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About Kane: The Playwright & the Work
By Graham Saunders
Faber and Faber £9 99
184 pages
Dateline: 2nd August, 2009
This book is unreservedly recommended for anybody who has the slightest
interest in the cult that is Sarah Kane or the In-Yer-Face Theatre movement
that developed in the 1990s.
In three quite distinctive sections, Graham Saunders, one of the two
leading experts in this field, explores the playwright's work from different
viewpoints.
First, in an introduction Saunders presents an brief history; next
we learn the writer's personal opinions about her work and its context;
and finally are able to see Miss Kane through the eyes of those who
worked with her.
In an academic world where, far too often, one gets a distinct sense
of dog eat dog, Graham Saunders has the good sense to work in collaboration
with Aleks Sierz, renowned as the man who coined the phrase In-Yer-Face
Theatre and wrote a seminal book with that title, which included a chapter
on Sarah Kane.
It is instructive to see the way in which Saunders, who lectures in
Theatre Studies at the University of Reading and has already written
one book on Sarah Kane, builds up an all-encompassing picture of an
unusual and unique personality whose fame (infamy?) flowered all too
briefly before a tragically early death.
The introduction gives a good overview of the subject and her work.
It is then fascinating to see the digests of Sarah Kane's own writings
and broadcasts, cleverly arranged by subject so that we begin to understand
the writer's motivations, frustrations and ultimately depressions.
While this almost completes the picture, the final chapter incorporates
interviews with an actor Jo McInnes, two directors Ian Rickson and Jeremy
Weller together with a guru, Aleks Sierz, whose re-evaluation of the
canon is perhaps a little surprising but undoubtedly of the greatest
value. Finally, there are extracts from two symposia in which those
that worked with Sarah Kane or produced her plays are able to share
their opinions.
Graham Saunders does not fall into the trap of using academic language
for the sake of it so nothing is performative and there is no foregrounding.
This means that About Kane is genuinely readable even for somebody
that has never set foot in a University but still wants to understand
what made a writer, who might just have been a genius, tick.
Philip Fisher
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