RAT Sarah Kane

[KSTUARTXX@aol.com]

I'm posting this about Sarah, not because   I think she was a great writer and
one who got to do things we don't get to do here in this silly country--  I
think her work should be read, and I want people to know about her.  

>From the obituaries page:

With Blasted, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on January
17, 1995, Sarah Kane, who has committed suicide aged 28, made the most
controversial theatre debut of recent times.

No play or playwight had attracted such outrage since Edward Bond dared to
show a baby being stoned to death in his 1965 play Saved. A three-hander,
set in a Leeds hotel room occupied by a tabloid journalist and his
girlfriend, who find their space invaded by a rampaging soldier, Blasted
included scenes of fellatio, frottage, micturition, defecation, homosexual
rape, eye gouging and cannibalism.

Critics were quick to condemn it as 'a feast of filth' although some were
brave enough to subsequently revise their opinion, noting that like Bond,
Kane's play was written in the bleached language of truth and poetry.

Kane wrote simply and starkly about the world she saw around her, a world in
which violence and love were deeply entwined, and hope and despair were
mirror images of each other. For her, Blasted was simply a play about
'fragility, survival and hope'.

Although her friends and her agent, Mel Kenyon, did as much as they could to
protect her from unwelcome attention, nothing could have prepared Kane for
the response to Blasted, which cast her as the bad girl of British theatre.
While the tabloids tried to hunt her down, she spent her nights quietly
watching her play at the Royal Court, a pale, thin, anonymous girl.

Ironically, Kane knew the territory well; she was a daughter of a Mirror
journalist. For a short time in her teens, she and her family became fervent
born-again Christians. Later, she rejected religion, but the violent,
apocalyptic, biblical imagery remained a feature of her work.

She was always a writer. At seven she penned her first short story about a
man who met a violent end and at school she directed productions of Chekhov
and Joan Littlewood's Oh, What A Lovely War. She got a first at Bristol
University, where she studied drama, and went on to do a master's degree on
the Birmingham University playwriting course. It was there she began writing
Blasted. In her short career, she was to have only three original plays
produced, but together with Phaedra's Love, an adaptation of Seneca,
produced at the Gate in 1996, it represents a body of work that is a mature
and vividly theatrical response to the pain of living.

Talking about Phaedra's Love, she declared it a play about love, faith and
depression. 'Through being very, very low comes an ability to live in the
moment because there isn't anything else. What do you do if you feel the
truth is behind you? Many people feel depression is about emptiness but
actually it's about being so full that everything cancels itself out. You
can't have faith without doubt, and what are you left with when you can't
have love without hate?'

The theme continued with Cleansed (Royal Court, May 1998), which was no less
violent than Blasted, and outraged a whole new set of critics with scenes
that included the injection of heroin into an eyeball, violent amputation
and suicide. But a play about the extremes of love had to be extreme itself;
it cost Kane a lot to write it and had taken her many years. 'There is an
enormous amount of depression in the play because I felt an enormous amount
of despair when writing it,' she said.

Crave, which opened at the Traverse in Edinburgh during last year's Fringe
Festival and subsequently transferred to the Royal Court, was a sudden
change of style. A virtuoso poem for four voices, styled as two parallel
conversations, it drew on The Wasteland and the Bible, and proved that Kane
could write with tender, playful, Beckettian brilliance.

The introversion of her work suggests that Kane might have been
self-obsessed and inward-looking. But those who knew her well say she was a
loyal and entertaining friend, who could be very good company. As
writer-in-residence at the theatre company Paines Plough, she worked
tirelessly and with enormous generosity with emerging writers.

When she died, she was under commission to a number of theatres and had a
new play soon to go into production for the Actors Touring Company. Like
Cleansed, it is inspired by Roland Barthes's assertion 'When one is in love,
one is in Dachau.' Like all her work it was about the catastrophe of love.
As a reluctant interviewee following the furore over Blasted, she told her
interrogator that Blasted was, for her, 'quite a peaceful play about hope.'
The pity is that she could find none for herself.

James Macdonald, associate director of the Royal Court, writes: I am sitting
on the stage of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan talking about Sarah Kane's work.
And I don't know she's dead. The main subject of the discussion is another
play, Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life, opening here today, a work Sarah
loved. Proper Kane irony.

Sarah did what no one else in her generation has so far managed to do: she
said the unsayable, in beautiful English and with witty, impossible stage
directions. In Cleansed, the second of her plays that I directed, her piece
de resistance was perhaps the family of rats which appeared on stage in a
late draft of the play. Apparently they were inspired by finding a dead rat
in the cutlery drawer of her kitchen. She told me later that she had created
them to punish me for making her rewrite. In fact, in rehearsals, Sarah was
impeccably open-minded, supportive and very witty. The only thing she would
get narked about was actors not observing her punctuation. 'If they don't do
that fucking comma properly, I'm going to kill them.'

She was also extremely generous about other writers' work and an inspiring
teacher of playwriting. She ran brilliant workshops in Bulgaria and Spain
with the Royal Court International Summer school. She also coped brilliantly
with all the sanctimonious nonsense that was written about her work, always
managing to laugh her way out of the hurt. I believe, above all, that she
was writing about the possibilities of love. And in our time of consensus
and artistic cowardice, no one else has done so with her courage and
imagination.

Michael Billington adds: One thing people in Britain didn't realise was the
extent of her fame throughout Europe. Cleansed has just been given an
apparently sensational production by Peter Zadek in Hamburg. Blasted has
been performed all over Europe. Kane's name was known in just about every
European capital. Wherever I went I found there was an extraordinary
curiosity about her work and what it said about contemporary Britain.

Sarah Kane, writer, born February 3, 1971; died February 20, 1999