The Kane Controversy

Reviled by the British press for her fist play, Blasted at the Royal Court, Sarah Kane seemed to flare amid a stink of sulphur before taking her own life, just short of her thirtieth birthday, on February 20th 1999. Four brief years after the first controversy there had been a critical volte-face in response to her work and she died one of the most acclaimed playwrights in British Theatre. This November, East London saw the return of two of her plays to the stage, Phaedra’s Love at The Barbican Pit, and Cleansed at the Arcola, marking the ten-year anniversary of her first production.



Sarah Kane’s death was no Chattertonesque stab at sealing fame. David Greig, introducing the Complete Plays describes 4.48 Psychosis, her last play, as “the internal landscape of suicidal psychosis”. As her twenties went on, she succumbed to debilitating bouts of mental illness. Her suicide was not surprising, but her ability to communicate from that devastated territory remains unique, and draws an audience from around the world to her work. In one year there were 17 productions of her plays in Germany alone.

Here her plays are rarely performed, the Oxford Stage Company production at Arcola is only the second ever British production of Cleansed. And it’s the first London revival of Pheadra’s Love since it premiered at the Gate in 1996, where the writer directed it herself.

Phaedra’s Love, at the Barbican Pit, part of the Young Genius season, is a modern re-telling of a classical Greek play. It’s about a queen who falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, an indulged royal, who watches television, eats junk food, and uses his socks to masturbate and blow his nose. His step-mother enters and tells him to clean up his room. This is the teenage territory of disturbed privacy. The magical use of the toy car as sulky weapon shows real humour, and the dialogue flares with intelligence. Suddenly though the stepmother is on her knees giving her stepson a blow-job. “No one must know”, Phaedra says, and there is a huge resonance as the potent attempt at sexual manipulation reverberates in the theatre.



Phaedra then accuses Hippolytus of rape because he doesn’t respond to her love, and his fate is to be torn apart by a royal-watching crowd. But not before his stepsister, with whom he also had a sexual relationship is raped and killed by his father. One gets the impression of lost boundaries, an impression that continues in Cleansed, where the heroine Grace voluntarily enters an institution, run by a torturer called Tinker, and proceeds to have sex with the ghost of her dead brother, as those around her lose their limbs, and eat the most excruciating chocolates in the name of love.

One could be forgiven for giving the whole thing a miss. Yet, there is something here.

In Phaedra’s Love, Anne Tipton a young director of undoubted imaginative credibility, knows how to open a moment on stage, and hold it open, so that we could see the pain from all aspects, including the funny side. Though the production lost its rhythm at the end there was a sense of genuine theatre, aided in great part by the wonderful lighting by Emma Chapman, and soundscape by Gareth Fry.

This marrying of Sarah Kane with such a young director brings to the fore the adolescent intensity of Kane’s material, and helps explain her enormous power with younger audiences. She understands the grief of youth, and it’s unrealistic notions of love and death.

Neither production works terribly well. Phaedra’s Love is the more interesting play and the director’s vision caught the humour but Cleansed was hampered by the choice of filmic movement between scenes. The director, Sean Holmes said, “One of the really difficult things about the play is that if you have to take time for the scene changes, that’s 20 moments you have time to question the play. In this space you can move the action fluidly from one place to another, you can locate the areas that Sarah was very specific about in the stage directions.” Using lighting effects, and the wonderful flexibility of the Arcola space, he rushed from scene to scene, with design kept to an absolute minimum.

And in not allowing the audience the time to think between scenes, which the play demands, this version of Cleansed became a relentless barrage of meaningless violence. Those gaps were needed in the play, as the humorous scenes are needed in Shakespeare’s tragedies to allow the audience to regroup its psychic forces.

Artistic Director of the Oxford Stage Company, Dominic Dromgoole, said. “I think there is an unwritten story about Sarah, I think she got wrapped up in a bag, and a label was slapped on it. ‘In Yer Face’: It’s a good sort of vibrant sticker but it doesn’t tell the whole story. And the idea that she is being shoved into a ghetto of pure shock and outrage, merely wanting to lay into the audience with a relentless barrage of ugly incidents, I felt didn’t do her justice. There is tremendous wit, warmth, humour in there.”

But he admitted, “when we went to the read through, and we sat there through scene after scene after scene… (and) suddenly realised, it is relentless, grim and it is full of atrocities and is horrible and whatever we’ve been kidding ourselves about it’s not a sunny play actually.”

Despite wonderful acting by the whole cast of Cleansed, and some imaginative solutions to the limb chopping, which was wonderfully done with sound and movement, this was not an evening that could be termed theatrical dynamite. Kane’s reputation as a writer must remain mixed, for despite her theatrical near-genius, and poetic access to the truth of painful human emotions, the range of her work is limited, and the depth of explorations speak to the juvenile or angst-ridden teenage psyche. Within this sphere she is a burning torch.

Cleansed

Arcola Theatre
Tinker Paul Brennen
Graham Garry Collins
Carl Toby Dantzic
Woman Lisa Diveney
Grace Polly Frame
Rod Sean Gallagher
Robin Craig Gazey
Director Sean Holmes
Designer Anthony Lamble
Lighting Charles Balfour
Sound Fergus O’Hare
Video Lorna Heavey
Movement Mike Ashcroft

Barbican Pit
Hippolytus Laurence Perry-Jones
Phaedra Diana Kent
Strophe Alexandra Moen
Theseus Dan Mullane

Additional Cast:
Brian Hickey, Zara Ramm, Stuart Crossman, Daniel Gosling, Nadia Williams, Craig Anthony, Kate Mayne, Emily Moore, Sphie Williams, Chaly Leonard, and Francesca Bailey.
Director Anne Tipton
Designer Naomi Dawson
Lighting Emma Chapman
Sound Gareth Fry