Abstract

This paper analyses Edward Bond’s play. The Sea as a subversive comedy. The existing sociopolitical hegemonies in the British culture are ridiculed. Bond foregrounds the unjust automatized social structures that produce multiple types of madness that leads to violence. Gradually, the social beings become habitual of their madness-based identity. They develop an equation to cope with the existing coercive social system. The victim of these social hierarchies are brutalized, alienated and dehumanized, ultimately. Bond, through dialectical modes, self-reflexive text, creative images, comic strategies, symbolic configurations and various behavioral absurdities awakes his reader/audience to diagnose the dreadful situation in which they are and to practically do something to replace the irrational life by the sanity-oriented social existence. Elisabeth Wright’s theory of found in her book Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (1989) informed this study as a theoretical paradigm.

Key Words

Aggro-effects’, Alienation, Dehumanization, Rational Theatre

Introduction

Bertolt Brecht, a theatre theorist of the 20th century, influenced the political playwriting across the globe. His impact is exclusively prominent among the post-War British dramatists of the previous century. Edward Bond abundantly got inspiration from this German theatrical talent. That is why he is commonly called the British Brecht or the Brechtian Bond (Eddershaw, 2002). Like every creative artist, Bond appropriates the aesthetics of the Brechtian theatrical theories, theatrical practices and playwriting and bends the Marxist poetics to his own culture and context. ‘Rational theatre’ is the technical term that he invented for his alternative theatrics. To Bond  “‘reason’ is a Brecht word” (2000, p.171). Brechtian dramaturgy is called Verfremdung or V-effects; Bondian dramatic poetics is labeled as ‘aggro-effects’ which characterize his dramaturgical methods. Explaining the Bondian aesthetics on drama, Davis (2005) states:

‘Aggro’ confronts the audience with frightening, disgusting or simply extreme acts.  Rather than simply aiming to provoke a strong feeling or a gratuitous sense of shock, these acts of theatrical provocation fully implicate the viewer by demanding an emotional response…Bond is asking for analysis, a calling into question the causes and mechanisms by which the event occurred. (p, 202).

Brechtian distancing devices are propagandist, and those of Bond are chiefly aesthetics based. Keeping in mind Heiner Muller’s argument that the adherence to Brecht demands the overhauling of his aesthetics (Rio, 2008), convinced Bond to keep up the Brechtian spirit with a changed configuration. He appropriated the Brechtian theatrical theories and distancing devices to tell a story or analyze the truth in a different socio-temporal context. This diagnostic realism remained the well-regarded goal of his artistic career.

Since his early days as a playwright, Bond took a clear stand concerning his artistic perspective. When Beckett’s theatre of the Absurd was popular everywhere, he vehemently critiqued it; and there are very solid reasons behind it. He is fully aware of the huge efforts, artistry and care that are required to compose an absurd play, but he is not appreciative of it as “nothing comes of it except pity” (Bond, 1996, 23). Harold Pinter and Beckett, who commonly draw on the helpless and miserable condition of man in the universe do not attract Bond.  This artistic background serves as a stimulus to the socio-politically conceived dramatic response of the British Brecht. He is a philosopher in his views on the concept of art. To him, art is the name of a critical brand of realism, diagnostic version of human life, socially interpretive document and an aesthetic activity that is politically useful. Jose (2012) quotes Bond thus: “Art is the close scrutiny of reality” (p.156); therefore, he puts only that material on the stage which is self-conscious and interrogative in orientation. The provisions of his materialist poetics compel him to aestheticize the ongoing social values that are entrenched to dehumanize and depersonalize the humans.  He posits that human life is shaped by social, economic and political forces which necessarily facilitate the exploitation of the voiceless at the hands of the authorized. “Bond is” Worthen (1997) says “surely interested in a metaphysics of justice, his plays take as their central subject the operation of social injustice, figured largely through the lens of class and the exploitative privileges it enables” (p.197). He believes that the capitalistic hegemonies are the unjust, inhuman and coercive systems which specifically aim at the dehumanization, alienation and madness of man and his society. Resultantly, violence is widespread in the modern cultures. He postulates that life would soon become unbearable, if the ever-increasing violence is not checked in the western societies. He writes his plays to avoid madness and letting the audience evade insanity by becoming aware of its magnitude and its sociopolitical causes.  He enumerates various types and forms of madness that the violence, inscribed in the institutional practices, continues to generate.  Bond’s argument that violence is hidden within democratic structures (Hartley, 2012) reminds us of Brecht of Life of Galileo who ascribes the fall of atom bomb on Nagasaki to the betrayal of Galileo, the scientist in his theatre. Like Brecht, the chief purpose behind the Bondian dramaturgy and theatricality is to bring a change in the sociopolitical domain by activating the rational faculties of the spectators. His artistic talent is programmatically committed to mobilize the audience to acquaint them with the critical sense of reality. The last sentence of the play The Sea is incomplete; it is to completed by the audience in their practical life. 

