Enacting Kane's disgust : a cognitive and emotion science approach to Blasted

Utilising emotion science on disgust and the interconnection between emotion and cognition this essay analyses Kane's Blasted to articulate not only how the play makes us feel through an application of the evolutionary basis for disgust, but how this experience is meant to communicate the morality of the play's world through the cognitive structures of embodied schemata. The operation of experiential theatre is expanded through an understanding of enactivism, an integral part of 4E cognition, as it applies to the emotion of disgust. Identifying and analysing the embodied schemata of boundaries, contamination, animality, and balance the essay develops how Blasted relies on the most evolutionarily advanced form of disgust, 'moralisation', to understand how the embodied experience of theatre creates meaning. Kane's shocking and disgusting theatre is thus understood to go beyond feeling. It can help us understand how viscerally reactive moments in the theatre impinge on how an audience/reader learn and adopt moral views.