angel reviewed Sarah Kane by Sarah Kane
Indispensable.
Despite her oeuvre consisting of a mere 5 stage plays and 1 screenplay, I still find something endless in Sarah Kane's body of work. It's an utterly remarkable character arc that brought forth the works themselves, for one. The young playwright who offended and appalled through her early works, just as much psychological dissection as a display of endless darkness and brutality and the mind's unraveling to make sense of it—and the nowhere-near-old-enough victim of that endless darkness giving a posthumous farewell to the stage in her final "play", a work so raw in its expression, so bare and so tormented that one reviewer asked simply, and many readers surely shared after, "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?"
It's not just the subject matter, either. Anyone aware of her final two plays will be aware of the abstract form she takes up. …
Despite her oeuvre consisting of a mere 5 stage plays and 1 screenplay, I still find something endless in Sarah Kane's body of work. It's an utterly remarkable character arc that brought forth the works themselves, for one. The young playwright who offended and appalled through her early works, just as much psychological dissection as a display of endless darkness and brutality and the mind's unraveling to make sense of it—and the nowhere-near-old-enough victim of that endless darkness giving a posthumous farewell to the stage in her final "play", a work so raw in its expression, so bare and so tormented that one reviewer asked simply, and many readers surely shared after, "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?"
It's not just the subject matter, either. Anyone aware of her final two plays will be aware of the abstract form she takes up. Her penultimate, Crave, involves four nameless characters, dialogue which seems to force themselves into meaning, rather than abiding by the logical flow of conversation. Through it seems an entire soul spilled onto the page, all areas of love, hate, joy, despair. Her final, 4.48 Psychosis, voids characters altogether, and stage performances are incredibly subject to their interpretation. Personally, the more one looks at both as "plays", the more confusion arises. I absorb them as I absorb a prose poem, and when all senses of convention disappear, her sheer breadth of expression comes to light.
Some artists who are also victims of suicide are defined by worlds far vaster than the final act. Kane's melancholy and her succumbing will be forever inseparable from her art. To read Kane is to confront uncovered corners of one's own psyche, to question the metaphorical martyrdom of art from the trenches of emotion, to parse through the fractured contents of a soul. Even still, Kane is a hard sell but she must be read. How many times do you think she heard that in her years?
I hope that, somewhere in the cosmos, she understands her prevailing power and influence even decades later. Darkness was her muse, but through it we see a vastness of humanity's many cores that few modern playwrights accomplish.