And this is an article (in Portuguese) about Psychosis that was staged by Artistas Unidos. Its the play that touched me the most....

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The Paradox of Sarah Kane

Kane's first play may have provoked outrage but she is now recognized as a brilliant, if tormented, genius

There are some who believe that the world lost one of its finest late 20th century dramatists when Sarah Kane committed suicide in 1999. Her work produced extreme reactions in critics and audience alike but many failed to appreciate the pure poetry of her writing until it was too late.

She was born in Essex on 3rd February 1971. Her parents were both journalists and devout evangelists - religion played an important part in their everyday lives. Her father became the area manager of the Daily Mirror for East Anglia, while her mother gave up work to care for Sarah and her brother. By all accounts Kane was an intelligent child who enjoyed learning, supported Manchester United and openly discussed God. However, in later years, when she had lost her faith, she described her juvenile beliefs as "the full spirit-filled, born-again lunacy".

As a teenager she became involved with local drama groups and directed Chekhov and Shakespeare while still in school - playing truant at one point to be an assistant director in a production at Soho Polytechnic. After taking her A-levels she went on to Bristol University to take a degree in drama, with all intentions of becoming an actress. She seemed at home in the theatre and was immensely popular with fellow students, enjoying their company to the full and indulging in a typically wild social life. She went clubbing, enjoyed affairs with women and became a great admirer of Howard Barker's Jacobean dramas (once acting in his play, Victory) - empathizing with his dark views on life and love.

Sarah stood out as a talented actress and director, but somewhere down the line she began to loose heart with her anticipated vocation and started writing instead. The first substantial work she produced was Sick, a series of three monologues that were performed to a pub crowd in Edinburgh. The pieces concerned rape, eating disorders and sexual identity, and her first person delivery was said to be "raw" and "unsettling".

She graduated with a first from Bristol and went straight to Birmingham University to join David Edgar's MA playwriting course, which she disliked but completed for the sake of her mother. Secretly she started writing Blasted, a complex play about violence from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When it was first performed at the students' end-of-year show it was watched by Mel Kenyon, who was completely "awe-struck" and later found it difficult to get the play out of her mind. She wrote to Kane and they subsequently met up in London, where Kane agreed to Kenyon becoming her agent.

Blasted is about a middle-aged tabloid journalist who appears to be dying and invites an unsuspecting retarded child into his Leeds hotel room, assuring her that he simply needs a little comfort during his final hours. Once trapped he proceeds to rape, debase and ridicule her before an armed soldier suddenly bursts in and wreaks appalling havoc, turning the scene into a Bosnian battlefield. The play opened in January 1995 at the Royal Court Upstairs, becoming the theatres most controversial work in over thirty years. British newspaper critics were in their element, describing it as "a disgusting feast of filth", a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and like "having your whole head held in a bucket of offal". However, established dramatists such as Harold Pinter turned on the reviewers, telling them they were "out of their depth" and that Blasted was simply too complex for them.

Although upset by the slating, Kane went on to write four more plays in as many years. Cleansed was about love, death and drug addiction in a concentration camp and, like much of her work, was closely fashioned on real-life incidents. Whereas Crave, written under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon, was about four warring factions of one individual's consciousness and was generally received as her most mature play up to that point. She also wrote the terrifying Phaedra's Love and Skin, a short film for Channel 4. Throughout this period she travelled around Europe, leading theatre workshops by day and writing at night - becoming quite a celebrity in France and Germany.

While there's no doubt that Kane was an incredibly likeable, original and kind human being, depression was never far from the surface and she was unable to cope with the intensity of her emotions after completing Crave. She admitted herself to the Maudsley Hospital in south London for a time but recovered sufficiently to enjoy her play's critical triumph - which was compared by some to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Unfortunately her happiness was short-lived and the depression returned. In January 1999, after completing 4.48 Psychosis (so called because it's the time of morning when people are most likely to kill themselves), she swallowed 150 anti-depressants and 50 sleeping pills. She survived because her flat-mate found her in time and rushed her to King's College Hospital. Two days later she was left alone for 90 minutes and was later discovered hanging from her shoelaces in a nearby toilet. She was just 28 years old.

