On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
Notes on Sarah Kane2005-2007
Ravenhill on KaneIf at right I illustrate this post with a book cover instead of a picture of Sarah Kane, I do so in an attempt to draw attention to her plays rather than her life, as Mark Ravenhill in the 12 October 2005 issue of the Guardian (UK) suggested we do.Kane's early death has created something of a myth around Kane as a contemporary "tortured artist" in the mold of Sylvia Plath or James Dean. Said Ravenhill:When a friend commits suicide, you're always going to feel angry with them. Any personal anger that I felt towards Sarah has long since gone, but I still feel a flash of anger that she could leave a fine body of work that can be appropriated as suicide art. Her work is far better than that.Now there's a chance to reappraise it, with revivals of Phaedra's Love and Cleansed. They're very different plays: Phaedra's Love a blast of sardonic nihilism, Cleansed a wave of almost operatic romance in the middle of a harsh world. Kane told me she wrote Cleansed when she was in love. Neither play was written by a person who knew she would commit suicide. Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.New Yorkers have been served both well and badly in terms of Kane's work in the past few years: we had two productions of her last "play," 4.48 Psychosis in 2005, one at St. Ann's Warehouse and another at BAM. This hallucinatory tone poem for voices is a fascinating work, but far from characteristic of Kane's plays, which are precise, Swiftian howls of pain and derision at the human animal. Rumor has it that Kane's estate is extraordinarily careful about the rights to her body of work. It's probably right, but at the same time it keeps audiences outside of London from experiencing these plays in a theater, for which they've been written.Allow me to call attention to Iain Fisher's Web site on Sarah Kane and Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre site, which both provide a great deal of additional information. I can also recommend "Love me or kill me": Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes by Graham Saunders.Sarah Kane's Complete Plays is available as a Methuen paperback."I do not feel a responsibility towards the audience or to other women. What I always do when I write is to think: how does the play affect myself? If you are very specific in what you try to achieve, and it affects yourself, then it may affect other people too. On the other hand, if you have a target group in mind, and you think, 'I want to affect the eleven million people watching ITV on Sunday,' then everything becomes bland. So for me I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That's why I try to please myself."Sarah KaneQuoted in Johan Thielemans, Rehearsing the Future