Violence not on body but through body-image: Mark Ravenhill’s some explicit polaroids

In-yer-face theatre arising in the 1990s in Britain is generally renowned for displaying extreme and explicit images of violence and sexuality on stage without any censorship. This paper focusing on renowned in-yer-face playwright, Mark Ravenhill’s play, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), will attempt to eliminate the reductionist approach that in-yer-face theatre produces nothing but provocative, filthy, extreme images of violence and sexuality on the stage. Ravenhill surprisingly excludes any form of physical violence from the action on the stage; however, it should be noted that this exclusion is not done under the name of propriety or censorship; rather, it is a strategic move to attract attention to another form of violence. This play examines the concept of violence not in the form of physical violence perpetuated by an agent but as what Slavoj Zizek calls “systemic violence” caused by the current economic or political system. Ravenhill unveils the impossibility of experiencing reality in itself in a system of postmodernist global capitalism by displaying the discrepancy between the real physical body and the myth of the body or the body image that is perpetuated and acknowledged to be real for survival in the global capitalist system. Namely, this paper on Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids will focus on the mechanisms through which the social system causes victimization of the individual in a gradual and imperceptible way.