Death Is Sacred: Being and Non-Being in Sarah Hall’s “Theatre 6”

The short story “Theatre 6” is one of three post-apocalyptic short stories included in Sarah Hall’s collection Madame Zero, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013. The story is inspired by the real-life case of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septic shock at Galway University Hospital in 2012 becau...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEast-West cultural passage Vol. 23; no. 1; pp. 51 - 60
Main Author Ciocoi-Pop-Vecsei, Maria-Miruna
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published LUCIAN BLAGA University Press of Sibiu 01.06.2023
Editura Universitatii LUCIAN BLAGA din Sibiu
Sciendo
Subjects
abortion rights
Aesthetics
being
British Literature
feminism
life
non-being
post-apocalyptic fiction
Sarah Hall
Sociology of Culture
Sociology of Literature
Theory of Literature
Sarah Hall
abortion rights
feminism
postapocalyptic fiction
being
nonbeing
life
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Summary:The short story “Theatre 6” is one of three post-apocalyptic short stories included in Sarah Hall’s collection Madame Zero, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013. The story is inspired by the real-life case of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septic shock at Galway University Hospital in 2012 because of being denied an abortion on grounds of septic miscarriage. The text paints a dystopian vision of a not so far away future where the Hunter fetal care act legislatively places the life of unborn babies higher than the one of mothers. The protagonists are a genderless anaesthesiologist, Dr. Rosinski, and a nameless patient, brought to a London hospital in septic shock, following a denied abortion in spite of a miscarriage suffered several days before. The time of narration is uncertain; however, the story is generally taken to be placed in a future where present-day anti-abortion tendencies have taken over the British judicial system. The story discusses the being/non-being dichotomy from a variety of perspectives: life-death, moralshypocrisy, religion-secularism, male-female, empathy-bureaucracy, truth-duplicity. The ultimate question the text raises is what or whose life is sacred in a world that has jettisoned all semblance of sanity?
ISSN:1583-6401
2067-5712
2067-5712
DOI:10.2478/ewcp-2023-0005