SARAH KANE, PLAIN AND TALL.

I'm currently working my way through The Complete Works Sarah Kane, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. These are some of the most arresting plays I've read in a long, long time. I hope this isn't yet another thing that should go into the asshole file, but a lot of her writing seems really campy to me. Nicole wrote about this on her blog yesterday after I joked about it in a tweet. Is Sarah Kane camp?

I don't mean it in any derogatory way. Camp is pretty much my life. I love the late, great Divine more than some of my own relatives. But I feel a deep connection with Kane's work too. I write comedies (kind of) but I can't help feeling like I owe Kane a debt for sheer outrageousness. I love (most of) these plays. I just mean that the plays are so exaggerated. Kane really turned up the grotesque to 11 in such a way that... well... makes me laugh. I can't help but wonder; did Sarah Kane have a better sense of humor than we give her credit for?

Before you send me nasty comments, let me qualify by saying that I think this are beautiful, arresting, troubling plays. I just also think they're a little campy too.

As a footnate, my idea of heaven is now a production of Blasted with Divine magically playing both Cate and Ian like she played both Dawn and Earl in Female Trouble.

Comments

[Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist !]

she had psychiatric problems and hung herself in a mental hospital room. I never knew her, but my mentor in London went to school with her.

she was definitely one of the most interesting playwrights. she felt hurt and upset by all the hate and attacks she got from London papers after her play premiered Royal Court in 1995. I think I read somewhere this week that her plays are more popular in Germany than the UK. I wonder why.

[isaac]

josh,

thank you for writing a post that makes liking kane's work in any way understandable to me.
the grotesquerie is so over the top that, to me, her plays read basically like the plays of David Cho, so to me when people take it totally at face value, i find it kind of ridiculous.

Or to put it another way: if she was instead of being as dark as she is, the exact same level, but wrote flat out straight up comedies, eveyrone would think her work is bullshit.

[Josh]

Deaf, have your read some of those reviews? Ouch!

I read that article about Germany as well. Interesting.

I fucking love some of her work but, in general, I think some people only like it because she's dead. Because seemingly nobody liked it when she was actually alive.

That said, I wouldn't have heard of it if she were still alive, so there's that.

[Josh]

Isaac, who is David Cho? If he is the comedic version of Sarah Kane then I MUST know his work immediately.

I was worried that I was going to get roasted for saying that Kane's work seemed campy. I don't know what her intentions were, but to me the over-the-top violence seems ridiculous.

[isaac]

I now realize I got his name wrong. I apologize. His name was actually Seung Hui Cho . I was confused. He's the guy who committed the school shooting at Virginia Tech. He wrote two plays before hand that read basically like Sarah Kane.

[Nicole]

A dark comedic vein definitely runs throughout Kane's plays. The early lovers' banter between Carl and Rod in cleansed is at once dark and serious,but also true to life and funny. I've never seen the play staged, but in reading, the rats gnawing on and carrying off severed limbs strikes me as disgustingly funny, if that makes any sense? The play also has moments of incredible beauty...thinking of the sprouting flowers.

I know bio-criticism went out of fashion long ago, and I'm also no psychiatrist, but reading Cleansed heightens my sense of Kane's sense of societal persecution because of her sexual orientation. Cleansed is very heavy, also very courageous, in its taking on the transgender issue. Whether she was a lesbian, or (wanted to be) trans or whatever, this play in particular suggests just how deeply troubled she was by gender identity issues.

PS. Josh, the exchange I speak of between Rod and Carl made me think a bit of your play, A Super Shiny Precious Thing.

[Nicole]

Also, as Isaac and I have both discussed on our blogs, bad reviews have only so much significance. If she wrote bad plays, uninteresting plays, unmemorable plays, I don't think a suicide would be enough to keep her work in our conversation and on the world's stages more than a decade later. Her work rests on its own merits.

[Josh]

Nicole, I just reread my comment to deaf, which was pretty crass. Sorry. I only meant that it was interesting how critics hated her almost across the boards and now that she's dead she's become one of the most important writers of the last couple of decades. Van Gogh syndrome, you know...

