'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s

BBC News

6 days ago

Thirty years ago, the late British writer's debut play Blasted was castigated as a "feast of filth". Now though, revivals of her work are showing she was ahead of her time.
Blasted, the 1995 debut play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane, begins with a couple, Ian and Cate, entering a Leeds hotel room. Ian, a tabloid journalist, is unimpressed, and in the following moments he brandishes a revolver, utters a stream of racist slurs, and commits acts of sexual violence against Cate. It is easy to fixate on these details which set the tone for a play that only gets more harrowing, building to a truly sickening final scene.
Warning: This article contains content that some may find disturbing or upsetting
With its staging at London's Royal Court Upstairs, Blasted became the biggest theatrical cause célèbre in the UK for decades – and reviewers were scathing. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph called it a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and even suggested that Kane was mad. Jack Tinker from the Daily Mail's review was headed "This Disgusting Feast of Filth". Many of the press viewed Blasted as a grotesque waste of taxpayers' money, mindlessly squandered by a 23-year-old enfant terrible who was – shockingly – female.
The critical tide later turned, with some of those reviewers apologising to Kane for misunderstanding Blasted. Thirty years on, Kane is part of the theatrical canon – a production of 4.48 Psychosis, the final play she wrote before taking her own life aged 28, is currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, while a revival of her 1998 work Cleansed is being staged by director Rebecca Frecknall at North London's Almeida Theatre next year. While revivals of Kane's plays are not universally appreciated, they always invite new responses and revelations in relation to contemporary conflict and oppression. But at the core of each work is an abstracted meditation on love. "No one play is the same as the other," Graham Saunders, Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC. "It would be difficult to believe that the writer of Blasted was the same person who wrote 4.48 Psychosis".
Alongside playwrights including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, Kane was part of a movement in British theatre in the 1990s often described as "in-yer-face", a phrase defined in the New Oxford English Dictionary as "blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid". Yet that is what many of the critics who saw Blasted attempted to do – to run away from the confrontational aspect of the play by burying it with outrage. Midway through, a third character enters the play: a soldier who details war crimes he has witnessed, confronting the repulsive Ian with the realities of conflict. Kane does not merely gesture towards the then-contemporary horrors of the Balkans War, but rips the stage open and has them erupt into the theatre itself. Blasted removes the temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and trauma, forcing us to face the very worst of humanity.
Kane's route to notoriety
The daughter of a journalist, Kane was born in 1971 in Brentwood, Essex, and rejected her Christian suburban upbringing from the age of 17. In Ravenhill's obituary of Kane upon her death in 1999, he quotes her saying: "There is an attitude that certain things could not happen here. Yet there's the same amount of abuse and corruption in Essex as anywhere else, and that's what I want to blow open". She drew influences from her musical loves (including Joy Division, Pixies, and Radiohead), modern playwrights, (especially Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter), and classical drama. The latter influence was brought to the fore in Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, first performed at London's Gate theatre in 1996. Taking a story already given stage treatments by Seneca, Euripides, and Jean Racine, Kane's attention moves to Phaedra's stepson, Hippolytus, and dissects the taboos of incestuous desire.
Phaedra's Love ends with an extreme act of mutilation. It is no wonder that Kane's plays are infrequently performed, not only for their challenging subjects, but because they pose enormous staging difficulties. Fellow writer and friend David Greig recalled that Kane said to him that the reason why she featured unstageable images in her plays was because "whatever they do they're going to have to do something interesting". In Cleansed, which premiered at the Royal Court Downstairs in 1998, Kane jokingly decided to "punish" the director, James Macdonald, for making her do a rewrite. After finding a dead rat in her cutlery drawer, Kane included the direction: "The rats carry Carl's feet away." Carl experiences some of Kane's most shocking violence, being subject to the most extreme of torture from a man called Tinker – the surname of the aforementioned Daily Mail journalist who whipped up the lambasting of Blasted in 1995. During the run of Katie Mitchell's staging of Cleansed at London's National Theatre in 2016, a press furore rose again as audience members fainted and walked out at the play's horror.
