Johnson’s hostility towards the play and his bigotry against liberal politics and elite is indeed
old-fashioned today and even it can be considered homophobic, intolerant and highly
prejudiced, but it is worth reflecting the diversity of critical voices about the arts at the time
serving Johnson’s article as a rebuke to In-Yer-Face theatre which did much to move “obscene”
art into the mainstream and to celebrate the diversity of sexual experience and identity.

Shopping and Fucking and Blasted gave the critics a language with which to navigate
demanding and challenging plays like these.

 The Lieutenant of Inishmore: Irish In-Yer-Face on English stages

Martin McDonagh is understood as being part of the In-Yer-Face movement due to the intense
and shocking violence of his plays although it is a late example of the genre and in many ways
tangential. He is from London, but his ancestry is Irish and his early plays were set in rural
Ireland, which puts his work at odds with the “urban innui” of the In-Yer-Face theatre. He is
therefore a marginal In-Yer-Face playwright, often presented as a liminal, outsider figure. Mike
Wilcock sees similarities between McDonagh’s 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore and
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Sierz analysed McDonagh’s first play which also included
moments of shocking and unexpected violence. However, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
generated more critical attention due to its controversial engagement with Irish terrorism as
well as for its graphic and extreme violence. It centres around INLA terrorist Padraic and his
beloved cat, Wee Thomas. Padraic is portrayed as insanely violent. Scene two opens with his
graphic torture of a drug dealer – but he is obsessively fond of his pet cat. His father and friend
find a dead cat and, mistakenly believing it to be Wee Thomas. In fact, a random cat has been
killed by Padraic’s fellow terrorists. Padraic returns home and meets Mairead, who is also a
greater lover of her own cat and obsessive about Irish nationalism. They begin a brief affair.
The INLA terrorists, including Padraic, are murdered, and his father and friend are left with the
task of sawing all the corpses up, leaving the stage littered with body parts and covered in
blood. Mairead remains alive to continue the INLA’s cause. In the closing moments, Wee
Thomas returns played by a live cat, and his life is spared.

McDonagh’s play did not take an overtly serious or reverential approach to Irish terrorism, but
instead the play is a comedy, presenting the terrorists, as well as arguably the Inishmore locals,
as dim-witted, stupid and simple. Some critics felt it drew on a theatrical history of derogatory
depictions of Irish identity. This criticism draws on narratives of colonial repression of the Irish
at the hands of the English. Mary Luckhurst accuses McDonagh of agitating these colonial
stereotypes to make his plays more appealing to English audiences, describing herself as
“troubled” that all of his characters are “psychopathic morons”. In response to Luckhurst’s
argument, my own reply to the play defends it against such criticism, suggesting that “we
would be foolish to ignore the political seriousness” (Rees, 2005_) of the moral ending, in

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which the locals save Wee Thomas’ life and feed him, an image of hope and resistance to
paramilitary violence.

Nightingale remarks the offensive nature of the play is either not a problem or can be justified
by the political message of the play, namely that all terrorists are stupid, thoughtless and ripe
for ridicule.

McDonagh himself declared “If they [the INLA] aren’t offended, I’ll be pissed off”. The
incendiary nature of the play was designed to irritate stereotypical prejudices of Irish identity
and to depict terrorism as pointless and damaging.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore also attracted controversy about the initial staging and location of
the play. The Royal Court had premiered much of McDonagh’s earlier work, as had the
National Theatre, but both rejected the play, and it instead received its premiere by the RSC in
Stratford. McDonagh’s view that the theatres had been too nervous to stage his most
politically charged work. Lonergan speculates that the RSC were keen to stage potentially
explosive play because “while the RSC could claim that it had a long history of producing
violent plays, it did not have the same reputation for the production of provocative new
writing of the kind found at the Royal Court”.

