Beyond her darkness

Sarah KANE’S public life began in a blizzard of condemnation, thanks to British theater critics’ outrage at “Blasted,” her grisly, taboo-breaking dramatization of everyday hatred and cruelty exploding into the horrors of war.

It ended four years later, on Feb. 20, 1999, in a determined suicide two weeks after her 28th birthday. Having survived downing nearly 200 antidepressants and sleeping pills at home, she succeeded in hanging herself by her shoelaces three nights later in the bathroom of a London hospital.

In her room in Brixton, where she often wrote through the night, Kane left a computer disk and a printout of her fifth and final play, “4.48 Psychosis.” She had worked on it for about a year, finishing the week of her death. The play, really a free-form dramatic poem, tries to show what it’s like to be lost in the deepest mind-shaft of depression.

Now the Royal Court Theatre, the London company that championed Kane, is attempting to make her less of a phantom in the U.S. While there have been 16 productions of Kane’s plays here, all but one since her death, they have resided on the fringes. The six-city tour of “4.48 Psychosis” brings Kane’s work to its first major U.S. venues, including a run at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

The director is James Macdonald, who staged the Royal Court’s premiere of “4.48 Psychosis” in 2000. Macdonald worked closely with Kane on earlier plays, directing the premiere of “Blasted” in 1995 and 1998’s “Cleansed,” a harrowing depiction of a prison turned into both a chamber of mutilations and a crucible for testing the power and endurance of love.

Mel Kenyon, Kane’s friend and literary agent, acknowledges that the mainstream may never have a place for her plays, at least in England and the United States, where, as Macdonald puts it, “the culture is a little more allied to entertainment.” In Germany and other central European countries, Kane’s work is often staged and has been mounted in important theaters.

Some critics and directors find hope and affirmation in Kane -- even amid the impalings and dismemberments of “Cleansed,” the rapes, gunshot suicide and baby-eating of “Blasted” and the word-paintings of loss, loneliness and depression in “Crave” and “4.48 Psychosis.”

But mainstream theater directors, even those who might see in Kane a legitimate heiress to her key influences, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, easily could conclude that she’s just too dark.

“She was always attracted to subjects that were big, universal and often taboo, subjects that people were afraid of talking about,” Macdonald said recently from Champaign-Urbana, Ill., the first stop on the U.S. tour of “4.48 Psychosis.”

In a 1995 newspaper interview with the Independent of London, Kane said that an infamous scene in Edward Bond’s “Saved,” in which street toughs stone an infant to death, showed her the power in staging the darkest kinds of truths.

“I was deeply shocked ... but then I thought ... if you are saying you can’t represent something ... you are denying its existence, and that’s an extraordinarily ignorant thing to do.”

Religion out, drama in

Kane’s father was a tabloid journalist; in her teens, the family was immersed in fundamentalist Christianity. But she rejected religion and found drama, first as an acting and directing student at the University of Bristol, then in a graduate playwriting program at the University of Birmingham.

There, in 1993, Kenyon arrived to critique student plays and was stunned by a long excerpt from “Blasted.” Kane’s edgy personality left an impression too during the question and answer session that followed. “It was typical Sarah, quite contentious and quite wry. I thought, ‘She’s a handful of trouble.’ ”

Kane cemented her reputation as an enfant terrible when “Blasted” premiered and sent middlebrow reviewers into a frenzy. Maybe it was a slow news week, Kenyon says, but “Blasted” skipped from the arts and entertainment pages to the news broadcasts and became part of a national debate over obscenity: artsy girl gone wild.

“I was utterly and entirely disgusted by a play which appears to know no bounds of decency,” wrote Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail under the headline “This Disgusting Feast of Filth.” Kane answered him by placing a torture-master named Tinker at center ring in the hell of “Cleansed.”

The Guardian’s Michael Billington dismissed “Blasted” as “naive tosh.” But he was among those who later recanted. By the end of her life, Kane was regarded as one of the groundbreaking playwrights of her time, the first trouper ashore in a wave of edgy young British writers that included Martin McDonagh (“The Beauty Queen of Leenane”) and Mark Ravenhill (“Shopping and ...”).

People who knew Kane well say she had a salty tongue and a wicked, gallows sense of humor -- but that sweetness and empathy were her hallmarks rather than any desire to cultivate a tough, uncompromising image.

“She was incredibly warm and generous. The thing that is not often talked about is that she was jolly good fun,” says Stephen Daldry, the film and stage director who ran the Royal Court when Kane arrived.

“There were so many things you could project onto her work and her myth,” says American playwright Joe Hortua, who befriended Kane during her periodic sojourns in New York City. “You’d think you’d meet somebody with a chip on her shoulder. But she was this really sweet, funny woman.”

Hortua corresponded with Kane about her passions -- soccer and music (she especially loved the British band Joy Division) -- receiving letters from her on stationery emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and the motto “Write Hard, Die Free.”

Elana Greenfield, former artistic director of New Dramatists, a leading playwrights collective in New York, brought Kane to the U.S. as part of an exchange program with the Royal Court. The two became close. “She was the opposite of the narcissistic artist who can only see things through what they’re experiencing. She could glean what was going on with other people and what they needed, and she was very tender.”

That gift of empathy, says Kenyon, provided the moral grounding for Kane’s plays. Her belief in treating people humanely fueled her outrage at injustice and cruelty.

The depression was random

Daldry says that people close to Kane knew all along that she struggled with depression. It seemed, says Kenyon, that the grim moods would come in unpredictable cycles rather than being touched off by specific emotional upsets in her life. The randomness “must have been terrifying.”

Whatever caused her to give up on living, the people most intimately connected to Kane and her work are faced with trying to keep the woman and the plays from being pegged as cliches: the tortured, doomed artist sending forth eloquent cries of despair.

Macdonald’s staging of “4.48 Psychosis” attempts to treat it as an encompassing gaze into dire states of mind -- not just one woman’s elaborate suicide note. The title alludes to 4:48 a.m., which Kane held out as a sort of witching hour for the depressed: “At 4.48, when desperation visits/I shall hang myself to the sound of my lover’s breathing.”

“ ‘Suicide note’ makes it sound like a rather flat, out-of-control piece of writing,” Macdonald says.

“It’s actually a very textured and organized piece of work. It’s not implicating an audience. It’s saying, ‘This is what’s happening to me, but I hope it doesn’t happen to you.’ ”

Kane’s life was one of creative breakthroughs, public controversy, romances (critic Aleks Sierz’s entry on her in the Oxford University Press’ Dictionary of National Biography reports that she had lovers of both sexes) and oscillations between anguish and exuberance. But Kenyon says that she, as literary agent, and brother Simon Kane, as executor of Kane’s estate, are not about to prime the machinery to hoist her alongside Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath in some suicidal sisterhood of literary Olympians. Kane left instructions prohibiting films of her plays, and she did not want to be the subject of biographies, Kenyon says.

“It would be wonderful if she was regarded as a major playwright, but for the right reasons,” Kenyon concludes. “And if the work was done because she was a good writer, and not because she led a short, dramatically curtailed life.”

Perhaps the last words should go to Kane herself. The first quotation is from an interview with the Independent just as she was emerging in January 1995, and the second is from the penultimate page of “4.48 Psychosis” in the Methuen volume of her plays:

“Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humor and freedom as you can.”

“I have no desire for death/no suicide ever had”

*

‘4.48 Psychosis’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue at Sunset Boulevard, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 2, 6 and 8 p.m., Saturday; 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday

Ends: Nov. 7

Price: $15 and $45

Contact: (310) 825-2101