Be Violent Again: Violence, Realism and Consumerism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking

• Autor(a) principal: Coelho, Rui Pina
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30730
• topic: British drama; Violence; Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005 - Crítica e interpretação; Ravenhill, Mark

Violence, as the influential critic Michael Billington states, “permeated the culture in the Fifties”. In fact, after John Osborne’s angry outburst with Look Back in Anger in 1956, it became clear that “violence was a theme that preoccupied a large number of writers, and the reasons for this were social, political and cultural” (Billington 2007, 109). In a recently published volume, Violence Performed (2009), Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon argue that “enactments of violence are both spectacular in their cultural impact and embodied in their transaction and effect”; “that violence is a binding, affective experience that crosscuts the domain traditionally registered and distinguished as the physical, the psychic, and the social”; “that conventional distinctions between ‘victim’ and ‘aggressor’ are often ill-suited to fully explain the effects of violence”; “that representations of violence are not innocently mimetic, and risk extending the very trauma they aim to expose”; and, finally, that “scholars in performance studies are ethically obligated to explore specific sites of violence acts as well as larger questions about the performative ontology of violence” (Anderson & Menon 2009, 1-14). This volume is a perceptible consequence of the interest that the representation of violence is having in contemporary theatre and performance studies. In this sense and considering these topics, I will explore and present the portrayal of violence in some British plays that were staged between 1951 and 1965, in order to discuss the role, impact and aim of its representation. Thus, I will consider John Whiting’s Saint’s Day (1951), Ann Jelicoe’s The Sport of my Mad Mother (1956), Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party (1958), David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come (1962) and Edward Bond’s Saved (1965). My aim is to discuss the way how theatre in the post WWII changed the traditional ways of representing violence. On one hand, violence and reality became more and more familiar and domestic, permitting a representation of multiple and non-agonic violence; and, on the other hand, the violence that was depicted often changed the way one perceived reality itself, being part of a socially engaged artistic attitude.