All her work is intense and breathtakingly strong, but with a curt language that is almost lyrical, and in some plays even loving and hopeful. Her position as one of Britain's greatest writers of the century is secure; alas she committed suicide at the age of 27.

Sarah Kane was born in Essex on 3 February 1971, growing up in Kelvedon Hatch; she studied drama at Bristol University, and did her MA at Birmingham. She directed a number of plays at school and university, but the only professional directing she did was of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the Gate Theatre (Notting Hill) in 1997. Her Crave was written for the Edinburgh Festival, and she used the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon.

She was much better received on the Continent than in Britain, and achieved almost instant classic status. Her plays are produced all over Europe in many languages. The Royal Court has at last mounted new productions of her work here. The British critics who were coruscatingly dismissive of Blasted couldn't keep it up as she repeatedly came up with extraordinarily inventive and deeply-felt experiments, reaching back to classic drama of the past even as she created new form; and her death only added to the aura of sacred monster around her, rendering her now almost impervious to criticism.

One thing I find essential, in reading her playscripts: every single last word and direction is meant precisely. If she repeats a word seven times, you say it seven times, not six, not eight, definitely not skipping over it, even if you're just reading it to yourself in your head. It's essential for the timing. She is reported to have said, in watching rehearsals of one of her plays, "If they don't do that fucking comma properly, I'm going to kill them".

Another thing that constantly surprises me when I re-read her, at the most awful parts of the drama, is how funny she is: very, very black humour, and often self-deprecating, but amazingly mordant and clever. You scold yourself for being shocked and laughing, because it's about anal rape or mutilation or suicide or something -- yet she makes you gasp in appreciation.

She was happy, briefly, or at least as happy as her life had ever let her be, because she was in love, while she was writing Cleansed. This explains why despite all the horror in it, it somehow has a brighter feel, as if there might be hope at the end. It didn't last. The final abstract, scattered 4.48 Psychosis is a continual cry of anger, pain, and hopelessness in her depression. She took pills again, was hospitalised again, and in there, on 20 February 1999, hanged herself, having been unable to promise her father she would not try again.

Blasted

It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 12 January 1995, starring Kate Ashfield, Pip Donaghy, and Dermot Kerrigan.

The above first paragraph was my E1 summary of the plot, and gives you an idea of why the critics all hated it. As Sarah Kane came up with more brilliant and ground-breaking plays, and of course after her suicide, they had to eat their words. Blasted was her first and is the most conventionally representational of her plays -- the only impossible thing is how suddenly Leeds turns into something like Bosnia -- compared to the later dream-like experiments, but is in no way an unformed or less polished work. Each of hers was unique, each reflects on the others.

There are great longueurs through it. They enter the hotel room, Ian goes off to run a bath, Cate looks around and bounces on the bed, but doesn't say anything until he comes back. Several times in the course of it she spins out these wonderful blank spaces in the action, slowing down the audience's expectation, getting you psyched up for concentration and repetition. I was gobsmacked when this started happening. I loved it. A completely different dimension of theatrical time: make 'em wait!

Ian taunts Cate for her brother being a spaz. He taunts her for her stutter, her uselessness and helplessness, and she is a simple loving creature who thinks well of people but gets confused and angry about this. She likes Ian, there is some sexual history between them from when she was too young, and now she's trying to stand on her own two feet, be friends, refuse the sexual. Between scenes he forces himself on her, there is blood, it's horrifying, but at the same time it seems normal for their debauched relationship.

Ian's swilling down the booze and the fags: his lungs and liver are going, and it's only a matter of a short time to see which will kill him first. He doesn't care. He boasts, though he's a reporter, of also being some kind of shadowy secret agent, a dispenser of death, a killer. But when the real thing arrives...

The third character is known only as The Soldier. He is some kind of undefined foreigner, a wop or wog, one of the scum Ian contemptuously dismisses perhaps, when they're merely hotel servants, or some outsider, some wrecked relic of foreign wars his readers don't care about. His stories are about tits and adultery and schoolgirls and vicars, not real people dying and being raped and having their lives destroyed. The Soldier brings home what that's like. The Soldier is horrible, vicious, vulgar, callous, sick, and blackly funny. No nobility here, no elevation, no redemption by suffering.

Cate It's wrong to kill yourself.
Ian No it's not.
Cate God wouldn't like it.
Ian There isn't one.
Cate How do you know?
Ian No God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No fucking nothing.

