Lust and Loss in Ravenhill’s Shopping and F****ing & Kane’s Blasted: Troubling Trends in a New Culture

Abstract

As the modern world hangs on a string of utter moral collapse, several writers unleash moral restraints, thus bringing immorality to the market square to consumers who seem to yearn for the collapse of moral walls in their world. Hearkening to such cravings, Mark Ravenhill’s provocative title and play, Shopping and Fucking (1996), and Sarah Kane’s flaming play, Blasted (1995), present morally bankrupt characters clothed in the garments of modern humanity. Glued to wild and recurrent sexual habits, suggesting, as it were, the unceasing erosion of human dignity, these characters cling, with menacing sternness, to sex at all times and in all lieu. Like burning candles that consume their own heights, chronic sexual drives and activities in the works of the foregoing playwrights depict our world and diminish the statue of humanity. Set in an economically dejected and drug-redden East End of London, Shopping and F****ing serves as a canopy under which sits rancorous, impulsive, and rampant sex and drugs with the attendant loss they create. In a similar vein, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, set in a war-torn city, which duplicate the ruins of our societies, depicts depraved characters who have sex at whim and with impunity.