Nearly three decades after her death in 1999, playwright Sarah Kane has complicated legacy. On the one hand, many critics, artists and academics consider her one of the finest playwrights of her generation. On the other, her work has rarely been remounted by large theaters on either side of the Atlantic, leaving her work little known to audiences and Kane herself as something of caricature of transgressive 1990s “In-Yer-Face” theater, best known for a couple moments of extreme violence from her earliest works. But two separate productions this fall—one in New York City and one in Dublin—are giving audiences well-produced opportunities to experience her most poetic, complex and mature plays. At the Dublin Theatre Festival, Irish director Tom Creed’s production of 4.48 Psychosis is playing at Project Arts through Oct. 11. In New York City, Alec Duffy’s production of Crave plays at the East Village Basement on Oct. 9-24. In September I spoke with both directors about their productions and Sarah Kane’s work. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jeremy Barker: Maybe to start off, can you share how you first encountered Sarah Kane’s work and the impact it had on you?
Tom Creed: I first discovered Sarah Kane in the library at university in Cork in Ireland in the late ‘90s, and it wasn’t the most well-stocked library in terms of theater-selection, but somehow Blasted was there. And it was not like anything I had ever read or seen before. And then, I guess quite soon after, she died. I didn’t get to see the first production of 4.48 Psychosis in London, but I remember ordering the Complete Plays as soon as they were available. So I had access to those texts. And you know, even talking about that—the idea that this fairly slim volume of five plays is called “Complete Plays,” rather than “Collected Plays,” with the very clear implication that there won’t be any more. I suppose that was a moment, definitely in Ireland, probably elsewhere as well, where the Royal Court in London and the plays that were coming out of there was a kind of North Star in terms of writing. Then, not so long after I graduated, I directed a production of Crave in 2003. It was my first time making an attempt at one of those plays. I subsequently directed a production of 4.48 Psychosis in 2005 at the Dublin Fringe Festival. And then sort of found my way back to the play about two years ago. I was doing some work with a visual artist here in Dublin called Cecily Brennan, who was making a film about men and their experiencing psychosis. She asked me to come and help her work with the actors, because she’s a painter and a conceptual artist and video artist. So, I spent some time working with her, helping her work with these six men, and thinking about about psychosis, and Sarah Kane inevitably came up. And then in the middle of that process, she showed me a film that she had made a few years before with the actor Marty Rea, a great actor, someone I have a lot of respect for. We knew each other, but hadn’t worked together before. I went to see a very busy production [of 4.48 Psychosis] at the theater school with eight actors, with a lot of staging, a lot of video, a lot of stuff. And somehow, while I was watching that show, I thought that it might be interesting to have another go at the play, 21 years later. Actually my experience of that production with a large ensemble and a lot of theatricality made me think, This is really the expression of one consciousness. There are different voices in this, but it really is a very individual experience. And I thought it would be interesting to try and do it that way. And I thought it would be interesting to send it to Marty Ray to see what he thought.