© Paula Bardell, 2000

(http://englishculture.allinfoabout.com)

Sarah Kane by Aleks Sierz

'There may be some people who kill themselves,' wrote Al Alvarez in The Savage God, his classic 1971 study of suicide, 'in order to achieve a calm and control they never find in life.' He went on to claim that for poet Sylvia Plath, a personal friend who'd committed suicide in 1963, it was a desperate way out of a corner she had boxed herself into.

The case of Sarah Kane, the 28-year-old playwright who hanged herself on 20 February 1999, inevitably recalls Plath. Once again, here was a precocious but self-destructive young talent whose death changed the way we look at her work.

Kane's short career began in January 1995, with Blasted, a shocking play whose raw language and powerful images of rape, eye-gouging and cannibalism provoked critical outrage. The Daily Mail denounced the play as 'this disgusting feast of filth', the Sunday Telegraph fulminated against its 'gratuitous welter of carnage' and the Spectator called it 'a sordid little travesty of a play'.

But if Blasted shocked because of its explicit sex and violence, it was also disturbing because of its innovative structure: after a naturalistic first half, Kane exploded theatrical convention by making the second part richly symbolic and earily nightmarish.

In her subsequent plays - Phaedra's Love (1996), Cleansed (1998) and Crave (1998) - Kane developed a characteristic mix of extreme emotional content and theatrical innovation. Although her savagery attracted more attention than her tenderness, Kane's special talent lay in taking apart theatrical structure. In Crave, for example, the four characters have no names and most of their speeches could be addressed to any of the other characters on stage.

Since her death, an enormous amount of interest has been generated by rumours that her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, which is now being produced by the Royal Court in London, tackles the subject of suicidal depression.

When speculation about it first began, in September 1999, Simon Kane - Sarah's brother and executor of her estate - pointed out that 4.48 Psychosis is 'about suicidal despair, so it is understandable that some people will interpret the play as a thinly veiled suicide note'. But, he said, 'this simplistic view does both the play and my sister's motivation for writing it an injustice.'

You can see his point. If 4.48 Psychosis is worth seeing, it should be because it's a good play and not because it hints at its author's depression, her voluntary stays at London's Maudsley Hospital or her previous attempts at suicide.

For this reason, the Royal Court is discouraging publicity. The poster advertising the play is black, with no picture, and includes a quote from the play which simply conveys Kane's bleak humour: 'I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live - I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.'

In view of her ceaseless desire to innovate, audiences should expect 4.48 Psychosis to be more of a poetic extravaganza than a traditional three-act play. Watching it will probably involve being exposed to a text in which lyricism is laced with powerful stage images and where missives from the edge of extreme experience are laced with a wry humour.

But 4.48 Psychosis inevitably raises troubling questions about the literature of despair. On the one hand, sceptics see Kane's work as a literal reflection of her life. The Telegraph's critic, Charles Spencer, wrote in May 1998 that 'you feel her work owes much more to clinical depression than to real artistic vision'. You could argue that her writing simply reproduces the fears and confusions of mental illness.

On the other hand, Kane's defenders - such as Graham Whybrow, the Royal Court's literary manager - emphasise her dramatic technique. Not only did she have a first-class honours degree in drama, but her work never stayed still. 'Each new play,' he says, 'was a new departure and to some extent an investigation of form. She left behind a body of work which is consistent in vision and diverse across a range of subjects.'

But Kane was also 'acutely aware that she was living an accelerated life, personally and artistically,' says Whybrow. 'She was only too aware of the tragedies of other artists who died young: she was conscious of Buchner and so on.' In fact, Kane directed Buchner's Woyzeck in 1997.

Was she part of what Alvarez calls the 'black thread' of morbid writers who were fascinated by suicide and death? Playwright Mark Ravenhill, who knew Kane and whose Shopping and Fucking (1996) also caused a stir at the Royal Court, says: 'Actually, I see her more as a classical writer. Her work is connected with a form of theatre that is quite confrontational because it doesn't reassure you with social context or Freudian psychology - it doesn't explain things. It just presents you with these austere, extreme situations. She is the only contemporary writer who has that classical sensibility.'

