ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a close reading of the play with a focus on identifying its various rhetorical strategies and intertextual references: first to theatre history and then to psychiatry. Kane often publicly acknowledged her artistic debt to canonical dramatists such as Georg Büchner, Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and Howard Barker. The chapter will locate Kane within the tradition of modern drama with a particular focus on the performer/spectator relationship.
The play also engages with the history and practice of psychiatry through its multitude of references to pharmacology, especially the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose history reveals a lot about the provisional status of medical knowledge. Indeed, the chapter concludes by locating the play within an intellectual tradition, arguably inaugurated by Michel Foucault’s book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964), that explores the borders that separate madness from reason.
