Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Monday, 28 December 2009

Sarah Kane speaks

In the below 65-minute interview with Sarah Kane conducted by Dan Rebellato at Royal Holloway University of London on 3 November 1998 (only a few months before Kane's death), the dramatist discusses the creation of her work, acting, the hostile critical response to her plays and her dislike of Quentin Tarantino. The sound quality is not the best, but increasing the volume on your computer speakers should help:

Prof. Rebellato was kind enough to post this on his Web page this year under a Creative Commons "Attribution Non-commercial" license, which makes my posting it here possible; my thanks to him for doing so. There is also a PDF transcript of the interview available prepared by my friend Aleks Sierz. More on Sarah Kane here.

Posted in /Dramatists/Sarah_Kane
Permanent link to this story

Home > Dramatists > Sarah_Kane

Sunday, 18 January 2009

Kane in New York

In the most recent issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Elana Greenfield, the Director of Artistic Programming at New Dramatists from 1989 through 1996, remembers Sarah Kane's 1995 visit to New York during a Royal Court Exchange between the London theatre and the New York service organization. It's a rare look at Kane's only visit to these shores, and Greenfield paints a sensitive portrait, especially about the rather dismissive treatment she received from one of her collaborators at New Dramatists, a director of one of her readings there. About Kane's work itself, Greenfield writes:

In writing [her play] she had wandered unintentionally – from what I know, she wrote what she saw just how she saw it (all any artist does) and the fact is she did not dwell in that territory but quickly moved on in her work – into what is usually male territory, and then turned the rules of the territory on its head.

She took the glamour and titillation out of the construct, out of the relationship as it's often presented, between sex and violence, and showed it for what it is, a horror, and even more impressively in her play, she managed to present the linking of sex and violence as a lamentable and pathetic perversion of the human longing for kindness and perhaps love.

She deprived people point blank of their daily poison and I guess they were afraid they were going to die.

Read the entire article here.

Posted in /Dramatists/Sarah_Kane
Permanent link to this story

Home > Dramatists > Sarah_Kane

Friday, 26 December 2008

Sarah Kane: Skin

The self-destructive failures of the ideologically- and communally-constructed self, as well as the risks of transgressive vulnerability, tenderness and love, are at the center of Sarah Kane's only film for television, Skin, written in 1995 just after her first major stage play Blasted. The 11-minute film is more of an anecdote than a story; nonetheless, it retains considerable power as an incision into the bowels of hate and the attractive desire towards the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva:

A comparison of the final film with the screenplay as published in the Complete Plays is instructive. The most interesting difference is the cutting of an unnecessary and mute commentary by the old black man who appears very briefly in the beginning, middle and end of the film: his compassion is less forced in the film than in the script, and a particularly unnecessary sentimentalism is excised; the compassion here is gentler, more subtle and more powerful. (I also note the mordant commentary on "communication," here rendered as a satire on the cellphone and answering machine, a few years before cellphones became ubiquitous; that the skinheads use them to coordinate a violent racist brawl is a dark commentary on the technology. So much for the "text swarm.")

Though produced in 1995, it received its television debut only in 1997 on the BBC's Channel 4. Due to the depiction of violence and racism in Skin, the Daily Mail called it "one of the most violent and racially offensive programmes ever to be made for television in this country." Despite this, director Vincent O'Connell was nominated for a Golden Bear award for the film at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival.