Sarah Kane in Context (review)

In the theatre collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Jack Tinker’s now infamous vituperation of Sarah Kane’s Blasted stands as its sole example of the power that a theatre review can wield. It also stands as a marker of how thoroughly Kane’s reputation has been resuscitated since the Daily Mail published Tinker’s “This Disgusting Feast of Filth” in 1995. Since then, criticism on Kane has moved from the breathless reverence that seemed to imbue writing on her work in the years immediately following her death to the kind of philosophically challenging, ethically searching, and theoretically sophisticated work collected in Laurens de Vos and Graham Saunders’s valuable collection Sarah Kane in Context .

Critical anthologies in this publishing environment are often beset with a difficult choice to include a small handful of fully imagined essays—these collections work in depth, rather than breadth—or to showcase the variety of approaches to thinking about the given subject. But at this particularly fruitful moment in studies of Kane’s work, the editors have chosen the latter approach to the playwright’s small oeuvre and collected eighteen essays of shorter length (including an introduction by the editors and an epilogue by Edward Bond), most of which are stimulating and suggestive in the pathways they open up into our thinking about Kane’s plays. The collection has the advantage of featuring the usual suspects (Saunders, Dan Rebellato, Aleks Sierz), while also providing a venue for a broader range of scholars than has typically participated in the critical conversation on Kane’s work.

“Part I: Surrounding Voices” includes those essays most clearly in service of the collection’s title, as these work directly at placing the plays “in context.” Elaine Aston’s opener is perhaps the savviest piece here, looking not at a dramaturgical context but, rather, a cultural one, placing the initial critical reception of Kane’s first major play, Blasted, in conversation with structures of feeling that dominated the age. Following Aston’s essay is Rebel-lato’s consideration of Kane’s very earliest, still unpublished monologues, which provide helpful clues to the playwright that Kane would become. The piece is useful for a completist study of Kane’s oeuvre and helps to trace out the origins of some major themes in her work. Meanwhile, Sierz’s essay on the “Muslim Other” articulates Blasted as more overtly political than its initial reception implied, although beyond this, the essay is of limited use for further scholarship.

Several other essays seek out Kane’s dramaturgical context, locating threads of writerly influence: Zina Giannopoulou’s essay on Phaedra’s Love locates the ideological ghosts of Seneca; Saunders traces literal and thematic echoes of Samuel Beckett across Kane’s plays; Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier points out the sway of Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty through the invocation of a variety of often violent constructions of ritual; and Clare Wallace argues for Kane’s work as a contemporary avatar of the avant-garde. These essays in particular highlight the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the critical anthology of a playwright’s body of work; while they collectively indicate a dizzying array of convergences and breaks with a set of theatrical traditions, they frequently sacrifice depth in order to touch upon as many plays and themes as possible. This is perhaps most frustrating in Saunders’s own essay, which is compelling in the range of references it locates, but at a mere twelve pages it cannot possibly do justice to the extraordinary potential of its subject. Wallace’s essay, by contrast, seems to choose its examples more sparingly, offering a bit more space to open up meaningful connections between Kane’s work and avant-garde aesthetics.

On the whole, “Part II: Subjectivity, Responsibility and Representation” offers more focused contributions to Kane’s work, and the essays here are much more likely to have a lasting impact on the future of the critical conversation. Here, a variety of theoretical frameworks overview the...