Sarah Kane: The savage mark of Kane

Why, when Sarah Kane's Blasted opened at the Royal Court in 1995 ­ "the most important pioneering play by a young playwright of the last 10 years," according to the Court's literary manager, Graham Whybrow ­ did theatre critics so savagely attack it? A retrospective season of the work of Kane, who committed suicide two years ago, opens at the Court this week, an onstage raspberry blown at those reviewers who, according to the current orthodoxy, got it shamefully wrong six years ago. "Won't it be interesting," says the theatre's director, Ian Rickson, "when they all have to come and see it?"

Sarah Kane (right) and Vicky Featherstone, of Paines Plough theatre company Internal links Review David Greig on Kane's "love at the extremes" External links Royal Court Theatre online Paines Plough Theatre Company online

Why, when Sarah Kane's Blasted opened at the Royal Court in 1995 ­ "the most important pioneering play by a young playwright of the last 10 years," according to the Court's literary manager, Graham Whybrow ­ did theatre critics so savagely attack it? A retrospective season of the work of Kane, who committed suicide two years ago, opens at the Court this week, an onstage raspberry blown at those reviewers who, according to the current orthodoxy, got it shamefully wrong six years ago. "Won't it be interesting," says the theatre's director, Ian Rickson, "when they all have to come and see it?"

But the season's about more than cocking a snook, and may lead to a more measured verdict on Blasted than the recent appalling/brilliant paradigm has allowed for. As Rickson points out, "fewer people saw Blasted during its whole run than used to see The Weir in the West End in one day." Its revival, in a far larger auditorium, will let a little air into the hothouse of debate that surrounds the biggest theatrical scandal of the 1990s.

It's startling to be reminded just how dismissive Blasted's original reviews were. The Guardian's Michael Billington has since recanted his accusation that Blasted was "naive tosh". Jack Tinker, who branded the play "a disgusting feast of filth" in the Daily Mail, never lived to see Kane, in her later play Cleansed, append his name to one of her less attractive characters. According to James Macdonald, director of both the original Blasted and its revival: "The phenomenon she wrote the play to explore, which is the way that serious subjects are reduced to stories in newspapers, was visited upon the play itself. That was a hideous irony for her to deal with."

Macdonald suspected a conspiracy. "It was a moment at which, as I understand it, newspaper critics' job security was threatened. If they could make theatre newsworthy, it empowered them." Others attributed the critics' rage to the fact that Kane's main character, a racist and rapist, was a middle-aged hack. Many cited the play's radicalism. "She put a bomb under the conventions of the well-made play and psychological realism," says Macdonald. The critics were blind-sided by Kane's desire to "connect emotionally rather than intellectually".

It's the stuff of a thrilling myth that contains no little truth, and which, naturally enough, the Court eagerly propagates. Macdonald compares Blasted's notices to "the original reviews of [Edward Bond's] Saved, or Strindberg, or Beckett. They were all as bad". But, while Rickson claims that the play was attacked "because of the associations and correspondences it made", it was the unrelenting violence that critics rejected ­ not always because it shocked them, but because it was "risible", "tedious" and provoked "indifference". Onstage violence ­ Kane's includes baby-eating and eye-gouging ­ is as apt to deflect as compel engagement with a drama, and often elicits more sympathy for performers than characters. Blasted demonstrates limited understanding of this. Kane was quoted as saying, "I don't believe I have a responsibility to the audience", which isn't an attitude compatible with writing plays.

Remembering the furore, Macdonald admits that he can't completely absolve himself of blame: "We did play Blasted absolutely for real, whereas I now think there's a way in which one could reach the theatrical language of it." Kane's later plays suggested she reached the same conclusions. "Her response [to the Blasted affair]', says Macdonald, "was to write Cleansed, where it was beyond doubt that the images were poetic." The greatest schism in Kane's career, however, came with Crave and 4.48 Psychosis ­ the latter staged posthumously ­ which eschewed staged atrocities and explicit imagery, retreating into language and individual consciousness. They won critics' hearts, but led some to detect a move on Kane's part from playwriting into poetry.

Whybrow agrees that "Kane tried in the later plays to see how good a poet she could be whilst remaining a dramatist". Rickson takes issue with the tendency "to dichotomise the poetic and the dramatic". 4.48 Psychosis, the script of which is a block of unattributed text, he found "intensely dramatic as an experience. But I get keener on the work when people say, 'it's not really a play'. I don't know if people really want to see the plays that are plays."

Blasted's curse was to brand Kane a shock-monger when her distinction lay elsewhere. Unlike so many extremist writers of the 1990s, there was nothing opportunistic about the starkness of her imagined landscape. According to her precursor, Edward Bond, the Royal Court's staging of Blasted in the tiny Theatre Upstairs was "like hiding the Alps under a bed. Kane was easily the most important writer to come out of the Court in at least 20 years. She came from the blazing heat of a confrontation with the real world. That's the only thing that makes theatre great."

That epic lucidity, the keenness of her perspective on how the world brutalises us, should guarantee that her current Europe-wide popularity endures.

But it's Kane's experiments with theatrical form for which collaborators remember her. "The secret of Blasted is in the form and there rests its power," says Whybrow. "Many playwrights find it difficult to sustain experiments and investigations into drama. Kane stands head and shoulders above all the playwrights of her generation in consistently doing that."

It remains to be seen whether the Court's retrospective can establish Kane's qualities at the expense of the controversy and the suicide. Rickson justifies the programming with reference to Blasted's tiny original audience and to his belief that "these are major plays and worth classic status". Macdonald foresees problems gaining perspective on the work "because it's not that long since she died", but opposes the "specious argument abroad that because Sarah suffered from depression her work is invalidated".

The associated risk is that her plays, like the poems of Sylvia Plath, to whom she is often compared, are seen only through the prism of her despair. "She was her work," her friend Harold Pinter once said. "She was so naked, and her work was evidently so naked. She had no protective skins at all."

It's likely that she will be remembered primarily for this nakedness ­ the mark of Kane, both her weakness and one of her greatest strengths ­ at least for a while. "I don't think," says Simon Kane, her brother and literary executor, "that her work and her life will be separated. Not while I'm alive, anyway."

'Blasted': Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, SW1 (020 7565 5000), to 28 April; 'Crave': 8 May to 9 June; '4.48 Psychosis': 5 May to 9 June