But to focus on the violence is to miss the meaning of Kane's works. Cleansed is set in a university where Tinker leads an institution designed to rid society of its undesirables, while a group of inmates attempt to save themselves through love. Kane was inspired by A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes to compare extreme torture to the agony of being in love. Like Barthes, Kane finds the two experiences share the situation of panic, wherein there is no possibility of return. To fall in love is to be lost, forever. Cleansed is graphic, but it is heartachingly beautiful – the lovers Graham and Grace dance together, with her emulating him, until "she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time". A sunflower bursts through the floor. At another point a field of daffodils covers the entire stage. Light and beauty frequently shine through the most pitiless scenes.
Ravenhill recalled that upon telling Kane that he thought Cleansed was brilliant, she smiled and replied, "Yeah, well, I'm in love". A couple of months later, when she directed Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the Gate, Kane removed the possibility of redemption for any of the characters. "Yeah, well, I fell out of love," Kane explained. As explored in her final two plays, 1998's Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, Kane had fallen out with the idea of love itself. She wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon to detach herself from the associations of her name, allowing her to explore a free-flowing poetic narrative through the voices of four characters called C, M, B, and A. The characters mostly exchange single lines, until A bursts into a long monologue about all the little romantic things she wants to do with her lover. The stream of consciousness twists and turns between anger and love in the manner which defines Kane's worldview.
Her death and legacy
Later, A says, "Death is my lover and he wants to move in". This chimes with the emotions of her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, which explores a state of mind "at 4.48 / when desperation visits". The work comprises 24 sections, without directions or indication of setting, not even of how many actors should perform it. The revival currently running is directed, as it was first time around, by Macdonald, and features the three original actors: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. "It's a play about being a human being," Potter says. "The circumstances might have to do with depression and suicidal despair and psychosis. But the journey is a recognisable, human journey – the search for connection and the longing is universal." Evans reflects that, while Kane took the play form to a different place, "it's almost like we haven't gone beyond that yet – no one has discovered what the next stage is." McInnes adds: "Hopefully this production might have helped inspire new writers to come forward."
More like this:• The Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint• Why Requiem for a Dream is still so divisive• Why Gen Z is nostalgia about 'indie sleaze'
The Guardian critic Michael Billington dubbed it "a 75-minute suicide note" in his 2000 review. Kane struggled with severe depression and tried to kill herself once before she did so in 1999. But while 4.48 Psychosis might be its artist's cri de coeur, it is as reductive to call it a suicide note as it is to say the same of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems. After her death, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon said: "I don't think she was depressed, I think it was deeper than that. I think she felt something more like existential despair which is what makes many artists tick." However, in a letter to the Guardian, playwright Anthony Neilson retorted that, "No one in despair 'ticks'", and that, "Truth didn't kill her, lies did: the lies of worthlessness and futility whispered by an afflicted brain."
Far more important in terms of Kane's legacy is to focus on the ways in which she played with theatrical form. Reflecting on the power of Kane's work today, Graham Saunders observes that they "respond to #MeToo and issues of coercive control and sexual violence in ways that weren't even recognised or acknowledged when they were first written". Other themes which also come through strongly now include mental health, which is a subject now discussed more openly than when Kane was alive, and body and gender dysmorphia.
Imagery recurs in Kane's poetic writing. The emergent flowers in Cleansed recall the end of the first scene of Blasted. Ian and Cate discuss why she came to the hotel with him, ending with him saying, "I love you", and her saying, "I don't love you". Ian picks up a bouquet of flowers and holds them out to Cate. At the start of the second scene the flowers are ripped apart and scattered around the room. Love and beauty have never been shown to be more fragile than in the fraught theatre of Sarah Kane.
4.48 Psychosis is at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 27 July; Cleansed is at London's Almeida Theatre from 21 July until 22 August 2026.
* Details of organisations offering information and support for anyone affected by mental health issues and sexual abuse or violence are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.
--
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.