5 - Sarah Kane: the ‘bad girl of our stage’?

Summary

Sarah Kane is the most controversial of playwrights to feature in this volume. She exploded on to London's Royal Court stage in January 1995 with her debut play Blasted that outraged theatre critics on account of its representations of a violent war, somewhere in Central Europe, but set in a hotel bedroom in Leeds. Exceptionally for a theatre production, the play featured on Newsnight and made tabloid headlines, with Daily Mail Jack Tinker's ‘utterly and entirely disgusted’ of ‘Tunbridge Wells’ voicing the view of a majority of critics. Blasted joined the ‘canon’ of the infamous – Howard Brenton's Romans in Britain and Edward Bond's Saved (which Kane much admired). The Court was widely criticised for staging Blasted and the judgement of its artistic director, Stephen Daldry, was called into question. Kane herself expressed ‘genuine surprise that so much media attention could be devoted to a play in a 65-seat theatre in the same week that thousands … died in a Japanese earthquake’, and that ‘a 15-year-old girl’ was ‘raped in a wood’.

The whole point of what is considered newsworthy, or not, and the way in which sensationalist reporting marginalises significant global events is thematically central to Blasted, though it was some time before reviewers were able to ‘see’ beyond their initial reactions to her theatre – reactions that were significantly modified in the wake of Kane's suicide in 1999, aged just twenty-seven years.