Sarah Kane

1971–1999 · British

In-yer-face theatre

Sarah Kane wrote five plays and one short film before her death at twenty-eight, and changed the direction of British theatre in doing so. Her debut caused a tabloid scandal for its rape, cannibalism and eye-gouging, but the work moved steadily away from event and towards pure voice, ending with a text that has no characters, no setting and no stage directions at all. She is now among the most performed British playwrights in Europe.

How to spot them

▸Five plays only, all first staged at the Royal Court
▸The 1995 debut that a Daily Mail critic called a disgusting feast of filth
▸The label 'in-yer-face theatre', popularised by the critic Aleks Sierz
▸Later works abandon character and plot for unattributed voices
▸Died by suicide in February 1999, aged 28

Key works

A dying tabloid journalist and a young woman share a Leeds hotel room; a soldier arrives, and a civil war comes through the wall with a mortar shell (1995)

Blasted — the Royal Court debut that drew a tabloid firestorm, defended by Harold Pinter and Edward Bond.

A modern retelling of a Greek queen's desire for her stepson, in which the prince is obese, depressed and playing with toys (1996)

Phaedra's Love — her only commission outside the Royal Court, written and directed at the Gate.

Lovers in a university turned punishment camp are mutilated by a doctor called Tinker (1998)

Cleansed — its stage directions (rats carrying off severed limbs, sunflowers bursting through the floor) were thought unstageable.

Four voices called C, M, B and A, with no stage directions and no named characters, premiered at Edinburgh under an invented name (1998)

Crave — written as 'Marie Kelvedon', a pseudonym from her middle name and the Essex village she grew up in.

A text with no characters and no setting, its numbers falling down the page, first staged a year and a half after its author's death (2000)

4.48 Psychosis — premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs in June 2000, directed by James Macdonald.

A ten-minute film for Channel 4 about a skinhead and his black neighbour — her only screenplay (1997)

Skin, directed by Vincent O'Connell.

Key ideas

Violence on stage not as shock but as the private cruelty of love made literal and public
The war abroad and the rape in a hotel room shown as the same event
A progressive stripping away of theatrical furniture: character, setting, direction, finally voice alone
Form derived from poetry and music rather than from naturalistic dialogue

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Brentwood, Essex, on 3 February 1971 and brought up in Kelvedon Hatch
•Read drama at Bristol University and took an MA in playwriting at Birmingham under David Edgar
•Blasted opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1995 to headlines about depravity
•Jack Tinker's Daily Mail review called it 'this disgusting feast of filth'
•Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill publicly defended the play
•Wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon so it could be judged without her reputation attached
•Died by suicide at King's College Hospital, London, on 20 February 1999, aged 28
•4.48 Psychosis was staged posthumously in June 2000 and has been widely read as a suicide note

Drill it — 7 cards

1 / 7new card

Sources

Aleks Sierz — In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today
David Greig — Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (introduction)