Sarah Kane plays are available in shops and libraries.  You can also buy them from Amazon in America or Europe.
They are not available for downloading.

Highly recommended.  The book in in two sections, the first covering each of the plays:

and the second featuring interviews by Saunders with Kane directors James Macdonald and Vicky Featherstone, Nils Tabert, Mel Kenyon, Phyllis Nagy, Kate Ashfield,  Daniel Evans and Stuart McQuarrie.  From the interview by Saunders of James Macdonald:

207 pages with photos.

Young British playwrights. 32 pages on Kane. A good biographical overview

On Cleansed: "In a play about love, each of the four main relationships is different and symbolic. Grace and Graham represent the fantasy of incestuous, identity-sharing twins; Carl and Rod are the classic couple, one member of which is idealistic, the other realistic; Tinker and the dancer represent domination and alienated love; Grace and Robin experience a teacher and pupil, mother and child rapport. In each case, the relationship is difficult and makes suggestive assumptions about gender and identity: Grace becomes Graham without ceasing to be female, Carl and Rod are the same sex but have the opposite sensibilities; Tinker has the power to abuse the dancer, but she's complicit in her victimization; Robin is needy and falls in love with care and knowledge, which kill him"

Highly Recommended.

"Each chapter pairs a well-known play from the post-war period with a classic theory text."  One chapter, 19 pages, is "Trauma and testimony in Blasted: Kane with Felman"

"...there are good reasons to assume that not everything that occurs on stage happens at the level of a single ´reality´ but that at least some aspects of the civil war raging outside the hotel, and the arrival of the soldier, are in fact phantasms of Ian's memory"

Other chapters cover Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Orton, Griffiths, Churchill, Hare and Wertenbaker.

How the dramatic works of the 1990s have shaped the New British Theatre movement. As well as Sarah Kane playwrights discussed include Billy Roche, Sebastian Barry, Conor MacPherson, David Harrower, Jonathan Harvey, Philip Ridley, Richard Cameron and Naomi Wallace.

Some good writing (five pages) on Kane:

"The only problem with Sarah, in my view, is that I'm not sure she's a natural writer. The sturm und drang and the savagery; the shitting and the fucking; the deconstruction and the erudition, the whole feast that's on offer tends to distract from the lack of simpler, quieter virtues. Relaxed human dialogue; characterization that is vivid, surprising and true; the creation of worlds both recognizable and new; narrative lines that both support and surprise; a fidelity to life- all these virtues are harder to find in Sarah's work"

An introduction to writers who are helping to shape the future of the British theatre. Sarah Kane is represented by 11 pages from Blasted. The five line biography includes "Her monologues Comic Monologue, Starved and What She Said have been performed by Fringe companies throughout Britain".

Kane is quoted as saying "If a play is good, it breathes its own air and has a life and voice of its own. What you take that voice to be saying is no concern of mine. It is what it is. Take it or leave it".

Other pieces are Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice, Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing and Philip Ridley's Apocalyptica.

The photo from the book is by Simon Annand.

Interviews with women writers, including Sarah Kane just after Phaedra's Love. A six page interview, plus interviews with 19 other women playwrights such as Pam Gems. Kane says:

"There was something about the inadequacy of language to express emotion that interested me. In Phaedra's Love, what Hippolytus does to Phaedra is not rape- but the English language doesn't contain the words to describe the emotional decimation he inflicts"

"Blasted raised the question ´What does a common rape in Leeds have to do with mass rape as a war weapon in Bosnia? And the answer appeared to be ´Quite a lot`. The unity of time and place suggests a paper-thin wall...A wall that can be torn down at any time, without warning"

A tribute to critic Jack Tinker.  It includes his infamous review of Blasted This disgusting piece of filth:

"...For utterly disgusted I was by a play which appears to know no bounds of decency yet has no message to convey by way of excuse... utterly without artistic merit...".

A general overview of theatre, looking at 50 significant plays.

Blasted is covered (5 pages): "presented as the first in an uncompleted trilogy of plays about war" and "...as the dust settles, Kane's extraordinary debut begins to take on the shape of a finely crafted modern parable"

"I mentioned danger... Now it seems to me the best way of producing this concept of danger is by the objective unforeseen, not unforeseen in situations but in things, the sudden inopportune passing from a mental image to a true image"

"At best [Seneca] is felt to have been a link between ancient Greece and the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights...Artaud greatly admired him...It is true that Seneca dwells on the grisly aspects of the myths he chooses to tell. In Phaedra the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus in gruesome detail; another messenger pays inordinate attention to the rending of flesh and the flow of blood in Oedipus"

"I lived with a man whose no was in the middle of his heart, whose no kept him thin as a bone and stole the juices from him.  No is pain and yes is pleasure, no is man and yes is nature"

Compare with Crave:

"The sentiment of an accumulation of amorous sufferings explodes in this cry: ´This can't go on...´

...

Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight"

Bond's play was attacked by the press just as Blasted was.  "Clearly the stoning to death of a baby in a London park is a typical English understatement.  Compared to the ´strategic´ bombing of cities it is a negligible atrocity" from the Author's Note.