Literature Review

So many significant pieces of research have been conducted on Bond’s plays. One of them is Edward Bond's Bingo: A Re-Reading of Shakespeare's Biography (2014) by AL-Radaydeh (2014). It is a critique on Bond’s famous statement that Shakespeare was not fair in his treatment to the daughters of King Lear. The research is mobilized to seek answers to the questions of how far Bond was biased in accusing Shakespeare and what were the real motives behind his statement about Shakespeare. The researcher concludes that Bond was subjective in calling Shakespeare unfair for his treatment to the children of Lear. He also concludes that the composition of Bingo had political motives. Bond was inspired by Marxist ideology therefore opposed to capitalism. It is a good study but it did not cover Bond’s play The Sea.  The title of the research article Dehumanized or inhuman: Doubles in Edward Bond by Castillo (1986) shows that Bond juxtaposes the two antagonistic aspects of the same personality in the form of two opposing dramatic characters; one aspect is the satanic, and the other is a humane one. To ascertain this hypothesis, the researcher undertakes the critical study of three Bondian plays:  Saved, Lear and Early Morning. It is very important to research in the context of the Marxist philosophy of dialectics. The study concludes that the dialectical mode of the Bondian characters is a political ploy to engage and mobilize the audience rationally. Certainly, it is a good piece of research but it does not cover The Sea. Sean Carney’s article Edward Bond: Tragedy, Postmodernity, The Woman (2004) discusses Bond’s play The Woman as a tragedy conceived in a dialectical model. The researcher argues that the ploy of dialectics is not only popular with Bond it is also very successful in fulfilling his political aims as a playwright.  

Aqsa Kaleem, in her research article The Role of Imagination and Ideology in Defining Culture in the Works of Edward Bond, presents the concepts and relationship of ideology and culture. She discusses the Bondian plays in terms of culture and ideology. Bond holds that certainly, the working classes are the oppressed souls.  As far as the case of the ruling classes is concerned, they are tied to an unjust system that was generated by the corrupt image of the irrational culture. Kaleem argues that, according to Bond, the combination of imagination and human intellect is the basis of ideologies. If the synthesis is successful, it creates humanism, but if the merger is not complete, the result would be the irrational culture. What she insists on is that ideologies are not something invisible in disposition; they are maintained by our materialist daily activities, common images and the popular myths.  It is an enviable piece of research but it did not extend its hook to The Sea.

Ms Natasa Milovic’s research paper Zygmunt Bauman and Edward Bond’s Critical Thoughts on Postmodern Morality (1995) is a comparative study of Bauman’s Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (1995) and Bond’s Notes on Postmodernism, and other texts collected in Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State (2000).  Two points of comparison and discussion are important: various forms of barbarism produced in the guise of modern civilized life and the faulty role of intellectuals in this contemporary scenario. The researcher, through different examples, proves that the modern capitalistic ideology is dangerous and coercive; only the dynamic and mobile intellectuals can produce a rebuttal to ever-increasing cruelty of the social institutions. It is a remarkable paper to dwell on the critical writings of Bond and Bauman. Theatre of Social Commitment: A Study of Edward Bond’s Select Play (2013), an M.Phil thesis by Sameeul Haq Nazuki, investigates some important plays of Bond with reference to statusquo found in the British culture. It studies the British complacency and self-satisfied sense of life that is a main support to the statusquo. Nazuki analyses the theatrical devices by Bond to make the audience conscious and cautious of the unjust and coercive social structures that have been naturalized by the ruling ideologies. All these above studies on the Bondian universe are significant in their context. But up till now no formal research was conducted on the madness phenomenon in The Sea.  Hence the present study. 

