From the Archives: Sarah Kane and the Death of Theatrical Modernism, by Adam Lehrer
Adam got really into the late British playwright Sarah Kane at the beginning of Covid
Wherever the transgressive might still exist in our culture, it’s less and less so in the theater. There are exceptions, of course, but the great playwrights of today hardly occupy the avant-garde prestige that Brecht, Artaud, Genet, and Beckett once did. These artists are gone, and where their spirits reverberate and ghosts haunt is hard to tell. Have you seen a Broadway show recently? As a casual observer, it often appears like whatever shred of originality, danger and bold vision that still existed within the theater industry died with British playwright Sarah Kane, when she hanged herself just two days after overdosing on pills in 1999. She was only 28-years-old. No playwright since has gone so deep into troubling waters. She drowned in it, sadly, and very few have had the courage to dive in since.
Why does our theater feel so disconnected from both the modernist instinct and its radical history? Throughout the centuries, the theater was just as important an aspect of an avant-garde project as was literature, painting, or filmmaking. What changed? Though I’m merely speculating, I suspect that the theater has grown disconnected from that very history. It’s become isolated into its own industry, yielding an internal culture that functions as a kind of bubble. This is true for all art forms, to an extent, though you’re still more likely to find artists hanging out with musicians and filmmakers hanging out with sculptors than you are playwrights hanging out with any of them. I believe it was Frederic Jameson who defined the postmodern condition as one mired in generational inability to think historically. Kane’s greatest subversion then was the ability to think historically about her craft, creating a postmodern theater aware of its place in a lineage of transgressive theater and performance while still contextualizing it within an alienation specific to her generation.
Theater history is steeped in polarities of extremity: joy and pain, love and war, sex and death, tears and laughter. The Jacobean Tragedy, the Comedy of Errors, Theater of Absurdity. To revel in the theater is to bask in an excessive mirror of the world in all its contradictions and harsh realities. Since the Ancient Greeks, theater offered a place for artists, performers and audiences alike to luxuriate in degradation. I want death, and betrayal, and ghosts, and blood, and excess, and sadism, and ecstasy. Theater has died a slow dead as its lost touch with these multitudes. Theater has diminished because “it has broken away from the truly anarchic spirit that is the basis of all poetry,” to quote Artaud.
Anarchy, indeed, pulsated in Kane’s plays. The anarchic impulse in her work drove her right to the brink of sanity. Her theater assaulted viewers with the horror of existence, all while delighting in delirious laughter at the terror of all life and death.
Artaud wrote about 17th Century playwright John Ford’s play ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore as a work of theater that “disturbs the senses’ repose” that frees the repressed desires of the audience’s unconscious mind. “From the moment the curtain rises,” writes Artaud, “We see to our utter stupefaction a creature flung into an insolent vindication of incest, exerting all the vigor of his youthful consciousness to proclaim and justify it.”
Sarah Kane resurrected the debauched spirit of Jacobean theater for the “End of History.” When the Soviet Union met its violent end, and liberal capitalism was declared the victor of the century long ideological battle, Kane’s plays screamed “not so fast” in response to the arrogance of a generation that thought itself safe, smug in its assuredness that it had solved the problem of history.
Kane’s work demonstrated to her generation that it had gone soft in its affluence and, worse than that, had become ignorant of itself. Repressed of its primitive urges to kill and pillage. She demonstrated to Generation X that the world they inhabited and had come to feel a sense of false security in was as mired in sexual anxiety, rape, incest, murder, torture and death as was the world inhabited by the Jacobeans, from Ford to Marlowe to Shakespeare. The postmodern West wasn’t devoid of the savagery of previous epochs, but that savagery had just become repressed and safely disconnected from perceptual awareness in the face of the luxuries of a technologically enhanced society. Kane ripped the mask of sanity from the face of an entire generation. She used her own used form of classic theatrical tragedy, enhanced by the sensibilities of the late-20th Century postmodern avant-garde, to expose the underbelly of society’s forward progression: sadism, degradation, and bloodshed. Violence is history’s one immovable pillar, immune to technological or cultural progress, her plays suggest.
