Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane (February 3, 1971 – February 20, 1999) was an English playwright.
Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, cruelty, pain, torture -- both psychological and physical-- and death , and are characterised by a poetic intensity, a pared-down language, a bold exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action. Her inspirations were in expressionist theatre and other non-naturalistic theatrical forms and her work is thus at variance with the naturalistic tendencies of most 20th century English theatre.
Raised by evangelical parents, and herself a committed Christian in adolescence, Kane studied drama at Bristol University and, after graduating in 1992, took an MA course in playwrighting at Birmingham University, led by the playwright David Edgar.
Kane struggled with severe depression for many years and was twice voluntarily admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London. However she wrote consistently, if slowly, throughout her adult life and was for a year the writer-in-residence for Paine's Plough, a theatre company promoting new writing where she actively encouraged other writers.
Apart from early student work, her entire opus consists of five plays and a screenplay for a short film, Skin.
Her first play, was Blasted which, directed by James Macdonald, opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in 1995. The action is set in a room of a luxurious hotel in Leeds where Ian, a racist middle-aged journalist, first tries to seduce and later rapes Cate, an innocent and simple-minded young woman. From its opening in a naturalistic -- though troubling -- world, the play takes on different, nightmarish dimensions when the Soldier, armed with a sniper rifle, appears in the room, and the narrative ultimately breaks into a series of increasingly disturbing short scenes.
Blasted suggested parallels between Britain and the war being fought in Bosnia and its scenes of anal rape, cannibalism, and brutality, created the biggest theatre scandal in London since the baby stoning scene in Edward Bond's play Saved; Kane admired Bond's work and he in turn publicly defended Kane's play and talent. Other dramatists who influenced Kane include Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, and Georg Büchner, whose play Woyzeck she directed.
Blasted was fiercely attacked in the British press with the Daily Mail's drama critic Jack Tinker (after whom she named a character in her later play Cleansed) writing a review headlined "this disgusting feast of filth", a reaction shared, if in slightly more considered terms, by most other critics. Blasted's merits were however recognised by fellow playwrights Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill.
Kane's second play Phaedra's Love was loosely based on the classical dramatist Seneca's play Phaedra, but given a contemporary setting. In this reworking of the myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus, it is Hippolytus, not Phaedra who takes the central role. Bored, depressed but highly sexually attractive, it is Hippolytus' emotional cruelty which pushes Phaedra to suicide. Kane reversed classical tradition by showing, rather than describing, violent action on stage. The play continued her exploration of love, desire, cruelty and death and contains her wittiest and most cynical dialogue. Directed by Kane, it was first performed at The Gate theatre in London in 1996.
This was followed two years later by Cleansed performed at the Royal Court's main house and again directed by James Macdonald. Set in what Kane in her stage directions described as a 'university' but which functions more as a torture chamber or concentration camp, overseen by the sadistic Tinker, it places a young woman, a disturbed boy, a gay couple and a peepshow dancer within this world of extreme cruelty in which declarations of love are viciously tested. Kane's most theatrically ambitious work, it pushes the limits of what can be realised in the theatre with stage directions including 'a sunflower pushes through the floor and grows above their heads' and 'the rat begins to eat Carl's hand.'
A change in critical opinion occurred only with her fourth play, Crave,directed by Vicky Featherstone and presented by Paine's Plough at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1998. The play was originally published under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon so that critics would examine it, not as the latest play from an author whose characters had sucked out each other's eyes and barbecued their genitals, but as a play in its own right.
Crave marks a break from the on-stage violence of Kane's previous works and a move to a freer, sometimes lyrical writing style, at times inspired -- in language but not content-- by her reading of the Bible. It has four characters, each identified only by a letter of the alphabet, linked through various relationships, the layers of which can only be seen through a detailed reading of the play. It dispenses with plot and unlike her earlier work, with its highly specific stage directions, gives no indication what actions, if any, the actors should perform on stage, nor does it give any setting for the play. The work is highly intertextual. Via this "new" image of Sarah Kane, her earlier texts were reread, revealing, to those who had been unable to see them before, complex characters whose pain is as psychological as it is physical.
Kane's career was brought to a premature end in 1999, when she committed suicide by hanging herself in a bathroom at London's King's College Hospital.
Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000,a year after her death, at the Royal Court, directed by James Macdonald. This, Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work, dispenses not only with plot but with character and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play. (In Macdonald's production two women and one man performed the work). Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression, it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Grieg as having as its subject the 'psychotic mind'. The title derives from the time --4.48 am -- when Kane, in her depressed state, frequently woke in the morning.
Kane is now acknowledged as a major figure in British theatre and her work has been proved highly influential and widely performed in Europe. At one point in Germany there were 17 simultaneous productions of her work.
Plays
- Blasted (1995)
- Phaedra's Love (1996)
- Cleansed (1998)
- Crave (1998)
- 4.48 Psychosis (1999)
Screenplays
Literature
- Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London 2001 ISBN 0-413-74260-1
- Graham Saunders: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’. Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester 2002 ISBN 0-7190-5956-9
- Aleks Sierz: In-Yer-Face Theatre. British Drama Today. 2001 ISBN 0-571-20049-4