Methodology

Bertolt Brecht and Edward Bond did not present, in a formal way, any theory of comedy but the patterns observed in their plays point to the general theory of the comic they believed in. Opposite to the definition of a ‘social comedy’ that considers human vanities as part and parcel of eternal human nature, Brechtian and Bondian notion of the comic is a historically bound phenomenon. Their theory of comedy stands for the political confrontation between the continuing ideological structures and the subversive ideology. Instead of criticizing the individual morality of the people, Bondian comic aesthetics strike at the very roots of the ongoing hegemonies that shape up and construct the ugly faces of the social characters. It targets the manifestations of common sense and routine images that look natural. What happens all the time is not natural; it is ‘naturalized’; therefore, open to ridicule. Gourg describes Bond’s theory on theatre in these words: 

His (Bond’s) shock-based strategy has led him to revamp Brecht’s alienation techniques through his own brand of the “V-effect’- distancing effect-dubbed” agro-effect”, a forceful approach that has now gained wide currency on the British stage. At the time, he felt that Brecht’s V-effect had percolated down Mainstream drama, becoming tame in the process; his theatre required intensified “defamiliarization” so as to startle the audience. (p.3)

The Bondian play The Sea is a powerful effort on the part of the writer who composes his writings to “stop” himself “from going mad” (Bond as in Stoll, 1967, p.418) and to shake up the audience to rationally think over their robotized, routinized and automatized tone and ambience to the social relations, based on institutional injustice, that the daily experience. To awaken the British spectators rationally, Bond made use of his favourite artistic devices called ‘aggro-effects’ in The Sea. These Bondian strategies consist of dialectical modes, self-reflexive text, creative images, comic strategies and symbolic configurations. They estrange the madness phenomenon that is embedded in multiple forms of institutional values. 




Research Questions

The present study is devised to seek answers to the following questions.

i) To what extent Bondian strategies called ‘aggro-effects’ are helpful in realizing the political goals set behind the composition of The Sea?

ii) What are the forms of the phenomenon of madness in the play under-analysis?

iii) What is the orientation of The Sea as a comedy?

Data Analysis and Discussion

Bond’s plays belong to the genre of subversive comedy that thematizes the coercive behaviours of the unjust social, religious, political, familial, democratic, cultural and moral institutions of society.  The Sea is a story of Willy whose friend Colin is drowned in the stormy sea and Hatch, the coastguard on duty, does not pay attention to his cries for help. During his stay in the town near the sea coast, Willy meets different people belonging to different social classes like, Mrs. Rafi, Hatch, Evens and the priest. All the individuals of this population suffer from various categories of madness. Fed up with the violent and mad behaviours of the people, Willy leaves the town along with Rose to start a normal and healthy life somewhere away from this socio-politically sick settlement.

Althusser (2001) says that the ruling ideology that works through the network of social institutions addresses the social beings, in all the social situations, in such a way that they turn into subjected ‘subjects’. But they feel individualized, honoured and respected because of ideological interpellations. When this theoretical paradigm is applied to The Sea, we come across the social institutions that continue to naturalize the manmade exploitative thoughts.  Bond’s self-conscious playtext not only acquaints the reader with the ways used to legitimize the existing hierarchies, but it also exposes the pettiness and meaninglessness of the dominant structures. Bondian political playwriting tends to denaturalize these hollow hegemonies. Bond actualizes his authorial aims by foregrounding the institutional violence and the resultant madness. This irrational phenomenon exists in the play under analysis at different levels and in different manifestations. One example of this madness material is the ideologized Hatch.