Unlike Crave, which does have four characters indicated by four letters of the alphabet, with 4.48 Psychosis you can choose to divide the text, among a group of actors any way you want, by the very open nature of the text itself. With 4.48 Psychosis, it’s in 24 scenes. Some of them look like dialogues, some of them look like monologues, some of them look like poems, some of them look even more abstract than that. I think the tradition began with the first performance in London, where the text was divided between three actors, maybe taking a prompt from the triplet pf victim, perpetrator, bystander in the text. So there’s kind of been a tradition of this play being looked at as an ensemble play and a play that has, in all of the white space and all of the absence of stage directions, an invitation to fill it with things. I think it’s one of the reasons why directors starting out, I think, are really attracted to it, because it allows the possibility to do things with it, and that’s certainly something that I was thinking about when I did it as part of a young director showcase when I was 25 with three actors at the Dublin Fringe Festival. And I think that maybe that also came out of a kind of certain kind of ’90s postmodernism and a certain kind of ’90s ensemble theater, where the idea that this was a text that you would work on with an ensemble, and it’s a fragmented self, replicated by fragmenting the text among a number of actors. But this time, I thought, what if we did something very simple? What if it was all delivered by one actor, the entire text? And what if the absence of stage directions and the white space around the text was not taken as an invitation to fill it with stuff? Sarah Kane, when she wanted to, could be extremely graphic and detailed about what she imagined seeing on stage. Blasted and Cleansed are full of very detailed stage directions about all kinds of acts of violence and intimacy. And I thought, what if when she was writing this and letting those things fall away, that this was not necessarily an invitation to fill it with stuff, but to do something very precise and to really make an encounter between one actor and this text? And I thought also there might be something by not casting the play in an obvious way, with a female-presenting young woman at the center of it. Marty and I are the same age. I thought it might be interesting to allow Marty and I to draw a line from us now, back to who we were 25 years ago when that play was being produced for the first time. Also, to point up some of the slipperiness around gender that’s in the text of 4.48 Psychosis. The speaker on the first page refers to themself as “hermself”, an invented word with a kind of slipperiness of gender. I’m not going to speculate about how Sarah Kane might have considered their own gender if they were still alive in this different era with the different access that we have in terms of how people think about gender. But it was a combination of all of those things, a hunch that it might be interesting for an audience to sit in front of one actor who importantly had the technical and emotional capacity to really bring us through this text. That we’d really just sit in front of each other and encounter this play from 25 years ago.
Jeremy Barker: Alec, do you want to kind of go back through your experience of Kane and how you arrived at this?
Alec Duffy: I think my first experience with Sarah Kane was the 2008 production of Blasted that happened at Soho Rep. An incredible production directed by Sarah Benson. And if I’m right, that’s the last time a major, homegrown New York production of a Sarah Kane play has happened. There have been some, I’ve seen through Googling, some productions by small theater companies in New York, but that was the last that was widely known.
Jeremy Barker: The only one other I know is 4.48 Psychosis at St. Ann’s Warehouse [2014]. St. Ann’s brought T.R. Warszawa out of Poland, so it was a Polish production.
Alec Duffy: Right.
Tom Creed: St. Ann’s also had the Royal Court’s original production with the original cast [in 2004], and then subsequently did the Polish production from TR Warszawa.
Alec Duffy: Right. In any case, it’s been a while since there’s been a six-week run of a Sarah Kane play in New York City. After Blasted, I did read 4.48 Psychosis and remember being quite drawn to it. But that was a decade ago or so. In any case, a few years ago Hoi Polloi did a production of a Celine Song play called Family, which we revived last year at La Mama. And what I really loved about that play was that it was just, it was so brutal. And it was so uncensored in its vision of the depravity of history and of America. And kind of had a hopelessness to it, which I really appreciated in this particular moment. That for those of us who don’t have much of a school spirit for humanity right now, it felt like a piece that spoke to me, and it seemed like it spoke to a lot of people who saw that play. And it felt so different from other plays that were coming out, new American plays that were being produced at other theaters. And so, when thinking about what to do next I read dozens and dozens of scripts by contemporary writers, young writers, whatnot. I asked for recommendations from all sorts of literary managers around the city. I was reading scripts, and none of them quite hit like Celine’s play did. There were some that were definitely, you know, adventurous, but not in quite the way that I was looking for. I was trying to find a piece that felt like it spoke to our particular moment, a really charged moment in our political history, in our social history, and started reflecting upon Sarah Kane. And so I picked up, um, that book that you were speaking of, Tom, the Complete Plays. I started with rereading 4.48 Psychosis, and I was just, ‘This is the play.’ I had a vision for actually doing it with the cast of Family, which is these three amazing physical actors. So I applied for the rights to do it. They told me it was under review, but it was under review for like three months, when I finally got the word from them that permission had been denied. So then I thought, “Okay, fine.” And that is when I delved, I think, for the first time into Crave, which I had never read. Or perhaps I had started reading it at some point, but found it too difficult to read. For readers who are not aware, as Tom said, the characters are delineated by letters of the alphabet: A, C, M, and B. It’s quite poetic. There are no stage directions. And so, I think of it as a sculpture, right? But reading experience was, I’m not even connecting who’s saying what, because it’s too hard to develop a sense of any kind of particular character on the first, second, or even third read of that play. You’re just trying to get a gist of it, a general sense of what’s going on. And then as you read it more, you kind of whittle away at the sculpture and it starts to become a defined figure. Eventually, I’m like, okay, I get that there’s something going on between character M and character B. There’s definitely a relationship there, and now that’s becoming clear. And there’s a wit to it, and a sardonic quality to it, and so I’m starting to get a little bit more sense of its specificity. The characters of A and C are getting more defined. And then it becomes really workable in my head. I’m starting to get a sense for what this play is. But it took a long time. After a few reads of it, I felt like I would like to apply to stage this play.
