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Sarah Kane Complete Plays

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Even by her own standards, Sarah Kane’s 1998 play is an unusually punishing experience that posits a world in which licensed cruelty tests love to its limits. But while it has an undeniably serious purpose and is imaginatively staged by Katie Mitchell, I find its escalating horrors have a sense-numbing effect that outweighs its redemptive lyricism. Psychosis, a Royal Opera House production, is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, from 24 to 28 May. Box office: 020-8741 6850. Kane sent a draft of the script to the playwright Edward Bond. In a letter that Bond sent to Kane in September 1997, he wrote how he suspected that " Cleansed is even more powerful than [ Blasted] because it takes any two or three minutes of Blasted and subjects them to great pressure." [6] In the script of Crave Kane does not provide context, stage directions or clear descriptions of the play's four characters: A, B, C, and M.

Reviewing the first production of Cleansed, the critic John Peter wrote about the nightmarish quality of the play: Theatrically, Cleansed is a daring challenge. It's physicalisation of lyrical imagery raises the same question that dogs Kane's first three plays: how do-able are they? […] This is a question that goes to the heart of Kane's writing. Every one of her plays asks the director to make radical staging decisions […] In a Kane play the author makes demands but she does not make solutions. Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, it was possible to represent it. By demanding an interventionist and radical approach from her directors she was forcing them to go the limits of their theatrical imagination, forcing them into poetic and expressionistic solutions. […] With Cleansed, Kane wrote a play which demanded that its staging be as poetic as its writing." [20] Kane herself and scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, have identified some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. [1] The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility of drama termed " in-yer-face theatre". Sierz originally called Kane "the quintessential in-yer-face writer of the [1990s]" [2] but later remarked in 2009 that although he initially "thought she was very typical of the new writing of the middle 1990s. The further we get away from that in time, the more un-typical she seems to be". [3]

Performing a Sarah Kane Play

Actor Daniel Evans said that Kane "learnt the lines and went on with almost no rehearsal – and she blew us all away. She was fearless and connected. The performance required her to dance, to fly, to remove all her clothes – and she did it without blinking." [23] He also said "She was brilliant – extraordinary and above all raw. I always said that she made us look like actors, because she was so raw. She wasn't acting in the accepted sense of that term and any acting next door to that just seems like huge acting." [24] Evans has also stated that "I consider that one of the great privileges of my life having acted alongside her as well as being in her plays." [25] The court heard that Ms Kane, from Brixton, south London, was "hailed as the young playwright of her generation" and had enjoyed "immense success at a very young age". Despite this, she had a long history of severe depression and in the two years before her death had been in and out of medical care and was taking anti-depressant drugs. By her following play, Crave, Kane is dealing in total desperation and the rawest of unrequited love. Stylistically, it's a departure: Her work has now dissolved into nameless characters and nonlinear poetry; the theme of the pain of love is all-encompassing, with the characters also being haunted by rape, incest, anorexia, mental illness, and other very real demons. But the actors deserve equal credit for the depth, variety and energy they give to their performances. Smyth's delivery of the show's only long speech was outstanding. Despite depression, heartbreak, and other darkness, Kane shook up the art form like no one had for years. She heralded a new age of young writers after a lengthy period of few new works being put on in mainstream theater. She had a true vision of what theater should be—hating the idea of theater that trivialized itself as a pastime for the middle classes. When the idea arose in interviews that her work gave no answers, she replied, "For me, the job of an artist is someone who asks questions, and the politician is someone who pretends to know the answers."

As the news spread around the world, it became obvious that her life and work were being processed into the great Romantic legend of the tortured suicidal artist - the same eternally fascinating myth that had swept Germany after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Although Sarah would have had some sympathy with this fascination - she was drawn to the music of Joy Division and their suicidal singer Ian Curtis - the re-reading of her own life and work as a prelude to the final act does little to honour the complexity of the person I knew or the richness of her writing. Kane's crime? Writing a play so adventurous—not just in form, but content, too—that it puzzled and disgusted the people sent to review it. As she pointed out, "a play about a middle-aged male journalist who rapes a young woman and is raped and mutilated himself can't have endeared [her] to a theater full of middle-aged male critics." a b c d e f g h Saunders, Graham (2002). Love me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.224. ISBN 0-7190-5956-9. The playwright Edward Bond knew Kane personally and had a correspondence with her. Bond has referred to Kane's suicide in various essays he has written about theatre. In an essay from 1999 (revised in 2000) Bond wrote "Sarah Kane had to confront the implacable. You can postpone the confrontation only when you are certain that at some time it will take place. Otherwise it will slip away. Everything Sarah Kane did had authority. If she thought that perhaps the confrontation could not take place in our theatre, because it was losing the understanding and the means – she could not risk waiting. Instead she staged it elsewhere. Her means to confront the implacable are death, a lavatory and shoelaces. They are her comment on the meaningless of our theatre and our lives, and on our own false gods." A spokesman for King's College hospital said a review panel had investigated the circumstances surrounding Ms Kane's death. It had recommended that procedures relating to the risk assessment of patients be formalised to improve communication between medical staff.Sarah Kane's brother and executor of her estate, Simon Kane, in 2005 remarked that "overseas many, many people think that Cleansed is Sarah's best play." [3] Synopsis [ edit ]

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