Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (review)

Sarah Kane's suicide in 1999, just three days after the completion of her final play, 4:48 Psychosis, virtually guaranteed the visionary playwright a place in theatrical history among the likes of Georg Büchner, Heinrich von Kleist, and Virginia Woolf. Four years after her death, however, there exists a huge gap in scholarship concerning her tumultuous career in the theatre and the violent, often sensational, dramaturgy of her plays. Generally regarded as among the most important postwar British dramas (though seldom produced in the United States), Kane's plays have been prominently featured at the Edinburgh Festival, in various venues in London's West End (most often the Royal Court), and throughout Europe, where her work frequently appears in the state theatres of France and Germany. With Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, Graham Saunders presents the first comprehensive study of her brief but influential career as a dramatist and theatre practitioner.

Chapter 1 is particularly useful for those not familiar with Kane's work and the fervent critical response that it generated. Initially, Saunders places Kane with other artists of the "New Brutality" of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century such as Edward Bond, Martin Crimp, Mark Ravenhill, and Quentin Tarantino, noting similarities in use of language, dramatic structure, and stage imagery. Following the introductory chapter, the text is divided into two parts, subtitled "Plays" and "Conversations." Part 1 (chapters 2 through 6) examines each of Kane's five major plays (her sole television script, Skin, is not covered), beginning with her first work, Blasted. Saunders's analysis of Blasted, arguably the most controversial work to appear on the English stage since Bond's Saved, reveals parallels to King Lear and Waiting for Godot as well as references to world events like the Bosnian civil war of the early 1990s. Saunders notes that while Blasted was initially condemned by most West End critics, it was recognized by Bond and other members of the unofficial British theatre intelligentsia as an important example of Kane's playwriting genius. Chapter 3 deals with Phaedra's Love, "my comedy" (78), as Kane called it, the most overtly and darkly humorous of her works. Referencing productions at Paine's Plough and the Gate Theatre in London, the chapter examines Kane's treatment of Seneca's (to whom she is most often compared) version of the Phaedra myth. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze Kane's mature works, Cleansed and Crave. Saunders considers the critical response (Cleansed was attacked by many critics because of the unusual level of sensational violence in the text) in addition to assessing the numerous sources of the work, including Woyzeck, Twelfth Night, and Orwell's novel 1984, among others. In his structural analysis of Cleansed, Saunders also begins to develop the thesis, alluded to in previous chapters, that Kane's work became increasingly fragmented and more reliant on stage images and metaphors than language. Chapter 5 concernsher most critically acclaimed work, Crave. Including quotes from Kane and others who were in the original production, Saunders provides an extensive analysis of the text and comments on allusions to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, as well as the structural similarity to several of Beckett's plays. 4:48 Psychosis, Kane's "75-minute suicide note" (110), is the subject of chapter 6, the final chapter of section 1. Saunders includes the few recorded statements Kane made about 4:48 Psychosis, the most intensely personal of her works. He points out the structural debt to Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life as well as revealing many other references in the work, including statements by physicians, Sylvia Plath's poem Edge, and quotes from the Book of Revelations.

Part 2 consists of an intriguing collection of interviews and conversations with actors, directors, and other...