One of the great theatre directors writing about the stage.
"Alienation works in many ways in many keys.  A normal stage action will appear real to us if it is convincing and so we are to take it, temporarily, as objective truth.  A girl, raped, walks on to a stage in tears- and if her acting touches us sufficiently we automatically accept the implied conclusion that she is a victim and an unfortunate one.  But suppose a clown were to follow her, mimicking her tears, and suppose by his talent he makes us laugh.  His mockery destroys our first response.  Then where do our sympathies go?"

Buford´s account of English football violence was a source for Blasted:
"In the fight that ensued, Harry wrestled one of the policemen to the ground, lifted him up by the chest an then head-butted him- inflicting a hair-line crack across the forehead... he grabbed the policeman by his ears, lifted his head up to his own face and sucked on one of the policeman's eyes, lifting it out of the socket until he felt it pop behind his teeth.  Then he bit it off"

and

"It is easy to dismiss an incident of crowd violence in Yugoslavia; it is an unstable state; it is not ours"

A contemporary of Kane: "Sequin after sequin after sequin.  Sequins on the walls.  Sequins on the ceiling.  Sequins round the bar/ Looks like Little Richard walked in and exploded"

Compare with the staging of Crave:

"If it were essential on the stage to love as people really love, to employ that irreplaceable voice of the heart, to look as people contemplate in life, our speech would be in code.  But here silences must make themselves heard.  Love speaks up louder and immobility itself becomes spectacular"

Translated by Justin O'Brien

"Have you ever felt like that?  Nothing will ever happen again.  I am dead already"

"What it's not- and this is perhaps how it differs from those previous attempts- what it's not is a cry for help... No-one could have helped her... certainly none of her so-called friends"

Kane quotes T.S. Eliot in her work, and her style shows his influence.

"He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience"

"Who is the third who walks always beside you
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you"

"I walked into Vicky's office one day and found she was not there.  But I saw a copy of Fassbinder´s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now which I started to read.  While reading it I suddenly had the idea for Crave" (from Thielmans quoted in Sauders).

Fassbinder leaves space for the director just as Kane did.  Pre-Paradise Sorry Now tells of the Moors Murderers.  Fassbinder states that the scenes can be played in any order, and the cast can be between 5 and 30 performers.

"But you were friends/ you know that already/ when did you last see him"
"You must become a master.  A master over life and death"
(translation by Denis Calandra)

The famous story which legend has it inspired a wave of suicides.
"No priest attended him"

An original play, but influenced by Kane

Joanna Laurens has some of the same concerns as Sarah Kane.  The Three Birds draws upon the violence of Greek drama, and shares Kane's fascination with foreign languages.

"When the silence is/ spoken it isn't silence anymore/ My words are the pigeoncoughs/ of a fifteen year old/ A sign of the man who will come"

"...What strikes me now about Ashes to Ashes is how similar in theme it is to Sarah Kane's Blasted. She wanted to show that there is a clear continuum between a sexual assault in a Leeds hotel room and the rape camps in Bosnia. So she sent the horrors of Bosnia bursting into the location of that private English crime. Beginning with the recollection of a sado-masochistic ritual, Ashes to Ashes likewise attempts to remove the divide between its comfortable English setting and a world of fascism and systematised cruelty. Only in Pinter's play that world enters not in a violent irruption but through the dream-like "memories" and prophetic visions of the female protagonist, Rebecca, who is being interrogated by her badgering partner... about a former lover...." Paul Taylor, The Independent, 28 Jun 2001.

A contemporary of Kane.  "Crushed by a herd of wild elephants/ Only it wasn't an accident"

"That's one thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life.  In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal- unpleasant, but normal.  Depressions is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.  The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature after all abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.  But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead"

Includes Things We Said Today (as in Cleansed)

"one of these days
soon very soon
love you till then
love you till then"

"Existence - well what does it matter?
I exist on the best terms I can
The past is now part of my future
The present is well out of hand
Heart and soul , one will burn
One will burn, one will burn"

"Get a taste in my mouth
As desperation takes hold
Yeah, something so good
just can't function no more
and love, love will tear us apart again"

Compare with Cleansed:

"Despair and Deception, Love's ugly little twins
Came a-knocking on my door, I let them in
Darling, you're the punishment for all of my former sins...

Well I've been bound and gagged and I've been terrorized
And I've been castrated and I've been lobotomized
But never has my tormenter come in such a cunning disguise...

I let love in
I let love in
I let love in"

"Not a subject not a subject am I
Sick and pale but strangely alive
Broken blood vessels line my cheeks
Reflections look bad and somehow unreal"

Includes 4.48 Psychosis using Kane´s text.

German language, includes Sarah Kane as well as Mark Ravenhill, Martin Crimp

Zerbombt, Phaidras Liebe, Gesaubert, Gier, 4.48 Psychose

Includes Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis (but unfortunately not the filmscript Skin)

David Harrower e Jon Fosse n'a Capital Sobre Sarah Kane depois da uma - teatro? quatro anos de trabalhos.

Samlade pjäser is the Swedish translation of the complete plays.

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Para encontrar las obras de Sarah Kane y libros sobre Sarah Kane en inglés por favor vete al principio de esta página.