Sarah Kane
Mark Ravenhill (see previous posts) writes very thoughtfully about Sarah Kane, here.
I don’t think I would have had as much courage to stage Lost in Peru if it wasn’t for Kane’s work earlier.
Like Kane’s work, Lost In Peru draws its inspiration from events such as “the disappeared”, torture, Kosovo and the darket parts of humanity. I’ve not delved there so deeply since but I think I will at some point. It’s important and difficult, just like Kane’s work.
Ravenhill writes:
“…Kane’s work wasn’t just some outpouring of the soul. It was immensely crafted. She wrote the first draft of Blasted while studying in Birmingham. But, she told me one day in her basement flat in south London, that draft was very different. It was full of long, rich sentences, inspired by Howard Barker. When a friend suggested that a more edited form of language might be better, Sarah began retyping the play, working on her manual typewriter, each time refining, tightening, honing it. Yes, there was something of the obsessive artist about her. Yes, that retyping, over and over, had a compulsive drive. But it was that discipline that informed Blasted as much as the emotion at its core….”
“…It struck me that she was essentially a modernist – her enthusiasms were Beckett, TS Eliot; work that was flinty, imagistic, not immediately accessible. Whereas I would locate characters in a postmodern landscape of shiny surfaces under which pain was bubbling, Kane was placing her work in an essential, somehow more substantial, landscape. My artistic world was the claustrophobic bubble of high capitalism; Kane’s was a more brutally naked environment. The horrors of Auschwitz and Kosovo provided her with inspiration; mine came from the hollow world of the Big Mac and Disney World. I wrote on a laptop, Kane on a manual typewriter. We understood each other, but our visions were very different. We joked a lot at our first meeting. I teased her about her taste in indie music – she had a particular liking for the Pixies. I bought her several beers and, as she relaxed, her sardonic humour and ability to tell an amusing story came to the fore….”
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About me
I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.
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Recent Work
Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).
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Nakamitsu
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Yellow Gentlemen
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