Sarah Kane
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Sarah Kane (February 3, 1971 – February 20, 1999) was a British playwright.
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[edit] Life and Career
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, 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 theater and other non-naturalistic theatrical forms, including Jacobean tragedy. Her work is thus at variance with the naturalistic tendencies of much 20th century English theatre. Her impact is all the more remarkable, given that her entire published output consists of five plays and a screenplay for a short film, Skin.
Raised by evangelical parents, Kane was a committed Christian in adolescence, though she later rejected those beliefs. She studied drama at Bristol University, graduating in 1992, and went on to take an MA course in playwrighting at Birmingham University, where she studied under 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 Paines Plough, a theatre company promoting new writing where she actively encouraged other writers.
Her first play, Blasted, was directed by James Macdonald and 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 and foul-mouthed 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's rifle, appears in the room, and the narrative ultimately breaks into a series of increasingly disturbing short scenes.
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 whom Kane particularly liked and who could be seen as influences include Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, and Georg Büchner, whose play Woyzeck she later directed (Gate Theatre, London 1997).
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 muted terms, by most other critics. Blasted's merits were however recognised by fellow playwrights Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill and it was later generally accepted that the play is not an adolescent attempt to shock, but instead draws parallels between acts of domestic abuse and the war being fought in Bosnia, between emotional and physical violence, and thus confronts audiences with moral challenges rather than amoral shock tactics.
Kane's second play Phaedra's Love was loosely based on the classical dramatist Seneca's play Phaedrus, 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, in what was at the time the most expensive production in the Royal Court's history. 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 and her brother, 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 with her fourth play, Crave, directed by Vicky Featherstone and presented by Paines Plough at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1998. The play was originally offered to the company and performed under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon so that it could be viewed without the taint of its author's notorious reputation.
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, and of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. 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. (As such, it is influenced by Martin Crimp's 1997 play Attempts on Her Life, which similarly dispenses with setting and narrative.) The work is highly intertextual. Thanks perhaps to the less obviously confrontational nature of the play, 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 Greig as having as its subject the 'psychotic mind' [1]. According to Greig, 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.
[edit] Plays
- Blasted (1995)
- Phaedra's Love (1996)
- Cleansed (1998)
- Crave (1998)
- 4.48 Psychosis (1999)
[edit] Screenplays
[edit] Literature
- Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London: Methuen 2001 ISBN 0-413-74260-1
- Graham Saunders: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’. Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002 ISBN 0-7190-5956-9
[edit] External links
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kane, Sarah |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Playwright |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February3, 1971 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Essex |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 20, 1999 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