It had a raw quality to it that I really appreciated and loved. It covers the full range of human emotion in a really great way, but it also doesn’t hide from difficult topics, of abuse, of rape. So, in that way, I felt this did speak to our moment, and did speak to our time in a really exciting way. And that is when I started to develop a concept for it. My instinct was, kind of like Tom, to keep it really simple, and really let this text do the work. It’s such a language play. It’s clearly inspired or influenced by Beckett. It’s pretty bleak in a way, like a lot of Beckett’s work, but it also has a very contemporary feel, and a very accessible feel to it, as well, in a way that Beckett doesn’t have. Not necessarily to his detriment, but it just doesn’t have quite the same quality.
To let the words speak for themselves and really keep the focus on the actor’s voices.
And so I developed a concept for it, which would keep things really simple, basically have blocking at a minimum, if I can even call it that. To have it feel more like an installation than a play, that you’re walking into. This installation serves as a vehicle for this play.
Jeremy Barker: I find it very interesting how you’re both referring to there as very specifically an encounter with a text, and an interest in a text, and taking a minimalist approach to that text. Both of these plays offer the ability to take a much more maximalist approach, I think, in staging than you’re doing. Is there any particular reason you think you’re responding to something that’s almost more a recitation, or just a language, as opposed to something that has a visual element> Because, of course, Sarah Kane’s earlier plays are somewhat notoriously visual. I mean, I believe one of them, is it Blasted?, that has the rat carrying an eyeball offstage?
Tom Creed: For me, what we’re doing is intensely visual in a way, because what we’re doing is inviting, forcing the audience to look at one actor’s face and body as they move through the text. There’s a lot of movement within a very narrow range. Something that we found as we started to work through the play is that it makes things happen to the actor. And that’s a thrilling thing to encounter. There are certain sequences in 4.48 Psychosis…particularly this long sequence that starts, “flash, flicker, slash, burn,” and there’s a list of these words, a page and a half of them, in a particular rhythm and in a particular order. Other productions have projected this text, but Marty has memorized it and really tries to work his way through it. And it is almost completely impossible. It comes with extreme difficulty. And we have a feeling that maybe that’s something that Sarah Kane had in mind. Marty has talked about the idea, particularly with poetic texts, that, as an actor, that you “eat” them, that you ingest the text and then you let it work on you. And then you regurgitate it, having let it work on you. And, in a way, that’s sort of what we’re doing with this. But also, for a play which is quite fragmented and has a reputation for being quite abstract, I think when one actor carries that text a linear narrative comes very clearly into focus. I think that it is possible to do an extremely clear piece of storytelling with this text that threatens to derail that at every moment.
