Sarah Kane

• Born: February 3, 1971
• Birthplace: Essex, England
• Died: February 20, 1999
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

Sarah Kane wrote exclusively for the theater, with the exception of Skin, an eleven-minute film first broadcast in June, 1997, for England’s Channel 4, for which she wrote the teleplay.

Achievements

Sarah Kane received no major literary awards during her brief lifetime. Critics in England were divided about her work, many deriding it as shocking and disgusting, others defending her as a poet and an important new dramatic voice. Since her arrival on the professional London theater scene with the opening of Blasted in 1995, her plays have been widely performed and acclaimed in Europe, and all of her major plays—Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis—have been published both separately and in collections in English, French, German, and Italian. In 1996, she served as playwright-in-residence for Paines Plough, a prestigious London theater company dedicated exclusively to the presentation of new work.

Biography

Sarah Kane was the daughter of Peter and Janine Kane, both of whom were English journalists. Peter was a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror, and the family members, for a short time during Kane’s teenage years, became fervent born-again Christians. Kane renounced her Christianity in her early twenties but admitted that the violent imagery she found in the Bible inspired her work as a playwright. Kane joined local drama groups as a teenager and directed plays by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov. For a time, she skipped school altogether to work as an assistant director for a production at a school in London’s Soho district.

Kane attended the University of Bristol, acting in school plays and directing a number of student productions, including Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (pr., pb. 1982). After graduating with top honors in drama, she enrolled at the University of Birmingham, where she received her M.A. degree. While at school, Kane gained a reputation for nightclubbing and having affairs with women, though her work does not contain noticeable lesbian themes.

In 1996, her first full-length play, Sick, composed of three monologues (Comic Monologue, Starved, and What She Said) was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. However, it was her play Blasted, which she had written in 1994 while at Birmingham University and which was presented at the students’ end-of-year show, that brought Kane to the forefront of the New Wave theater scene.

The first professional production of Blasted opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in January, 1995, in a secondary theater that held sixty-two seats, forty-five of which were occupied by critics. No more than a thousand people saw Blasted during its short run, but the virulent critical response to Kane’s violent imagery and language splashed her name not only across newspaper arts sections but also across the pages of the British tabloids and made her the topic of television gossip shows as well. The play did have its share of admirers—among them, playwright Harold Pinter, whose hand-delivered fan letter to Kane shortly after seeing Blasted was among her most cherished possessions. Before Kane’s death, Blasted had already been produced in Germany, Austria, France, Australia, Serbia, Belgium, and Italy.

In 1995, Kane also wrote the teleplay for Skin, a short film about a black woman who comes into contact with a skinhead and the unexpected twist as to who will be the victim. During her season at Paines Plough, Kane wrote Crave. Because of the critical outrage over Blasted and because Kane wanted theatergoers to judge the play on its own merits, Crave was first presented under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon.

Critical outrage and accusations of what was perceived as a childish attempt to shock depressed Kane but did not deter her from continuing her work, and actors, directors, and producers with whom she worked—as well as fellow playwrights Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and Steven Berkoff—continued to defend her as a thoughtful, brave, and angry poet.

Kane battled mental illness and depression throughout most of her adult life, each new bout of depression affecting her more seriously than the last. In the two years before her death, she checked herself into mental hospitals several times and was treated with a number of antidepressant drugs. After her death, Tom Fahy, a psychiatrist who treated Kane in 1997 at Maudsley Hospital in London, told British reporters that Kane had told him she expected to be dead by the time she was twenty-seven.

On February 18, 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, Kane left a short note on her kitchen table (“I have killed myself”) and took an overdose of antidepressants and sleeping pills. She was discovered and taken to King’s College Hospital in south London, where she was resuscitated. Kane had been scheduled to be moved to a psychiatric ward at Maudsley Hospital, but on February 20, before she could be transferred from King’s College, she committed suicide by hanging herself on the back of a lavatory door.

Her final play, 4.48 Psychosis—so titled, Kane said, because she awoke many mornings at that time filled with extreme clarity alongside thoughts of suicide—was produced posthumously at the Royal Court Theatre, where Blasted had made such an impact just five years earlier. Shortly before her death, she had been working on an adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), in which the love-stricken hero kills himself after failing to gain what he desires.

Analysis

Like the deaths of playwright Joe Orton and poet Sylvia Plath before her, Sarah Kane’s early death forced many critics to reexamine her work. Some felt that her plays, especially her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, were merely reflections of her own suicidal depression. Critic Charles Spencer of the London Telegraph suggested that Kane’s work owed more to clinical depression than to artistic vision. Admirers such as Pinter and Kane’s brother, Simon, however, have refuted these statements, insisting that to treat Kane’s plays as suicide notes is to do an injustice to the playwright’s talent and motives. British drama anthologist David Tushingham agreed, insisting that as a mental patient, Kane was far less exceptional than as a writer and that the most extraordinary thing about her was not her illness but her talent.

Kane’s plays relied more on classical than contemporary structure and technique. She was more influenced by the scope of Shakespeare’s large dramatic conflicts than by the work of her peers in the London theater scene. The body of her work tackled human and political issues by placing those issues onstage in violent, distorted, and extremely personal situations. Her raw language and graphic visual images were particularly disturbing to theatergoers because she left conflicts unresolved and perpetrators unpunished, although, as in the works of Samuel Beckett, she continually showed the basic human impulse to connect with another even in the most hopeless of circumstances.

Kane was certainly one of the most controversial voices in a decade that was filled with controversy. The self-titled “in-yer-face” theater in Britain began in 1991 with Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney, shocking audiences with its scenes of cockroach eating, and continued in 1994 in Glasgow, Scotland, with Trainspotting, playwright Harry Gibson’s adaptation of the novel by Irvine Welsh, which in 1995 became a critically acclaimed film.

