Sarah Kane | |
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| Born | 3 February 1971 Brentwood, Essex, England |
| Died | 20 February 1999 (aged 28) Camberwell, London, England |
| Occupation | Dramatist, theatre director |
| Language | English |
| Alma mater | University of Bristol (BA) University of Birmingham (MA) |
| Literary movement | In-yer-face theatre |
| Notable works |
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Sarah Kane (3 February 1971 – 20 February 1999) was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that 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 and scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, have identified some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy.[1] The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility of drama termed "in-yer-face theatre". Sierz originally called Kane "the quintessential in-yer-face writer of the [1990s]"[2] but later remarked in 2009 that although he initially "thought she was very typical of the new writing of the middle 1990s", "[t]he further we get away from that in time, the more un-typical she seems to be".[3]
Kane's published work consists of five plays, the short film Skin, and two newspaper articles for The Guardian.
- ^ Saunders, Graham (2002). Love me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 224. ISBN 0-7190-5956-9.
- ^ Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-yer-face theatre: British drama today. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 120–121. ISBN 0-571-20049-4.
- ^ Saunders, Graham (27 August 2009). "ACADEMIC GRAHAM SAUNDERS ASSESSES SARAH KANE" (Interview: Audio). Interviewed by Aleks Sierz. Dewynters, London. Retrieved 20 February 2021.