[George Hunka]

To be fair to Kane, and to separate the myth from the truth, during her lifetime Kane's admirers included Edward Bond, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, not to mention Mark Ravenhill and critics like Aleks Sierz, Benedict Nightengale and (eventually) Michael Billington. On this side of the Atlantic, Ken Urban and ADs like Sarah Benson remain committed to her talent. I wouldn't mind admirers like that myself.

Both before and after her death she has had her loud, vociferous detractors, but the original reaction to her work was not a monolithic dismissal. Since then her reputation has grown -- and sure, her suicide has had some impact on the way she's perceived (mainly by those who haven't read or seen the plays). Like Nicole, I believe that Kane's work rests on its own merits. Now, those merits are open to debate. Since her death, in fact, many critics have pointed out that the lionization of her work has blinded many to its imperfections. As Graham Saunders writes in "About Kane," his recent book on the playwright: "The theatre director Dominic Dromgoole and critic Aleks Sierz have ... addressed the shortsightedness of this lionization. They have pointed out that Kane's work is not immune from criticism and that the plays can be subject to self-indulgence and adolescent petulance, together with a lack of formal characterisation and a narrow obsessiveness in its range of subject matter." A fair cop, it seems to me. But he goes on: "Yet, accusations of self-indulgence can often be mistaken for a writer's uncompromising personal vision that in retrospect enables new ways of perceiving the world." Which is also true.

As Nicole also notes, her work remains of interest, and her reputation and influence growing, ten years after her death. Certainly that's reason enough to take her seriously and avoid easy dismissals of her plays.

[George Hunka]

And, by the way, I'm not sure what the reputation of her work in Germany has to do with it -- unless we're going to indulge in a little xenophobia.

[Josh]

George, thanks for the info. I guess I bought a lot of the myths.

But I hope you don' think I'm dismissing her. I'm being glib, sure, but I love these plays. I just think Sarah had a sense of humor that nobody gives her credit for.

[Josh]

George, Deaf only pointed out her popularity in Germany as a point of interest. It wasn't a judgment, just a "huh... wonder what that's about."

[George Hunka]

Oh, no, Josh, none of my comments were directed at any individual! And I agree -- Kane had an excellent sense of humor. There's an interview with her online at my blog here:

http://www.georgehunka.com/blog/index.cgi/2009/12/24#speaks_20091224

She's very funny personally, as well as in her work, something that the Soho Rep production of Blasted a few seasons ago brought out very well.

[George Hunka]

Don't mean to clog your blog, but I've written about Kane extensively here, if you (or anybody else) is interested:

http://www.georgehunka.com/blog/kane.html

[Jack Worthing]

- I've always loved the stage direction in CLEANSED where Rod (I think) tries to pick up his severed arms: 'He can't. He has no hands.' That's always been hilarious to me. And yes, a bit camp.

- Kane is more popular in Germany for the same reason that Bond is popular there. She nakedly trades in violence and its consequences. Her plays aren't very English. There's no reserve, there's little subtext, she doesn't really trade in class or sex, there's just figurative and literal blood everywhere. She asks how you go on after a bloodbath. No wonder the Germans like her.

- I admire a lot of the words, I admire her enormous bravery, and her formal experimentation, which I think she had a very good grasp of at a young age. But I agree with Dromgoole that much of her work is missing humanity. Life isn't all cruelty and fear. The best writers -- Chekhov, Beckett, early Bond -- recognize this. You get a little of that in BLASTED, but the other plays lack the ghost of something better, warmer, more compassionate. Those things have never existed, she says, and they never will. Ultimately it makes for characters who, for all their formal beauty, are less than whole people.

Which is the sad point, I guess. She was a brave and talented young woman, and her work has a lot to teach us. But some peg her as a major writer with a fully realized and refined vision. This is a shame for a lot of reasons, but let's remember the most practical one: Sarah was 27. She knew it. She was trying to grow. I think she'd find her cult of personality to be hilarious.

[Jack Worthing]

I should say Rod tries to pick up his severed HANDS. And the stage direction is 'He can't. He has no hands.' Funnier that way.