Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane (February 3, 1971 – February 20, 1999) was an English playwright. Her plays dealt uncompromisingly with themes of love, and cruelty, pain and torture, and are characterised by an increasing poetic intensity, a rich affirmation of love in all its forms, and by use of sharply violent imagery so powerful that it cuts across and fragments the narrative, perhaps an attempt to give us the experience of a life torn up by its roots.

She struggled with intense manic depression for many years, but continued to work, and was for some time the writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre.

Her first play, Blasted, which drew parallels between Britain and Bosnia and contained scenes of rape, cannibalism, and brutality, created the biggest theater scandal in London since the baby stoning scene in Edward Bond's play Saved; Kane adored Bond's work and he in turn publicly defended Kane's play and talent. Other dramatists who influenced Kane include Samuel Beckett, Howard Brenton, and Georg Büchner, whose play Woyzeck she once directed. Kane and Caryl Churchill admired and were influenced by each other.

Whilst the Daily Mail's Jack Tinker (after whom she named a particularly dislikeable character in Cleansed) described her first play as "this disgusting feast of filth", she is now acknowledged as a major force in British theatre and one of the key-figures of the so-called In-yer-face theatre, whose promising career was brought to a premature end by her suicide in 1999. However, this change of critical opinion only occurred with her fourth play, Crave. The play was originally published under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon in order to allow critics to 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 concentrates on four characters, each only having a letter for a name, linked through various relationships, the layers of which can only be seen after a thorough interpretation of the play. Also, it is highly intertextual. Via this "new" image of Sarah Kane, her earlier texts have been reread, revealing complex characters whose pain is as psychological as physical. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed very shortly before she died and was performed a year after her death. In 2001, the Royal Court Theatre, which had staged premieres of all but one of her stage plays, produced a season of her work. The critics were unanimous in their acclaim for the woman they had once scorned as reminding them of 'the naughtiest girl in the class'. Her influence on the next generation of writers remains to be seen, but it is already there in the plays of Debbie Tucker Green and Joanna Laurens and in Caryl Churchill's Far Away (2000). Kane's plays are now among the most frequently staged in Europe; at one point in 2003, there were 17 simultaneous productions of her plays in Germany alone.

Plays

• Blasted (1995)
• Phaedra's Love (1996)
• Cleansed (1998)
• Crave (1998)
• 4.48 Psychosis (1999)

Literature

• Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London 2001 ISBN 0413742601
• Graham Saunders: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’. Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester 2002 ISBN 0719059569
• Aleks Sierz: In-Yer-Face Theatre. British Drama Today. 2001 ISBN 0571200494

External links

• Iain Fisher's Sarah Kane tribute site
• Aleks Sierz' In-Yer-Face Theatre website
• Obituary in British Theatre Guide

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