Summary
Ian tells the Soldier that he's a "home journalist, for Yorkshire," and that he doesn't cover foreign affairs. "I do other stuff," he says, "Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by queer priests and schoolteachers. Not soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land." The Soldier says that Ian doesn't know anything about him and tells him to turn over, putting his rifle to Ian's face. "Going to fuck you," he says, and when Ian refuses, he says, "Kill you, then."
"Fine," Ian says, and the Soldier kisses Ian tenderly on the lips. "You smell like her. Same cigarettes," the Soldier says, before putting the revolver to Ian's head, pulling down his pants, and raping him, "crying his heart out" all the while. He then "pushes the revolver up Ian's anus" before pulling it out and asking Ian if he's ever been penetrated by a man before.
The Soldier goes into a monologue about the violence of war, all the atrocities he's seen, before saying, "Don't think your Welsh arse is different to any other arse I fucked." Suddenly, the Soldier "puts his mouth over one of Ian's eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it. He does the same to the other eye."
The Soldier says, "He ate her eyes./Poor bastard./Poor love./Poor fucking bastard."
Scene 4. The Soldier is lying next to Ian, having "blown his own brain out." Cate comes in, wet and carrying a baby. She goes to Ian and says, "You're a nightmare." She tells him that "everyone in town is crying" and that the soldiers have taken over. Ian tells Cate to find Matthew and tell him something, but Cate refuses and tells him that a woman gave her a baby and she doesn't know what to do with it.
"What's happened to your eyes?" Cate asks, but he doesn't answer and tells her that Matthew, his son, is 24. She tells him she needs to find food for the baby, but he tells her that it's safer there with him. Cate sits down and Ian asks her to get the gun for him. She takes the gun out of the Soldier's hands and the bullets fall out. When she removes the bullets, she closes the gun.
Ian asks for the gun because he wants to kill himself, but Cate tells him that's wrong; "God wouldn't like it," she says. Ian says, "No God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No fucking nothing," adding, "No reason for there to be a God just because it would be better if there was."
Ian says he wants to kill himself because he's blind. Ian and Cate argue about the existence of an afterlife; Ian insists that people who see ghosts are "imagining it. Or making it up or wishing the person was still alive." Cate then tells him, "People who've died and come back say they've seen tunnels and lights," but Ian dismisses this as fainting.
"I believe in God," Cate says, and Ian counters, "Everything's got a scientific explanation." He asks for the gun and tells her he needs to kill himself. When she hands it over, he puts it in his mouth, and tries to shoot himself, but it's empty. "Fate, see. You're not meant to do it," Cate says, and Ian throws the gun down. Suddenly, Cate realizes that the baby is dead and begins laughing, "unnaturally, hysterically, uncontrollably." Blackout.
Scene 5. Cate buries the baby under the floorboards. She binds two pieces of wood together with some of the lining of Ian's jacket, in order to fashion a cross, which she puts between the boards. "I don't know her name," Cate says, but Ian is cynical about the whole thing. "Will you pray for me?" Ian asks Cate as she begins praying for the baby. "No point when you're dead," Cate says, coldly.
When Cate finishes praying, she goes to leave and look for food. She hints that she will get some food off a soldier by giving him sex, and Ian is disappointed in her. Suddenly, the stage goes dark, then light again. When the lights come back up, Ian is masturbating and saying "cunt" over and over again. It goes dark again, and when the lights come back up, Ian is strangling himself. Darkness. Light. Ian is shitting and trying to clean it up with newspaper. Darkness. Light. Ian laughing hysterically. Darkness. Light. Ian having a nightmare. Darkness. Light. Ian crying and hugging the Soldier's body for comfort. Darkness. Light. Ian lying still. Darkness. Light. Ian ripping the baby out from under the floorboards and eating it. Then he dies.
It starts to rain on him through the roof, but he isn't really dead. Cate comes back in holding bread, sausage, and a bottle of gin. Blood is "seeping from between her legs." She pulls a sheet off the bed and wraps it around her, eating her food, and feeding some to Ian. She sucks her thumb. It rains. Ian says "Thank you." End of play.
Analysis
In this section, a distinction is made between the personal and the broader and more political. Ian insists to the soldier that as a journalist, he doesn't cover stories that are about war or more broadly political topics. Rather, he is a "home journalist," and as such is more interested in the more localized, personal stories. To Ian, the Soldier represents larger affairs, broader political angles that have to do with war and diplomacy, not personal stories or personal horrors.
In having Ian draw such a line between the personal and the more broadly political, Sarah Kane shows the contradiction in his thinking, and reveals that in fact, the political and the personal are quite closely linked. The violence that Ian enacts against Cate, as well as the violence that he covers in his job as a "home journalist," are perhaps of a smaller magnitude than the violence of war and foreign affairs, but they are all part of a broader violence. The violence of a manipulative and abusive man keeping a woman in his hotel room against her will is not so different than the violence of war, not so different from the violence the Soldier enacts on Ian.
The play is filled with violence, some of which seems too atrocious to be believed. When it was first performed, critics maligned the play as only trying to shock, and indeed the play is shocking. Kane stages multiple rapes, penetration with a gun, a man eating another man's eyes, and other atrocities, which are often described simply and straightforwardly in the stage directions. At the end of scene 3, it simply says, "He puts his mouth over one of Ian's eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it." This action seems impossible to stage and even more impossible to wrap one's head around in any kind of emotionally logical way, yet there it is in the stage directions.
In these final scenes of the play, Cate and Ian become stand-ins for more rhetorical positions. Ian wants to kill himself in order to be done with life and descend into oblivion, but Cate insists that there is an afterlife, that no one ever truly dies. As they argue, they become stand-ins for two sides of an argument, Cate for religion and Ian for science. Cate believes in a metaphysical and spiritual world, while Ian contends that everything has a scientific explanation. They each make a case for their side of the argument, but neither can convince the other.
After so much brutality, the play ends on an unusually tender and simple note. Having grown accustomed to rape, baby-eating, filthy language, and unthinkable violence, the audience is treated to the most shocking image of all: the image of Cate tenderly sharing food with the incapacitated Ian. It is not an un-horrific image, especially following all that has occurred in the play, but its horror derives from the fact that it is so gentle, in contrast to the brutality of the rest of the action. It is an image of ambivalent survival, a haunting moment of silence that can barely hold all of the trauma that has preceded it.
