Re: RAT Sarah Kane

["Allison Narver" <anarver@chesnutt.com>]

This is incredibly sad.  Thanks for posting it.
Allison
-----Original Message-----
From: KSTUARTXX@aol.com <KSTUARTXX@aol.com>
To: rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com <rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com>
Date: Friday, February 26, 1999 2:35 AM
Subject: RAT Sarah Kane


>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
>
>
>