SARAH KANE’İN PHAEDRA’NIN AŞKI ADLI OYUNUNDA POSTMODERN PARAZİT BENLİK

Phaedra’s Love (1996) is a typical Sarah Kane play with its inversion of the classical Greek convention of not performing violence on stage and its subversion of British Theatre traditions. It is also typical in the sense that Kane employed in it —as in her other plays— the actions which are challenging for the directors and difficult to watch for the audience; i.e. it is a play staging the unstageable. These features of Phaedra’s Love may be attributed to its being a play of in-yer-face theatre; however, the extremities in the extremes such as violence and sexuality of all kinds and the filthy and abusive language in it may be thought both to be the novelties and contributions of Sarah Kane as a playwright to contemporary British Drama and the ploys functioning for her social criticism. In this context, this play of Kane’s is less similar to those of her contemporaries. Phaedra’s Love, the premiere of which was directed by Kane herself at London Gate’s Theatre in 1996, attracts the audience’s attention with not only its scenes with extreme violence, sex and abusive language but also its characters who are the perpetrators of violent and sexual actions that dehumanize them and the speakers of the abusive and obscene language. Therefore, this study analyses one of the characters in Phaedra’s Love, Hippolytus, the incestuous prince as a consuming parasitic self. Hippolytus is the central point in the play from which the action unfolds. Hippolytus is a character in whose personality various metaphors appear; yet, the focus of this study is the Hippolytus always eating junk food, watching television and making masturbation as the postmodern self in the context of consumerism and the technological life.