Whatever Hatch does and appears, is not by his own choice.  He is a typical example of a site that harbours a variety of madness; he is transfixed in insanity at the hands of ideological state apparatuses. Human material is maddened/abnormalized by the ‘to and fro motion’ of aggression that the institutional ideologies set out between the petit-bourgeois and the society.  When the play starts, Colin is drowning, as a result of a shipwreck in the territorial waters of England and his friend Willy, at the top of his voice, is crying for help. It is a twilight accompanying roaring thunder, blinding twilight, ferocious storm and belligerent currents and jumping waves. When Willy sees Hatch, a coastguard on duty, he beseeches him to save the life of his sinking friend, but the latter does not show any sign of humanitarian spirit. Rather, the coastguard calls him a ‘filthy beast’, snubs and orders him to go back from where he has come. This behavior of Hatch is indicative of a type of madness. It is an example of attitudinal insanity.  Capitalistic society clips that natural connectivity among humans and makes them insensitive, unsympathetic and indifferent to others. Keeping this reality in mind, Bond says, “the man without pity is mad” (Bellingham, 2014, p.52). If the first scene is interpreted in figurative terms, the meaning of the attitudinal irrationality is clearly brought home. The roaring and stormy sea stands for the capitalistically ideologized societal life; the anarchic currents that ram into each other and produce the hellish ambience account for the exiting social apparatuses that like the python trap, manage and maneuver some animal life. The wrecked ship is a sign of the failed system/mechanism for social life. The coastguard, by definition, is the emblem of a savoiur of human life that should guide and direct humanity to the safe place. Why the coastguard does not fulfill his duties? Answer lies in the ways of the capitalistic mindset and apparatuses that aim at generating madness and aggression. Hatch is supposed to be the name of a self-corrective, self-regulatory and self-remedial aspect of the societal system but he has been deprived of the natural role that is to redeem life. The capitalistic mechanism petrifies humans in their mechanical role; critical thinking and resultant natural rebellion, which is essential for a healthy society, has turned rusty. Bond is an accomplished writer who takes a lot of help from concrete images to convey hi message. The coastguard, in implicational sense, is Colin himself; what the stormy sea does to Colin is in fact the treatment that he receives from the town ideologies.  What the sea does to Colin the same is done by the society to Hatch. It means Hatch is that egg which is hatched in accordance with the ruling ideologies of the town. His utterance of ‘filthy beast’ for Evens and Willy is ironic in character. He himself is a beast, a man without critical sense that is incapable of analyzing his performance. Isn’t it ridiculous to note that his routinized uncritical self is the name of behavioural madness? Hasn’t capitalistic ideology robotized Hatch? Should Hatch continue to live such type of social existence? These are the questions that the reader is confronted with while studying play.

Quite contrary to the Cartesian and Desecration philosophies that stress the sovereignty of man in actions, the materialist thinkers believe that humans are social beings constructed by social apparatuses. Bond (1992) goes a step ahead and says that “human consciousness is” in fact “class consciousness” (cited in Spenecr, p.6); the social agencies constantly tempt and train the subjects to remain within the orbit of the class constitution. The results and implications of such practices are open to the subversive laughter.   Hatch calls Willy a leader of the aliens who are coming from the outer space, as a result of a disaster in their habitat, to occupy their town situated on the East coast of England. They would occupy their homes jobs and properties. ‘We’ll be slaves working all our lives to make goods for sale on the other planets’.  Is this an imaginary discourse? The answer is no. C. M. Bowra (1950) states that the world of imagination is more real than the real world. Bond (2012) announces that he is not interested in the imaginary world; he puts “on the stage only those things which” do “happen in our society” (cited in Jose, 2012, p.156). Bond’s declaration that art must interpret the world and not merely mirror it brings him closer to Marx and Brecht, who believe that the chief aim of art is to transform the readers and audience sociopolitically. Hatch’s paranoid fantasies are also fired with this orientation. First, Bond, through the Hatchian obsession, makes the audience think that the modern-day hegemonic hierarchies were once an imaginary material. But when they were introduced and practised repeatedly, they adopted the natural character. The manmade material, when it gets routinized, turns ‘natural’. From this angle, the play suggests to the spectators to examine and evaluate the ‘naturalness’ of the naturalized apparatuses. Second, the concept of displacement in the psychoanalytic theories also helps us a lot in the understanding of Bondian politico-surrealistic playwriting.  Under this theory, the image of a noun is transferred to some other noun. Hatch says that the aliens are the strangers plus sinister characters. They are ghosts, the agents of death. His mission seems to save the town from this looming threat. Evens tells Willy that these ‘ghosts’ of Hatch are in fact the oppressed, suppressed, terrorized and exploited souls of the town. These remarks of Evens bring us to the modern British world where just the mad souls exist. Hatch’s obsession of the alien armies refers to a shocking phenomenon i.e. the imaginative madness. Hatch’s campaigning against Willy, his arrangement of group to spy Willy wherever he goes and his repeated declaration that he wants to save the town invite the subversive laughter of the audience.  This is a political ploy used by Bond to make the reader laugh at the ideologized voice of the draper who instead of diagnosing and addressing the social ills, caused by the capitalist system, runs after paranoid fears. The comic here turns political and subversive in bearing. 

