3/10/2020 Sarah Kane: interview by Aleks Sierz

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SARAH KANE: AN INTERVIEW

Friday 1st January 2016

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When Sarah Kane was still alive, it was vital to support her work — her style was so raw, so provocative and so innovative that many critics simply
didn’t get it. Some even called for it to be censored. So it was important to support her, almost without question. But, when the 28-year-old playw
committed suicide on 20 February 1999, everything changed. Now, suddenly everyone loved her. Now, she was an icon. Now, she was a secular s
Critics fell over each other to recant — it was like an episode from some religious war.

Wars breed anecdotes. And it soon emerged that everyone has a Sarah Kane anecdote. So here’s mine. It’s about the interview I did with her for t
chapter on her work for my rst book, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, and it may, or may not, be the last interview she ever gave. In my 1
diary, there’s an entry for 14 September: Kane, 12 noon, SW9 (the name of a cafe in Brixton, south London, where we both lived at the time). The
also shows that, in the previous week, I’d seen the Paines Plough production of Kane’s Crave (8 September), and soon afterwards I saw Mark Rave
Handbag (18 September). Oh heady days.

We met at SW9 because Kane lived just around the corner in a at which she shared with her friend David Gibson at 6A Belle elds Road. I arrived
and remember standing apprehensively at the bar — I was a bit tense, a bit nervous. After all, I was a fortysomething journalist and couldn’t help
thinking that the character of Ian, also a fortysomething journalist, in her debut Blasted expressed her hatred of all middle-aged men. In fact, whe
spoken to her on the phone to arrange the meeting, she laughed: “I seem to be meeting a lot of middle-aged men recently.”

I was worried that she’d be as aggressive as her work suggested. I suppose this is an example of the biographical fallacy in reverse. In fact, when
arrived, right on time, she was smiling. Wearing a black leather jacket, and hip black clothes, she could barely disguise her sleepy eyes, and the fa
that she’d just got out of bed. “Oh, it’s early for me,” she said. “I’ve been up all night writing.” It was the way she liked to work.

We drank co ee at a corner table by the window. The moment she sat down, she got out her cigarettes. She o ered me one. No thanks, I said, I’m
afraid of cancer. “You’ve got more chance of dying from a heart attack from worrying about it,” she joked, lighting up. When Kane smoked, she he
cigarette behind her back so that the smoke wouldn’t blow into my eyes. This considerate behaviour reminded me that although her plays have
lashings of violence, they are also full of gentleness. After all, her main theme is love.

Then Kane gave me back a copy of an academic article I’d written about Blasted and the politics of the new censorship, where the media leads the
for banning plays rather than, as in the past, the state (whose censorship of theatre ended decades ago in 1968). In her delicate handwriting, she
made a couple of corrections: where I had written, “Kane deliberately sets out to create a godless universe”, she wrote: “I don’t know. God does m
an appearance [in Blasted]. And there is life after death.”

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3/10/2020 Sarah Kane: interview by Aleks Sierz

Kane talked some more about her rst play, pointing out that the nal scene takes place in a metaphorical “hell”. “Don’t forget the stage direction
says ‘He dies with relief’,” she said. “Ian dies, so you think that’s the worst thing that can happen — then it rains on him.” It’s a moment that sums
sense of humour, bleak perhaps, but humorous de nitely. And she enjoyed the fact that directions like this present a real challenge to directors o
work.

Showing me a passage where I had misquoted her, Kane corrected my garbled version by stating succinctly: “Theatre will always be a minority int
but the lack of a mass audience is compensated for by the lack of direct censorship.” At various points during our meeting, which lasted about tw
hours, she would consult a small notebook, pointing out which journalists had misquoted her.

It was clear that Kane thought of her character Ian with a mixture of horror and a ection. When I said that, as a middle-aged man, I recognised h
psychology, and the way he tried to manipulate Cate, she was pleased. “Yes,” she said, “when I was at Birmingham, there was a middle-aged man
the MA and he defended my portrayal of Ian when the other students attacked it. And I thought that was brave of him.”

Of course, Kane understood that you can feel a sexual or a violent desire without necessarily acting on it. “It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s quite
another to act on it. We all have some control over our actions.” But what about Cate? Well, she stressed the fact that Cate is not retarded, and —
much as she loved this character — she was also a bit exasperated with her: “I mean, what’s she doing in that hotel room with Ian?” Still, Cate’s
resilience was as important to Kane as her naivety.

When I asked Kane what she thought of the label “in-yer-face theatre”, she shrugged as if to say: “That’s your problem, mate, not mine.” Then she
“At least it’s fucking better than New Brutalism.” No writer likes to be labelled as part of a movement, and Kane was especially sensitive to being
categorised as anything other than a “writer”.

