Although her savagery attracted more attention than her tenderness, Kane's special talent lay in taking apart theatrical form. In her subsequent plays - Phaedra's Love ( 1996), Cleansed ( 1998) and Crave ( 1998) - Kane developed a characteristic mix of extreme emotional content and theatrical innovation.
The Daily Mail denounced the play as 'this disgusting feast of filth', the Sunday Telegraph fulminated against its 'gratuitous welter of carnage' and the Spectator called it 'a sordid little travesty of a play'.īut if Blasted shocked because of its explicit sex and violence, it was also disturbing because of its innovative structure: after a naturalistic first half, Kane exploded theatrical convention by making the second part richly symbolic and earily nightmarish. Kane's short career began in January 1995, with Blasted, a shocking play whose raw language and powerful images of rape, eye-gouging and cannibalism provoked critical outrage. Once again, here was a precocious but self-destructive young talent whose death changed the way we look at her work.
The case of Sarah Kane, the 28-year-old playwright who hanged herself on 20 February 1999, inevitably recalls Plath. 'There may be some people who kill themselves,' wrote Al Alvarez in The Savage God, his classic 1971 study of suicide, 'in order to achieve a calm and control they never find in life.' He went on to claim that for poet Sylvia Plath, a personal friend who'd committed suicide in 1963, it was a desperate way out of a corner she had boxed herself into. And check out The Literary Encyclopedia
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