And I think, for me, the experience of just sitting with one actor for 72 minutes… You know, in the text, it says, “At 4.48 / when sanity visits / for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind.” So this is a period of psychosis or a period of clarity between 4:48 and 6 a.m. And we sort of thought as we started to work on it, maybe that’s what this is, maybe [the show] should be 72 minutes. And it’s ended up as 72 minutes. Marty is so precise, that without even really having to time it or come up with strategies, it’s running at that length. And there’s something bracing and life-affirming about sitting and watching this. It’s bleak, it’s extremely bleak. It’s like staring into a bottomless hole. But there’s something quite bracing about the aliveness that it demands from an actor. You know, I’ve been saying to people who are worried, you know, “Oh, is it going to be traumatic? Am I going to be traumatized?” And I say, “Look, it’s bracing, it’s specific, it’s something that exists with great sharpness and precision, like drinking a martini or jumping into the sea.” And not everybody likes to do those things, but the people who do have a great time doing it.
Alec Duffy: The original production of Crave was staged as a kind of a television talk show. The four characters were seated in chairs with a glass of water at their side and talking to the audience. I just learned yesterday, in fact, I just read an essay about Crave that suggested that Sarah Kane herself, her original—she did not direct the original production, but she was involved with it—that her vision for it originally was that it could take place in the dark. That it would just be the voices that the audience would hear, and that seemed to bring her satisfaction in imagining that. I just learned yesterday, but that is somewhat the same impulse that I had, to forefront these voices.
Tom Creed: Nice.
Alec Duffy: And take away the labor of looking from the audience, so that they could just their ears could be the main vessels for this play. That being said, we do have quite a striking image or context for it visually, in that we’re going to have bodies on stainless steel tables, lying on stainless steel tables in a cross formation. The audience will be surrounding those tables, two-feet away from these actors in a tiny space in the East Village. So it will be quite bracing—the experience and visual of it will be quite bracing—and really the only development visually is how are the actors covered, and when. By using a sheet we’re trying to create a triple image of morgue/examination table/mental health facility. So that it can kind of move, depending on where we are in the text, depending on how they’re covered and what’s revealed.
Tom Creed: It’s fascinating to hear that because when I was trying to work out what Marty should be wearing in our production I sort of thought, if we’re stripping it back—so you know, the production that we’re doing has just three lights, there are two microphones, and all of the sound is done live, just with effects on the microphones—I thought, if we’re following the logic of stripping back, then maybe he shouldn’t be wearing any clothes, either. So it’s funny, I did have that impulse at one point, but what we’ve ended up with is actually something that’s very close to what he wore to rehearsal on the first day of rehearsals, so a kind of different kind of informality, maybe. So that we are sort of watching an actor go through something. But it’s interesting, there is something about that stripping back to what the actors are wearing and the images that we’re making. And, of course, the body and nudity is something that Sarah Kane worked so much with in her first three plays.
Alec Duffy : Right.
Tom Creed: In Blasted and Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed. So it’s interesting that we both had, at various points, a similar impulse in relation to these later plays.
Alec Duffy: Well, she does such an amazing job at stripping away the clothing of human existence, right, and really showing…
Tom Creed: Yes.
Alec Duffy : …the very interior of all of her characters, or many of her characters, in a way that doesn’t happen a lot in theater, I find, or it’s somewhat rare, that you would see just the innermost darkest thoughts of these characters and their vulnerabilities. So the idea of flesh allowing us access to the most basic human representation without any of the inherited traits of society felt right for this kind of examination of the human soul.
Jeremy Barker: Yeah, I was going to ask, I know, Tom, you’re performing, I think, in a conventional sort of theater space. But Alec, the space you’re doing it in is just an apartment. I went there for the first time myself just a week ago and was surprised. I thought it was going to be more of a black box type new space in the East Village, only to discover really it’s just an apartment with bookshelves and whatnot. I assume there’s a purpose behind this?