The “in-yer-face” movement of 1990’s theater reached its zenith with Kane’s Blasted in 1995 and continued in 1998 with Cleansed, which Kane had originally conceived, along with Blasted, as part of a trilogy. After Cleansed was produced, however, Kane stopped work on the trilogy and turned instead to Crave, a play for four voices. Not until Crave premiered at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1998 did Kane overcome the vitriolic early critical response to Blasted.

Kane’s work is an ongoing influence in British theater and continues to be acclaimed by an ever-increasing number of British dramatists and by critics and audiences in continental Europe. Her body of work follows an ever-narrowing path, from the gory conflicts of civil war in Blasted to the destruction of the family in Phaedra’s Love, into the fragmentation of the self in Crave and further into a singular mind in 4.48 Psychosis, always chipping away at the naturalistic boundaries of modern theater and charting a lonely internal world of darkness, violation, misuse of power, and frequently, a reaching out for love.

Blasted

Kane’s first professional production was both the most maligned and acclaimed of her short career. Blasted, which was the playwright’s response to the war and human atrocities taking place in Bosnia in the early 1990’s, opens with the young, mentally handicapped Cate and middle-age tabloid journalist Ian, who enter a hotel room in Leeds, England. The setting immediately suggests the type of relationship piece with which audiences are comfortable, but from the opening bit of dialogue, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary bedroom drama. Ian is obnoxious and perhaps amoral, but Kane does not provide a moral framework to comfort either Cate or the audience, and the rape of Cate by Ian, coupled with the later appearance of a soldier who joins them from a world fraught with its own terrors, only adds to the disturbing and violent world in which the characters find themselves trapped.

The play’s structure also fueled the audience’s discomfort. Although the first half of Blasted provides a naturalistic setting, the second half flouts theatrical convention with its eerie, nightmarish qualities and symbolism, ending with the destruction of all Ian holds dear, with the character reduced to a base shadow of what he once had been. The symbolism is more evocative of King Lear as he roams the heath facing his own self-imposed destruction than of the confines of most contemporary drama.

Phaedra’s Love

Kane was commissioned by London’s Gate Theatre to write her next play and wrote Phaedra’s Love, a contemporary retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra and her fatal love for Hippolytus, her spoiled stepson. Kane also directed the piece, which was the first of her plays to deal explicitly with the desire for love—a theme that runs throughout the remainder of her work. Phaedra’s Love contains some of Kane’s wittiest dialogue, set against the bleak backdrop of a situation fraught with taboos and impossible desires.

Phaedra, wife of Theseus, has fallen in love with her stepson, the prince Hippolytus, who is threatened by the ideas of real love and emotion. His sex drive, which would normally draw him into relationships with others, is abhorrent to him, and the desire of his stepmother to submit herself sexually to him is therefore an unbearable threat, leading to the violent destruction of the royal family.

Cleansed

Dealing with drug abuse, amputation, and sex changes, Cleansed is considered the bleakest of Kane’s plays—and the most difficult to stage, due in part to the inclusion in the cast of a family of rats. Set in a bizarre university/concentration camp under the rule of brutal Tinker, a drug dealer and doctor, the play reveals an ongoing attempt by Kane to find new structures to fit the context of her writing and offers stripped-down narrative and dialogue in an attempt to discover the limits of love. When the lead actress was injured, Kane herself took on the role for the final performances.

Crave

Expanding a technique she had used less successfully in her first play, Sick, which she wrote as a student and which debuted after Blasted, Kane’s characters in Crave are four voices, known only as A, B, M, and C. As in Sick, each character’s part in the play is essentially a monologue, but here the monologues are combined so the voices speak together, four bodies making up one life. These voices speak seemingly without a defined narrative, describing their loves and losses as each character moves emotionally into the boundaries of the next.

Influenced by music throughout her life, Kane uses the characters almost as a symphony, with each monologue rendered meaningless without the concurrent monologues of the others, as the individual voices move into a combined but fragmented whole.

4.48 Psychosis

Kane awoke at 4:48 on many mornings during her periods of depression and felt she found clarity in the predawn hours, paradoxically at a time when, according to her research for the play, the psychotic delusion is strongest. Here Kane wrote with dry humor and a bleak outlook, still churning out lines of poetry about the fragmentation and final despair of the self, a prisoner by now of her own mental illness but determined to share her last weeks and months with an audience. In attempting to give voice to a mostly silent condition, Kane explores the depths of her own despair and emerges with a witty and eerie artistic success, though early audiences and critics understandably found it difficult to separate the finished product from the recent death of its author.

Bibliography

Dromgoole, Dominic. The Full Room. London: Methuen, 2001. A broad overview of how the dramatic playwrights of the 1990’s have shaped the New British Theatre movement. Along with Kane, playwrights discussed include Conor MacPherson, Jonathan Harvey, Philip Ridley, Sebastian Barry, and Naomi Wallace.

Greig, David. Introduction to Sarah Kane: The Complete Plays, by Sarah Kane. London: Methuen Press, 2001. Scottish playwright and editor David Greig provides an excellent introduction to Kane’s body of work, including an insightful assessment on the difficulties in staging a Kane play.

Saunders, Graham. Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002. The first volume devoted to Kane’s life and works. Contains analyses of her various works, interviews with producers and directors who worked with Kane, and a thoughtful preface by prolific British playwright Edward Bond.

Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. This overview of young British playwrights has thirty-two pages on Kane, including a biography and a critical breakdown of her plays.

Tushingham, David. Live 3: Critical Mass. London: Methuen Press, 2001. An introduction to playwrights who are reshaping the British theater. Kane is represented by Blasted; other playwrights represented are Patrick Marber, Philip Ridley, and Jonathan Harvey.