Moreover, the London transfer was complicated by global events. In September 2001 the
World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks pushed debates about terrorism back onto the
political agenda, and McDonagh’s play was viewed as a politically sensitive hot potato. A
planned transfer to the West End was dropped and instead The Lieutenant of Inishmore’s
London home was the RSC’s Pit theatre. After its Stratford run the events of 9/11 raised
questions of courage, and theatres in the West End that may have adopted the play backed
away from its subject matter. The political context of this play is therefore significant in how it
was regarded in the press, and that context shifted during the period of its initial RSC run,
moving the focus of the play, and its interpretation, from that of the relatively local Northern
Irish Troubles to a wider global concern over Islamic terrorism. McDonagh meant to shock and
cause offence with his play, and press and scholarly debate about it explored both
identity/nationality and paramilitary politics in their response to its themes.

Another controversy raised in the play was the use (and abuse) of animals. During the play,
there cats are featured on stage. The first is an obviously dead prop. Later in the play, Padraic
shoots another “live” cat which “explodes in a ball of blood and bones”. This was a robotic cat
prop in the original production. Finally, a real cat is used as the real Wee Thomas in the final
moments of the play fed and petted by the surviving characters. A play in which four humans
are brutally murdered and dismembered and another is tortured on stage, caused controversy
also due to the two “cats” that are killed in the plot, even though, they are theatrical props and
the only clearly living animal is not in danger. However, some critics noted that the RSC
appeared more concerned with feline suffering than human misery. Of course, this double
standard is part of McDonagh’s point. Audiences at the RSC are used to a stage littered with
corpses, but they are less comfortable with the implied murder of beloved pets. Padraic might
have no qualms torturing and murdering humans, but he is obsessively fond of his cat, and
McDonagh holds a mirror to his audience asking them to reflect on their own value
judgements, normalising human violence but condemning animal abuse. The RSC has never
issued warning about its core repertoire, plays which include eye gouging, cannibalism and
impaling. So, if the RSC adopted The Lieutenant of Inishmore, was due to its sensational

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controversy, a tactic employed by the Grand Guignol French horror theatre of the late
nineteenth century.

If we accept that In-Yer-Face theatre was on the wane in the early 2000s, The Lieutenant of
Inishmore marks a closing chapter in this genre. Moreover, Lawson writes about McDonagh’s
play that it “makes Blasted look like the Teletubbies”.

The critical discussion surrounding In-Yer-Face theatre never really managed to escape the
reputation of Kane’s Blasted – it has a very clear and recognisable contemporary political
context, it is a comedy, and the violence is delivered in tongue-in-cheek Grand Guignol excess,
rather than the measured and poetic trauma and anguish examined seriously by Kane.
However, regardless of their differences, the In-Yer-Face genre was such a strong critical
message that plays were grouped under its terminology irrespective of their structural or tonal
differences. The Lieutenant of Inishmore offered audiences a biting political satire, mocking the
sensibilities and belief structures of Irish nationalist terrorists, reflecting back of very recent
Irish history to explore the Troubles with comedy and exaggerated violent slapstick.

2001 it was perhaps the last example of In-Yer-Face excess. The play was revived at the Noel
Coward Theatre in the summer of 2018. It is described as “A satirical take on the effect of
political tensions and the nature of political violence”. In the shadow of Kane’s dominant
Blasted, is becoming more critically secured.

 Conclusion

Some critics felt that Blasted was not a political play, too divorced from a clear and
recognisable political context. In-Yer-Face theatre developed from the ashes of 1980s political
playwriting and adopted a more sensationalist response to politics – a more fragmented,
reflective and experiential reaction to the extremes of human experience, emotion and pain.
These controversial and scandalous plays could be marketed to younger audiences and
therefore, the genre was of great importance to the commercial viability of contemporary
theatres.

Did In-Yer-Face theatre serve as a brief hiatus from British theatre’s obsession with political
playwright, or was it just politics in disguise, reflecting on questions of equality, justice and
violence in a more direct and confrontational fashion?

Bibliography:

Rees, Catherine. Contemporary British Drama. Red Globe Press, 2020.