Did she pay the price of being encouraged by theatre managements to explore the dark sides of life? 'Not at all, she was a very stubborn, strong-willed person,' says Ravenhill. 'She wrote what she wanted to write. For every person who praised her work, there was one that condemned it. She just went her own way.'

Perhaps her restless desire to innovate pushed her further and further into a corner from which death offered the only escape. 'I don't agree,' says Simon Kane. 'I don't think fears about her work were a significant factor in her decision to commit suicide. I think Sarah's work was much more the effect of who she was and what she cared about, than it was the cause of her depression.'

Similarly, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon sees her work as speaking for itself. 'People should admire the boldness of it, the starkness of the images and her influence will encourage writers to be courageously theatrical.' But there is also a dangerous side to her legacy. 'Because of her death, some young people might think they have to live in despair to be proper writers. And that you have to kill yourself to become profound.'

At the time of Kane's death, Kenyon was quoted as saying that Kane was an artist who suffered from 'existential despair'. But, as fellow Royal Court playwright Anthony Neilson pointed out, the same depression affects both artists and check-out girls, so why 'canonise one and stigmatise the other'? Mental illness is no respecter of professions.

And David Tushingham, who included Kane's work in Live 3: Critical Mass, an anthology of new writing, before she became notorious, says: 'Sarah Kane's career as a mental patient was briefer and much less exceptional than as a dramatist - the only freakish thing about her was her talent.'

Simon Kane adds, 'It is very narrow and trivial to look at a play simply as an expression of someone's biography - it limits interpretation and closes off other possible meanings. Her work is much richer than just an expression of personal anguish.'

When I interviewed Kane for my book on young playwrights - called In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today - in September 1998, she gave few clues about her pain. She wasn't the kind of person to offload problems on strangers. Her responses to my questions were helpful and polite, and her subsequent letters generous in answering my queries.

Since her death, however, some references inevitably seem to scream from the page. Her favourite band was Joy Division, purveyors of dark and doomy music whose lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide by hanging. When discussing Blasted, Kane once mentioned a haunting newspaper image - of a Bosnian woman hanging from a tree - that emphasised the stark realities of civil war. In Cleansed, a young man hangs himself when he realises how long his prison sentence is, an incident which Kane took from a true story about a black activist on Roben island in South African during the apartheid years.

In her plays, the portraits of depression and desperation - whether it's the character of Hippolytus in her retelling of the Phaedra story or the inmates of the corrective institution in Cleansed - were not just the results of research, but came from the gut. In her lifetime, she was accused of posing as the 'naughtiest girl in class', but the truth is that she meant it.

But seeing connections between Kane's life and her writing does tend to be reductive. After all, her friends will tell you about her sense of fun as well as her depression. Her taste in music and theatre may have been bleak (Beckett was a favourite) but she also loved Manchester United football team - hardly a melancholic's choice.

Besides, what she admired most about Beckett was his sense of overcoming the darkness. When I talked to her, she emphasised that she was essentially interested in love and affection. 'I don't find my plays depressing or lacking in hope,' she said. 'To create something beautiful about despair, or out of a feeling of despair, is for me the most hopeful, life-affirming thing a person can do.'

If anything, her ultimate failure to survive the pain of mental illness excites compassion and pity. In the end, her decision to kill herself probably had more to do with escaping the agony of depression and her feelings of loneliness than with her work.

If, as Alvarez suggests, some people kill themselves to gain control and find calm, the irony is that Kane, who all her life struggled against being pigeonholed as a 'woman writer', is now powerless against being labelled a suicidal artist. And the problem with seeing Kane as an example of the Sylvia Plath syndrome - with her work refracted through the optic of her death - is that it reduces her art to biography, and limits its meaning.

'It will be very hard for 4.48 Psychosis to be seen solely as a play,' says Ravenhill. 'How can anaudience engage with it without the author's biographical details getting in the way?' Perhaps the best way to approach the play is to do what theatre audiences always do: suspend disbelief - forget that the actors are only acting and that the writer is no longer living, and open yourself to the experience of the work.


© Aleks Sierz
An earlier version of this article appeared as 'The short life of Sarah Kane' in The Daily Telegraph, 27 May 2000

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