Cleansed

It is set in some kind of institution, part of a university set aside as a sanatorium for mental patients or drug offenders, but this is not completely clear. It also partly seems like a dream sequence, a drug-induced hallucination, or a future totalitarian regime ridding itself of undesirables. The head of the institution is Tinker, a drug dealer rather than a doctor, who rules over it calmly meting out torture, brutal death, and pseudo-medical experimentation. (Tinker is, incidentally, named after a leading theatre critic for a tabloid, who was one of the most vociferous in panning Sarah Kane's earlier work.)

It opens with Tinker heating up some "smack" for Graham, a drug addict. As Graham searches for a vein, Tinker grabs him and injects it into his eyeball. Later, after his death, Graham's sister Grace goes to the sanatorium looking for his effects. Tinker reluctantly admits he has given Graham's clothes to Robin, a simple-minded 19-year-old boy.

The love between Grace and Graham, and their long yearning for each other, lead her to commit herself to the institution and put on his clothes and adopt his voice and mannerisms, and eventually they make love; while the hapless Robin spends the rest of the play in Grace's frock. Robin is an innocent, and often he and Graham speak together, the same thoughts, but Grace hears the different meanings. Robin's growing love for her (she tries teaching him to write) is rejected kindly. From the sidelines, Tinker watches bitterly.

Another strand is the love between Rod and Carl. The idealistic Carl pledges eternal fidelity, and Rod gently twits him for being too impassioned about it, but accepts his love for now. Tinker hates this love too, and sets about to break Carl with horrific tortures, involving the... ah... insertion of... Moving right along, when Carl screams out his betrayal to end the torture, he cuts out Carl's tongue. On stage this was a cartoon-like violence, Tinker dragging out a long pink rubber tongue and snipping it off with scissors. The sadistic degradation of Carl continues through the play: Carl hugs Rod to show his love, so Tinker borgs him, then cuts off his hands. Later Carl dances to show his joy, so off come the feet. Rats nibble on the severed bits. The rats were a very good effect on stage too.

There is more rape, beating, machine-gunning, stripping, masturbation, lobotomy; and finally two forced sex changes, because Tinker misunderstood what Grace wanted, and didn't understand about love.

Towards the end of the first run, Grace was injured (in an accident unrelated to the part), and Sarah Kane herself took over as Grace for a few nights. I made sure to see both versions.

Phaedra's Love

Crave

It is for four speakers, who do little but speak. They sit in a row, and only once or twice is there any action. A and B are male, C and M are female. It is a constant flow of cross-currents, mostly very clipped lines, with occasionally one speaker expounding at length. There are complex relationships of love and hate and history and violence between them, but it is not entirely clear how, or at least not clear to this reviewer.

If two were middle-aged and two were young you could read it as parents and children, love affairs from a generation ago and from now, but the ages aren't strongly marked and the relationships between the four speakers are much more labile. It is as if sometimes one man is speaking as a father, then as an abuser, then as a lover, sometimes to one woman and sometimes to the other. On re-reading the playscript I have once more came away with this confusion. yet this is not an imperfection in Sarah Kane's writing; she wrote this infinitely complex flow, knowing exactly what she was doing.

It is more like the interweaving abstract themes in a string quartet. You hear notes of lost youth, betrayal, pain, annihilation. I've been looking through it again wanting to slice out a single extract that illustrates its nature, but with such an unbroken weave it's almost impossible. Here's an arbitrary glimpse:

C If I die here I was murdered by daytime television.
A I lied for you and that is why I cannot love you.
M Do not demand,
A Do not entreat,
B Learn, learn, why can't I learn?
C They switch on my light every hour to check I'm still breathing.
B Again.
C I tell them sleep deprivation is a form of torture.
B Again and again.
M If you commit suicide you'll only have to come back go though it again.
B The same lesson, again and again.
A Thou shalt not kill thyself.
C Vanity, not sanity, will keep me intact.
M Do you ever hear voices?
B Only when they talk to me.
A Weary souls with dry mouths.
C I'm not ill, I just know that life is not worth living.
A I've lost my faith in honesty.
B Lost my faith in
M Forwards, upwards, inwards,
C Lost.

4.48 Psychosis

the rupture begins

I don't know where to look any more


Tired of crowd searching
   Telepathy
     and hope

Watch the stars
predict the past
   and change the world with a silver eclipse

The title refers to 4.48 a.m., the time in the morning when suicidal and psychotic thoughts are strongest, though both occasions in the play when that time is mentioned, it is as one of special enlightenment and clarity ("at 4.48 / the happy hour / when clarity visits"), and one of them seems to make reference to the point in C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair when the Prince, thought to be mad and dangerous at that time, is actually free of enchantment for that hour only.

The initial cast were Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter, and like most of Sarah Kane's plays it was directed by James Macdonald.