Hatch’s dealings with Mrs. Rafi and her colleagues foreground some other types of madness in the play: mental, professional, class, lingual, psychological and physical. Hatch, as a draper and cloth merchant, adopts a subservient posture to Mrs. Rafi. To sell his articles like gloves and velvet curtains, he flatters, cajoles and dances to the tune of the upper class lady. He degrades himself before her to take orders from her. Can we call a person sane and healthy who consciously compromises his will, conscience and sovereignty? This is an example of professional and mental madness. The lady refuses to take the curtains, when she comes to know that Hatch did not help Willy and Colin at the time of their shipwreck. The draper grows mad at different levels. He tells a lie that he ‘tried to help’ out Willy but Colin was already drowned. This mental and psychological insanity is perhaps more marked than other sorts of madness. He also begins to cut the whole fabric material into shreds. Then he makes an attempt on the life of Mrs. Rafi. These are the instances of his physical and class madness. Hatch, the self-styled leader of the community, grows emotionally and physiologically mad, when he mistakenly stabs the dead body on the cost.  Mistakenly, he takes Colin’s dead body for Willy. One day, Hatch sees Willy in a gathering for prayers for the soul of Colin and grows out of control and calls the latter swine. He also calls Mrs. Rafi the lady burglar who has come under the influence of the alien. Is it not the proof of Hatch’s being mad lingually and psychologically?  Following the spirit of the principle of ‘cause and effect’, all these levels of madness are connected with each; one leads to the other. Keeping all these varieties of insanity and irrationality in mind, Bond (2010) says  “there is no doubt but that Hatch is a Hitleresque concept on my part” (para, 7). The audience laugh at the ruling apparatuses responsible for this entire repelling/irrational phenomenon.

The topmost level of ideological/political hierarchies that manages and controls the social formation is the superordinate of all aggression and violence which prevails in the social formation. Mrs. Rafi is the bullying dictator of the town. Following the mindset of the upper class, she practices specific kinds of aggression. During the visits to Hatch’s shop, she finds faults with every commodity Hatch is supposed to sell there. Her utterance, ‘your catalogue is full of interesting items, but none of them is in your shop,’ is the institutional aggression that flows from the top of the hierarchy to its lower areas. The gloves, which she takes from the shop, break up when she thumps the table. She refuses to take the curtains from Hatch that she herself had ordered. This leads to the economic breakdown of the draper. When an ideology successfully interpellates a human, he is blindfolded mentally and behaviorally. He becomes habitual and addicted to the status and identity given to him ideologically. The cultural positioning and cultural festivities he enjoys force him to fulfil the demands of the ideological dispensation. Mrs. Rafi is the representative of the exploitative class that ensures the continuity of the existing relations of production and, by incessant degradation of the subordinated. This is a compulsory syllabus that is executed to unavoidably train the masses. Here aggression makes the system go. Mrs. Rafi is herself an ideologized figure: she is compelled by the cultural apparatuses to be what she is. She continues to exercise emotional and mental violence on her social subordinates.  Rose says that ‘the town is full of her cripples’. And along with her class conscious features, she is a monster. Can a human monster be sane? Answer is no. Bond (1971) in this respect states that “as long as man does not realize that his real enemy is the social institution that fuels his aggressivity, the cycle of violence will continue” (p. 9). 

Aggression and insanity of Mrs. Rafi is related to other social situations and institutions also. She arranges and directs a play Orpheus to support the coastguards financially. Her arrogance and dictatorship is violent here too. She participates in the gathering that is arranged for saying prayers for the departed soul of Colin. Here too she is in the aggressive mood; it is to habitualise people of her control and superiority over them. Her repeated presence in various social situations is all ideological. Ideology is the name of the continuity of a sociopolitical system without any interruption. The dynamics and patterns of an ideology tend to suggest that whatever is repeated, through the social apparatuses, is ultimately naturalized. To keep this state of routinized behaviours go on, the ideological icons like Mrs. Rafi are advertised at different occasions of social and cultural life. Bond is a very shrewd playwright. He makes her character appear again and again with the same perspective. This is a political ploy called “not-but” (Brecht, 1984, p.137) formula that he borrowed from the Brechtian theories of theatre. She due to clichéd language and fatigue gestures invites the ridiculous laughter of the audience. Repeated rendition of her hollow character, on the one hand, stresses the irrelevance of the capitalistic hegemonies and, on the other hand, it highlights the violence that is done to the voiceless at the hands of the authorized ones. Institutional madness that works through the practices of Mrs. Rafi is ridiculed by the self-conscious text and the rationally mobilized audience. 

