How to Mourn: Kane, Pinter and Theatre as Monument to Loss in the 1990s

Abstract

To that generation of people entering early adulthood at the turn of decade from the 1980s to the 1990s, there was a palpable sense of change in the world, a sense that decades of atrophying cold war were thawing around them, and that the political paradigms of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — and by consequence the cultural paradigms that had been sustained by or in opposition to these — might give way to exciting new opportunities. If we were to identify a key event that participated in generating this sense of renewal, then we might first consider the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an act that resonated on the plane of symbolic value across Europe. The face of this change was often brutal, with, for example, images of the executed bodies of Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena presented in news bulletins on Christmas Day 1989. Nelson Mandela’s release in February 1990 continued the momentum of this sense of a new era, partially later manifested in British politics by the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990.