Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane
Sarah Kanewas an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture — both physical and psychological — and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action. Kane herself, as well as scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, identify some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. The critic Aleks Sierz has...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 February 1971
I feel like I’m eighty years old. I’m tired of life and my mind wants to die.
It is myself I have never met whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind
Please. Don’t switch off my mind by attempting to straighten me out. Listen and understand, and when you feel contempt don’t express it, at least not verbally, at least not to me.
I crave white on white and black, but my thoughts race in glorious technicolour, prodding me awake, whipping away the warm blanket of invisibility every time it sears to smother my mind in nothing.
But you have friends. You have a lot of friends. What do you offer your friends to make them so supportave. What do you offer your friends to make them so supportave what do you offer. " ...if I could remember any more of my lines I'd add them so basically this is a preface to the whole play. I would like to quote the whole play. Currently my mind is afraid to remember the play.
There is an objective reality in which my body and mind are one. But I am not here and never have been.
I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it.
I'm not a brand name, I'm a person.
I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre... but they don't. They expect to sit back and not participate.
I have no interest in trying to manipulate people's emotions or opinions.
You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they're crap.
I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.
Have you made any plans? Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself. All those things together? It couldn't possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.
Here I am and there is my body dancing on glass.