Suicide and the modern stage: Miller, Beckett, Kane

Thesis

This thesis examines the relationship between dramatic art and the suicidal act in three plays staged after the Second World War: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot, 1953), and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000). From the drama of Sophocles to Shakespeare to Ibsen, self-killing has featured on stage for centuries, receiving significant critical attention. Representations of suicide in modern theatre, however, remain underexplored. This thesis, in response, discusses some of the most prominent and influential postwar theatrical experiments with depicting suicidal states of mind and behaviour.

This thesis accounts for Miller’s, Beckett’s, and Kane’s dramaturgical innovations against scientific, philosophical, and cultural developments in the twentieth century. Chapter One analyses how Miller’s dramaturgy in Salesman illuminates the social and psychological forces motivating suicide, thereby sharing affinities with Edwin S. Shneidman’s objectives and theories in suicidology. Chapter Two explores Beckett’s representation of suicidality as a strategy for enduring suffering by reading Godot through the philosophical thought of Albert Camus and E. M. Cioran. Informed by psychiatric studies, Chapter Three evaluates how Kane offers one of the most profound enactments of suicidal phenomenology in theatre history in 4.48. My coda considers how contemporary playwrights such as Alice Birch continue to innovate dramatic form to engage with issues of suicide in the twenty-first century.

This thesis analyses how Miller, Beckett, and Kane explore the ethics, aetiology, and experience of suicide through their engagement with the mise-en-page and the mise-en-scène. I offer close readings of the playscripts informed by genetic studies of their origins and influences as evidenced in diaries, correspondence, and manuscripts. I use stage files and reviews to reconstruct production histories and critical receptions that reveal diverse responses towards the issue of suicide. Theatre, I argue, offers a physical and imaginative space for instructive dialogue about a subject fraught with epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical challenges.

Authors: Duddy, N

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-qao2rbeoy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Arthur Miller; Death of a Salesman; Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot); Alice Birch; Sarah Kane; modern theatre; Samuel Beckett; 4.48 Psychosis; Marsha Norman; suicide
• Subjects: Suicide in literature; Medical humanities; Suicidology; Modern drama; Literature and society; Literature; Philosophy; Critical suicide studies; Theatre