We talked about the performance of Blasted that I’d seen at the Royal Court. It was the second press night, and she asked me how many people h
walked out. I told her that only a couple had left, but that many people had giggled nervously during the evening. She was pleased that the play h
had a powerful e ect, and told me that she had seen most performances.

Why did the critics hate the play so much? Kane explained their reaction by pointing out that “a play about a middle-aged male journalist who rap
young woman and is raped and mutilated himself can’t have endeared me to a theatre full of middle-aged male critics”. She also felt that she’d ha
hard time from critics because she was a woman. I disagreed. I think that because Blasted is such a powerfully written piece, experimental in stru
and provocative in its portrayal of a contemporary English civil war, it made audiences uncomfortable, made them feel they were experiencing th
emotions shown on stage. And that discomfort and disorientation confused the critics (poor souls) — so they took the easy way out, which was to
attack her.

Kane felt that the emotional content of her work had been misunderstood. “Blasted is a hopeful play,” she said. She didn’t recognise herself in neg
descriptions of her work. “I don’t nd my plays depressing or lacking in hope,” she said. “But I’m someone whose favourite band is Joy Division be
I nd their songs uplifting. To create something beautiful about despair is for me the most life-a rming thing a person can do.”

Despite the fact that love was so important to her, Kane was also constantly aware of violence. She told me two anecdotes about life in Brixton. In
rst, she’d been shopping in Iceland supermarket, and bumped into a black woman, who went mad and abused her: “She called me ‘a white bitch
know, black people can be as racist as whites.” And the other story was from when she once lived in Josephine Avenue, and was about a gay man
been attacked and arrived on her front doorstep gasping, with his head streaming blood.

Kane also told me a story from when she was at Bristol university. Planning to study playwriting at Birmingham, she was compelled to pay a smal
for private health insurance. She wrote on the back of the cheque something along the lines of nding it fucking outrageous that to enter an
educational institution she should be required to pay for private health insurance, to which she was deeply opposed. I mention this because I now
think that the most important thing about her life was not her suicide, but the fact that she got a First Class Honours degree and an MA in drama
she was an intellectual. She loved plays. She loved theatre.

Kane hated giving interviews. At the end of our meeting, she told me she didn’t want to do any more. “I’m a writer,” she said. “I’d much prefer if yo
could send me letters, and I’ll write my replies to your questions.” In the next couple of months, she sent me a couple of letters about her plays, t
silence. I carried on writing my book and, just as I was nishing the rst draft of my chapter about her, I heard she’d killed herself. For a while I wa
shocked and couldn’t write any more about her, and even wondered whether to put her chapter in the past tense. In the end, I left it in the prese

Looking back, our meeting seems to be a characteristic mix of helpful kindness and full-on violent imagination that, in my mind, is the essence of
Yet what haunted me afterwards was the frankness and openness of her personality. “Go on,” she said, “ask me anything.” At the time, I didn’t as
the questions I wanted to. I thought we’d have plenty of time to talk about her work — I was wrong. I didn’t realise she was already planning her
suicide. In June 2000, I talked to Robert Gore-Langton, a Daily Express journalist who’d interviewed her father about her suicide. He told me that h
expected him to be defensive, but that in fact he was totally open. “Go on,” he’d said, “ask me anything.”

Like most people, Kane was a complex and occasionally contradictory human being: equally capable of being polite and aggressive, of being an
introverted garret writer and an extrovert fun-loving woman, of loving moody, doomy music and supporting Man United, a colourful club, a winn
club, of talking about “sucking gash” and of longing for love and tenderness, by turns honest, perceptive, provocative, sentimental and, yes, quite
yer-face. Sometimes.

© An earlier version of this article appeared as ‘Sarah Kane: a última entrevista’, Artistas Unidos, No 14, November 2005: pp 66-67.

Afterword 

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3/10/2020 Sarah Kane: interview by Aleks Sierz

Vince O’Connell, Kane’s friend and mentor, tells me that she became a Man United fan at a time when the team was not doing very well: “I took h
her rst ever football match, at Old Tra ord, where United lost 1-0 to Tottenham. United were abject, Lineker scored a 30-yard thunderbolt! (Perh
his only goal ever from outside the penalty area), and Saz started supporting United because she felt sorry for them. It was all Gary Lineker’s fault

biography blasted british theatre censorship cleansed crave david gibson handbag in-yer-face theatre journalism joy divisio

london love manchester united mark ravenhill paines plough playwriting poverty of academic life robert gore-langton royal court

sarah kane theatre criticism vince o’connell violence writers

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