In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a theater director stages a production of a lost Jacobean tragedy that is essential to the novel’s narrative. When asked by the novel’s protagonist about an incomprehensible word spoken by one of his actors in the play, he dismisses the idea that any meaning can be extrapolated from a play’s text. “I’m the projector at the planetarium,” he says. “All the closed little universes visible in the circle of that stage are coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices as well.” Sarah Kane’s work utterly negated this notion: all her work’s physicality and intensity is alive and breathing within her text. She is among the very few playwrights whose work I still read for pleasure, just to envision her productions within my own mind’s eye.
Despite this, she left room for much directorial oversight and decisions in her writings. She left her stage directions opaque, albeit visceral, ensuring that each production of her every single one of her pieces becomes its own living organism. This lends productions of Kane’s work an enduringly unhinged and spontaneous quality. “Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, then it was possible to represent it,” writes Scottish dramatist and Kane colleague David Grieg.
Kane used brutal language within her plays to unlock the expressive potential of her directors by demanding they adhere to the cruelty of her texts. How to represent violence? How to represent rape? The greatest playwrights leave potentialities within texts that can unlock the collective unconscious. Kane’s writing is like a demon passed from writer to director, leaping from host to host and unleashing a maniacal vision within. To direct a Sarah Kane play is to become the body-without-organs, in a sense.
Definitions of “ugliness” are generally culturally relative. An object of beauty in an Amazonian tribe — an animal sacrifice, for instance — would likely be met with nausea by us. That said, Kane basks in what can only be understood as an eternal ugliness. She puts what we don’t discuss, nigh, what we even like to think about, right on stage, plainly visible. Often associated with what is arguably the last great 20th Century transgressive theater movement — “In-Yer-Face” theater was a label applied to nineties playwrights ranging from Kane to Mark Ravenhill to Anthony Neilson — her work still stands apart from her contemporaries for its singular horror and lingering impact on the psyche. Reading Kane or watching her plays has a similar effect as reading Lovecraft or watching a Beckett production for the first time: it radically redefines your understanding of the power of text.
Kane’s first play Blasted debuted in 1995. It follows a journalist named Ian, portrayed as virulently crass, misogynistic and homophobic, who brings a young girl named Cate to a hotel room against an unnamed but illustratively brutal war. Midway through the third act, a despairing soldier enters the hotel after Cate has left to fetch some food. The soldier recounts to Ian the atrocities he has committed: rape, murder and genocide. Every act of cruelty, the soldiers says, was perpetrated in the name of symbolic revenge for the soldier’s murdered girlfriend:
Three men and four women. Called the others. They held the men while I fucked the women. Youngest was 12. Didn’t cry. Just lay there. Turned her over and - then she cried. Made her lick me clean. Closed my eyes and thought of - shot her in the mouth. Brothers shouted. Hung them for the ceiling by the testicles.”
In disturbingly monotone delivery, the soldier and Ian then converse about the various evils they’ve committed. When Ian says he’s not gay, that he’s never been with a man, the solider cracks him over the head with a gun and rapes him, all while uncontrollably sobbing. At the end of the assault, he gouges out Ian’s eyes, and then kills himself. Kane’s text imbues much ambiguity into the soldier’s character; in many ways, he’s vastly less reprehensible than Ian. Most productions of the play depict the soldier anguished, far from at peace with what he’s done and what he does, to Ian. The soldier’s violence is given explanation, we can understand why he’s like this, to a degree. Ian’s sadism, however, feels callous and unearned.
This is the play’s stroke of genius. It’s only after Ian’s survival of the attack that he becomes anything resembling empathetic. When Cate arrives home, Cate she is bleeding from her vagina; the text implies that she has traded her sex for a meal with a pack of soldiers. She brings with her a baby that she has rescued, but the child unexplainably perishes – perhaps a metaphor for the impossibility of purity in this narrative. Towards the end of the play, Ian, desperately hungry, eats the remains of that child. In the play’s final moments, Cate feeds the broken Ian the food that she has traded her body for, a marked contrast from the contempt that she treated him with prior. It is because of the trauma that that Ian has endured that he becomes worthy of Cate’s tenderness. In the morally grey universe of Sarah Kane, he is saved. Trauma unites us all.
In a world gone cruel and brutal, cruelty loses its tenor. Can survival be cruel? Of course it can, it also is difficult to condemn. Cannibalism is shocking until you are the one starving to death.
When Blasted first premiered, her work was decimated by horrified British critics who wrote the young playwright off as a mere shock merchant. The Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, for instance, admitted after her death that his initial reaction to her work was impulsive and wrong, conceding that Kane was indeed a poet.
