‘She plumbed our secret, shameful depths’: why are Sarah Kane’s plays still so shocking?
‘I was stunned it made people so angry’
Vicky Featherstone, former artistic director of the Royal Court, on Blasted.In the play, journalist Ian brings the much younger Cate back to his hotel room in Leeds and tries to seduce her. Then a soldier entersbrandishing a gun, triggering scenes of rape, violence and cannibalism.Premiered at the Royal Court, London, in 1995.
I first met Sarah when we were both at the Bush theatre. One day she said to me: “Oh my God, I’ve had a play accepted at the Royal Court!” I remember being shocked by the vile response to Blasted. When I went to see it myself, I was stunned that it had made people so angry. When you watch it and understand what she was writing about, you can see that there wasn’t another way the play could be. That’s what’s so extraordinary about Sarah’s writing.
The anger directed at the violence in her work showed a detachment from what we were seeing on the news, the war crimes we were doing nothing about. This is happening now. Famously, though, Sarah always talked about her plays being about love. When Cate comes back to Ian at the end of Blasted, it’s as an act of love. You believe you’re watching one thing – and then it slips, without any tangible logic, into something else.
Sarah used to say, and I think this is still the case, that people don’t know how to write about form in the theatre and that form should defy what we already know, surprising us in some way. Part of the vitriol towards her came from the fact that it was undefinable. She cared deeply about writers and felt such a responsibility to meet them. It’s one of the great tragedies that she will have no idea – and would have felt so thrilled by the fact – that her writing has influenced and affected people and that we’re still having conversations about it 25 years after her death.
‘Sometimes people laugh at the violence at the end’
Stefanie Reinsperger, of the Berliner Ensemble, on Phaedra’s Love which she currently stars in. The play, a radical take on Seneca’s Phaedra, is about the destructive relationship between Queen Phaedra and her sex-addicted stepson, Hippolytus.Premiered at the Gate theatre, London, 1996.
We stage Phaedra’s Love as a monologue and loop the rape scene. I play all the roles: first you see the perspective of Hippolytus, then Phaedra’s. I always like to use my body as an instrument, especially with Sarah ’s work. You need to discuss how to show the rape, how to make it as truthful as possible. So that was really challenging, finding a way to do that with just myself.
Sometimes people start laughing at the violence at the end, because it’s so absurd. Everyone in the audience is scared of me, because I like to interact with them. The first section is really physical and loud. Robert Borgmann, my director, said you have to imagine you’re jumping with your naked ass into the audience – it needs to be brutal. But after those first 20 minutes, then you just have the text, and the text is so beautiful and hard. What she’s doing is so intelligent, with all these ups and downs. That’s really rare.
I think about Sarah’s life a lot. It seems like there’s a revival of interest in her work because she was this female author writing about violence and love. I mean, look at our society right now. Those topics will never go away.