Finburgh Delijani, Clare. 2025. 'Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?': Watching torture in Dennis Kelly's works. In: Jacqueline Bolton and Nicholas Holden, eds. Beautiful Doom: The Work of Dennis Kelly on Stage and in Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526145222 [Book Section] (In Press)

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Abstract or Description

Detention without charge, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, intimidation, coercion, and other forms of torture set out in the United Nations Convention against Torture, have become justified and normalized since the start of the twenty-first century in order supposedly to guarantee national security and maintain law, order, freedom and democracy. This chapter derives its theoretical premise from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970), to illustrate how a number of Dennis Kelly’s plays testify to the torture and other human rights abuses taking place not only in totalitarian regimes, but also in states that supposedly uphold civil liberties. The chapter illustrates both how Kelly exposes the torture that habitually takes place in covert locations behind a façade of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’, and also the ethics implicit in how audiences spectate the abusive degradation of others from the safety of our television screens, or of our theatre seats.

Item Type:	Book Section
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Theatre and Performance (TAP)
Dates:	Date Event 2024 Accepted April 2025 Published
Item ID:	33253
Date Deposited:	06 Mar 2023 10:29
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2025 16:53
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33253

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