As is so often the case with transgressive artists, Kane’s work was defended by the renegades of her craft: Martin Crimp, Harold Pinter and Edward Bond were all early fans. What those British theater critics overlooked in Kane’s work, what petit-bourgeois liberal critics ALWAYS overlook in hyper-explicit art, is the the inherent moralism and humanism at the core of it. All of Kane’s plays are morality tales
Take Michel Houllebecq, for instance, who is often derided for his right wing politics, his misogyny, and his islamophobia (all true to one degree or another), but elementally asks one beautiful and profound question at the core of his literature: is love possible in late modernity?
Like Houellebecq, Kane was a romantic thrust into a cold, technological world. Despite all her plays’ rapes and defecations and cannibalisms, She managed to locate the redemptive forces that ennoble humanity in the face of a brutal and unforgiving world. Her play Phaedra’s Love - a modern rendition of Seneca’s Phaedra and the only direct homage to the classical tragedies that Kane implicitly referenced in all of her plays - was described by Kane as “her comedy.”
In it, Queen Phaedra, wife of King Theseus, falls in love with her lazy stepson Hippolytus. The plot is convoluted, as Greek tragedies are wont to be, but it involves an abundance of murder, suicide, and incest. Eventually, Hippolytus is jailed by Theseus after Phaedra has heartbrokenly killed herself herself after finding out that Strophe, Hippolytus’ step-sister and Theseus’ daughter, also slept with Hippolytus, implying in a note addressed to Strophe that Hippolytus raped her. At his hearing, Strophe tries to defend Hippolytus, claiming that he did not rape his step-mother. In response to Strophe’s defense of her brother, Theseus rapes and kills her, and Hipploytus is then torn to shreds and disemboweled by an angry mob. When Theseus realizes he’s murdered his own daughter, he laments:
God forgive me I didn’t know.
The haphazard nature of the text lends the otherwise brutal and ugly story an unnerving sentimentality. A tenderness, even. The play is like a romantic comedy: ill-fated lovers, driven by their desire and love, behaving incoherently and self-destructively. Kane’s work diagnoses the dual nature of the world: where there is violence there is often passion, where there is cruelty there is often love.
Kane’s work was radical, but in some important ways, it was also conservative. When critics dismissed her, they, by extension, dismissed the entirety of theatrical history. Though her narratives were often set in a seemingly contemporary world, they were set within the confines of the form of classical theater. Kane ingeniously exploited the traditional narrative devices of Jacobean drama; murder, revenge, betrayal, rape, cannibalism, bodily fluids; and smeared them on the faces of a politically correct, bourgeoise, liberal, nineties audience. Her work forced viewers to confront how wildly out of touch they had become with the violent nature of mankind and the brutality that had carried history and still occurred every day beneath the slick veneer of Western liberalism.
Kane’s life itself was a Jacobean tragedy. She was undeniably the most interesting playwright to come to prominence in the nineties, but like so many geniuses before her, she was written off as an amateurish provocateur. She wasn’t. Writing about poetry, the aforementioned Houellebecq claimed that the sonnet was the most powerful form of poetry and that no innovation in form could improve it. The French writer suggested that rigorously staying within the boundaries of a predefined form allowed one’s flaws to slowly emerge within the work, sculpting a style. As artists, our style is quite literally defined by our failures, our inability to achieve proper form. This is the functioning of Kane’s work: it stayed within the confines of the classics and slowly gave birth to a new style of storytelling and a very radical form of theater.
While I never read much of his work, I remember one clever quote from Roland Barthes: “When one is in love is in Dachau.” Love is pain, of course, and there’s a courage and even a sadism in opening oneself up to it.
Kane was in love with theater, in love with text, and performance, and violence, and cruelty. She was incredibly close to the work she created. She once told an interviewer, “To create something beautiful about despair is to me the most life-affirming thing a person can do.”
Can you imagine creating something that affirmed the very nature of your existence, only to have it so soundly rejected? It must have been like a young mother cradling her newborn child, basking in the glow of motherhood and so full of love, who realizes from her friends’ wincing expressions that they think her baby is ugly or gruesome. It’s gut-wrenching. It would evoke rage, even violence, from you. Unfortunately for the world, Kane turned that violence inwards.
Illustrations
1. Sarah Kane
2. A production of Blasted
3. A production of Phaedra’s Love