To achieve his aesthetic/political goals, Bond cleverly chooses positions and concretizes his images.  Evens, a social outcast on the beach and away from the town, is centrally important for explaining the institutional aggression and its bestial results on the social beings. His posture and stance remind us of Tiresias in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. This visionary character operates as the conscience and critical conscious of the community. When this prophetic figure identifies the root cause of the vast miseries of the Thebans, Oedipus instead of being thankful to him, snubs him, calls him the “prophet fraud” (Sophocles, 2001, p.26) and sends him away from the scene. The annoyed Tiresias abandons his critique and resultantly the tragedy deepens with the passage of time. Bond (1978) says “Evens, is the sane one. The rest are manic about their entrapment” (cited in Hayman, p.141).  He is a sign of critical sense and self-reformatory spirit that is automatically activated when the system is to be corrupted and debunked.  The virus of ideological repressive sate apparatuses is so powerful that the reformatory Evens is pushed out of the society. To keep the community ‘safe’ from the alternative and challenging perspective of Evens, he is advertised as an insane fellow. In the context of Even, the political use of irony is marked.  Hatch calls Evens the insane and the supporter of the aliens, but the reality is that he himself is befooled, exploited, oppressed and battered by the unnatural ideologies that control the community. The incoherence of speech, drinking and complex talk are the disorders of Evens’ personality that are correctly ascribed to sociopolitical violence imparted to him. Even then, there are patterns in madness. He keeps Willy willed to resist the institutional madness and to reject this ideologically diseased brand of life by migrating to some other place in the company of Rose. He also works as a foil to Hatch, who is a blind conformist to the coercive system.  He is also a form of protest against the rigid, petty and musty social institutions that continue to smooth over the gaps and contradictions of the existing ideological structures.   

Conclusion

The present study that was pursued in the light of Wright’s essay Theory in Praxis: Comedy as a Discourse (1989) produced very useful results. The research proves that the social institutions which are presented as the civilized agencies of the modern-day world are barbaric in disposition, practice and values. The religious, economic, social and moral structures are unjust, therefore, cruel. The absence of justice turns them into the authorized sources of aggression and violence (Kim, 2010). And the use of violence and the threat of violence straightforwardly lead to madness. This madness has some exclusive forms: psychological, emotional, mental, physical, imaginative, institutional, behavioural, attitudinal and moral. Bond’s strategic use of artistic devices proved instrumental in mobilizing the readers rationally. The repeated ideological bevaviours of the socially evolved characters expose the pettiness of their filter/view point. The study of techniques of imaginary enemy and the ironic modes used in The Sea proved extremely useful in the understanding of an alternative dramaturgy. One of the artistic strategies that distinguish Bond from other political playwrights is his use of the psychoanalytical theories of displacement. The analysis of the soul in metaphoric terms is another successful tool that Bond used to enhance the artistry of his political art.   

Water that has been traditionally called the regenerative agency for the humans assumes contrastive identity in the play under discussion. In spite of the violent mood of the sea Colin pushes his boat on the water at night.  Ultimately, he is swallowed up by the sea. Here the stormy sea currents adopt the role of a network of the social institutions that cruelly control man. Evens who is the sign of critical consciousness is thrown away from society; the sanest is advertised as the insane. His drinking habits and incoherent speech reflect the size of bestiality that the ruling hegemonies levy on the oppressed. Davis Allen (2014) argues that the Bondian plays shock the audience to look into the social structures that madden the subjects by bending them to the hierarchized society.  Hatch as a social being, as a coast guard and as a draper stands for a dehumanization, demoralization and exploitation that the hegemonic social structures continue to reproduce. His lies, paranoid fears, self-styled leadership and ambition to save the society from the aliens are ideological hence ridiculous. There are many types of insanity that co-exist in the ideologized subject, Hatch; he practices different sorts of madness in different situations.  Mrs. Rafi is both the subject and object of institutional violence and the resultant madness. Being the representative of the aristocratic class, she is bound to humiliate, use and befool Hatch. Her foregrounded fatigued roles and activities expose her to the political laughter of the audience. The subversive comedy raises different questions for the spectators. Isn’t sanity essential to live a just and peaceful life? Isn’t insanity a derivative of uncritical thinking? Can we become dynamic humans with uncritical thinking?  Aren’t hierarchical hegemonies bent upon making us stagnant, uncritical and resultantly violent and mad? Shouldn’t ruling structures be challenged?  

References