Customer Reviews

Sarah Kane: Complete Plays

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Sarah Kane's plays present the horrors which characterize the world of the late 20th century. The plays contain scenes of incredible brutality. Ordinarily, I avoid violence in books, plays and films but these plays haunt me with the beauty of their generous humanity. Her last two plays--Crave and 4:48 Psychosis are beautiful poems of hopelessness. If you are interested in contemporary theatre, YOU MUST READ SARAH KANE. The story of her life and death, while unspeakably sad, should not overshadow the extraordinary talent of this gifted writer and remarkable human being.

These are the most electric scripts to arrive in a long while. Sadly, the source was snuffed in 1999. Kane's writing is at once repellent and seductive. "Blasted" is exceptional, riffing on Beckett blatantly, but still signature of a visionary voice: inyerface, exuberant, filthy, poetic, profound. As a debut, it is truly remarkable. "Phaedra's Love" and "Cleansed" push the envelope past the hyper-real into lightning-bright brilliance, and with thunderous emotional depth. How does one stage this stuff? Kane's challenging work sets the imagination--and ultimately, the soul--on fire.

Sarah Kane is anything but family friendly. Her plays are raw, brutal, and yet beautiful in an ironic way. She takes all of the hate that exists in this world and uses it to show us the beauty that can come from the ruble of a blown up building. There is no way to actually describe Sarah Kane to you to make you want to buy her book. I was forced to buy it because of a class at my college, but I don't think I'll be selling this one back. I never thought I would enjoy a play such as Blasted. If you want to understand what my review actually means, buy the book, read a couple of her pieces and then read this again. I'm sure you will understand then.

Sarah Kane's collected plays represent an underestimated force in theater. Much like the work of Elfriede Jelinek or Ntozake Shange, Kane takes a private pain (losing oneself in another or testing the limits of proclaimed love) and creates a verbal landscape that the audience must inhabit, either by force of shock or noble acceptance of empathy. In either case, her plays must be reckoned with upon finishing. I think perhaps the most intriguing and powerful to me was 4.48 Psychosis, her final and posthumously performed play. There are no defined characters because who cannot claim a piece within the multitude of confessions that the play really unfolds as. Brutally honest and intentionally confrontational, this play, above the others, embodies the last possible moments of hope in anyone's life. Kane's characters rarely make the choice to latch on to these moments, but they are there and cannot be ignored.

One of the strongest women writers that lived, she revolutionized theatre and her death was unfortunate robbed theatre of her potential. A Great collection of her complete work at a great price. Cleansed was my favorite in the collection. Her work is so poetic, stark, honest, painful, and brutal.

Amazing plays. There's no translation of them all into spanish, so this is a great chance to te get acces to them. Wished this kind of editions would last longer in my country, but at least there's an opportunity to buy them in England. Sarah Kane is one of the names you must know to understand what's happening in the scene. Her words are fists thrown to your face like bridges to the reality of the characters, most of the times strange, twisted and distant from ourselves. She pushes you into her world roughly, with no mercy, as the characters have none either.

Book was in great condition. There were no major markings inside, just some normal wear on the spine. The vendor was honest about the wear, and I would trust them again when purchasing something from Amazon.

For a long time, Sarah Kane's name was almost a curse word, but this is manifestly unfair. Her work is challenging, poetic, austere, and can threaten people who want theatre to be simple, cheerful entertainment. But for audiences who want their art to speak to the truth of our human situation, Sarah Kane was one of the bright lights of late 20th Century theatre.

The five plays and one screenplay comprising Kane's corpus chart a remarkable arc out of the "real" world to a stunning, surrealistic landscape. Her first three plays could be called realistic, but not naturalistic. They mix social commentary, secular spirituality, stunning brutality, and dream imagery to create a tenor too real for the real world.

In the introduction to this volume, David Grieg says that Kane cast off her parents' evangelical faith in her teens. It's easy to see that in these plays. She needs absolutes in the world, but she can no longer turn to God. Ordinary human violence leaves us bleak and forlorn. And yet, particularly in "Blasted" and "Cleansed," moments of hope inevitably poke through.

Her later plays change their tone. Though she still lives in a desolate, godless world, her style is more mature, even as it turns more inward and personal. "Crave," her last play produced during her life, dramatizes her private thoughts to provide one of the most nuanced introspections in recent theatre. And "4.48 Psychosis," based on Kane's stays in mental institutions, is so personal that it wholly dispenses with character attribution, stage direction, and other conventions.

"Skin," the script for a ten-minute TV film, is primarily a curiosity. It takes up some themes and dream icons from Kane's plays, but it reads poorly. It's thick with camera directions and narrative that get between her and the reader. The film is on the internet; Google it and compare the finished product to the script, as an oddity, if you must.

Sarah Kane's suicide, clearly at a time when her best work was not yet past, leaves a major hole in the theatre world. But this hole still hasn't been recognized in America. Her debut play, "Blasted," didn't get its New York premiere until the fall of 2008, fifteen years after its London premiere and nearly ten years after Kane's death.

It's downright sad that Kane's entire body of work can fit in such a slim volume. But the fact that her work survived its initial assaults to be recognized as contemporary classics gives me hope. The trajectory she began needs to be continued, because the needs and gaps she realized still live in the heart of world theatre today.

A unique voice that took her life too soon. These plays are an important testament to the IN Your Face Theater that lashed out in the 90s. Sometimes mistaken for pointless violence, Kane has a brilliant ability to cut to the heart of humanity and explore the darker aspects of our own kind.