Crowds and communities in In-Yer-Face drama: A study on mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998)

This MA thesis aims to explore the dynamics of character groupings as they are presented in two popular plays of the In-Yer-Face British drama: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998). Viewing these two works as extensions of their sociopolitical context, I claim that the nature of these groups and the reasons for their formation come as reactions to that particular context. Furthermore, I analyze them through the notion of crowd according to Sigmund Freud, as it is presented in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and the notion of community as Jean-Luc Nancy describes it in his work The Inoperative Community (1986). Applying these two theories of collectivity, I reach the conclusion that Ravenhill has mirrored society in his creation of a primitive, tribal-like crowd, while Kane has opted for a more positive, yet quite nostalgic outlook and has her characters engage in a community based on love and yearning for one another.