Alec Duffy: It’s a space that’s relatively new to me, I think it’s been around for three or four years, the East Village Basement. One of the things that drew me to it, to be very honest, is that the rent is fairly inexpensive for a Manhattan performance space, right? For our company, it’s quite affordable. So that was a consideration for sure. And I felt like the amount of space they have, it’s confining, but it felt alive, to me. It felt like magical things can happen in the way that they’ve happened for decades watching experimental work in New York City, in storefronts and basements and garages. It felt of that ilk in a way that a professional black box theater maybe didn’t lend a similar sense of radical-ness. But it’s funny, because I just learned a couple weeks ago that that space, where the East Village Basement is, was the original La Mama space in the 60s. So Ellen Stewart and her brother, I believe, rented out that exact basement to start La Mama, which was supposed to be kind of a shop for her designs, but also for performances. They turned it into a cafe because it was easier to get a license for a cafe than a performance space, and had performances on the side. There are photos out there of these, um, this tiny space with little coffee tables, and a microphone, and a performer, and that’s how La Mama got its start. I was amazed to learn that just a few weeks ago. But it made it even more exciting for me to be in that space.
Jeremy Barker: Sarah Kane’s work in general has always dealt so deeply with issues of violence, often gendered violence, and it’s particularly interesting that the two plays in question are the ones that rather explicitly focus on the experience of violence on individuals, but don’t present it as explicitly as her earlier work had become known for. Is there an attraction to these plays, which allow a human to speak to something without us having to see it, or to focus someone reflecting on their own experience versus having a more traditional enactment of seeing violence against a body on stage, but instead hearing about it or understanding the legacy, the impact?
Tom Creed: I saw the recent production of Cleansed in London, also at the Almeida. And I have been thinking that there is something about theater, lets us into some proximity of violence, that feels necessary now. Recently I was recently in Germany at the Ruhrtriennale, and saw a production by the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski of a recent play by Wajdi Mouawad called Europa’s Pledge. It’s a strange, beautiful play about a kind of peace and reconciliation attempt, where an elderly woman who witnessed and potentially was involved in a genocide in a small town in Lebanon as a child has been sought out to talk about what actually happened. And the text, very calmly and at great length, contains descriptions of the most atrocious violence. There’s something about the kind of very calm, intensely calm, aesthetic of Warlikowski, somehow creates a space where we can approach those kinds of topics and deal with them in a way that maybe the earliest forms of theater in Athens and in Epidaurus did. You know, that something like The Persians which a huge part of it consists of recounting acts of violence. Or the idea of the obscene, you know, literally, these kinds of things that happen off stage in classical tragedy. There’s something about these works that allow us to engage with those ideas in a live way, surrounded by other people, that feels necessary.
And there’s something political about that, about bringing people together to somehow confront these aspects of our humanity.
Alec Duffy: It’s funny, because it feels like in the six years that she wrote plays, she basically had the same complete transformation of her playwriting that an artist like Miles Davis went from Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew over 20 years, right? Completely different twenty years later than he was. She reinvented herself so many times just in those five or six years, um, that a play like Blasted and Cleansed looks—looks—nothing like a play like Crave or 4.48 Psychosis. It carries with it some of the same themes and some of the same interests, but those first three plays are all “what-if” plays, right? Here’s a scenario, here are the characters, and we’re following a story. Very narrative. And then in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, she moves into quite different territory. Like you said, the brutal stuff doesn’t really happen on stage. It happens in suggestions of what might have happened in the past or whatnot. I myself am drawn especially to plays that behave like 4.48 Psychosis and Crave, much more than plays that behave like her first three plays. I, as a director, wouldn’t really know where to start with her first three plays.I’m drawn to them as a reader, for sure, but as a creator, that’s not the kind of work that I’m drawn to. So, for sure, the brutality in Crave in 4.48 Psychosis is one that I find much more mysterious and exciting to me.
Tom Creed: Yes. It was fascinating seeing Cleansed staged just a couple of weeks after our previews of of 4.48 Psychosis in August. Having lived so intensely on the inside of 4.48 Psychosis for so long, and spent so much time in theaters and rehearsal rooms watching it, I came away really with the sense that those two plays are like mirrors of each other in a way.
You really get a direct line in 4.48 Psychosis, I think, to what it was like for Sarah Kane to exist in the world. The kind of torture that it was. And, when you go back and look at Cleansed, you realize that one of the things that she’s doing in that play is literally, physically, enacting on stage what it felt like for her to be in the world. So somehow those two plays, more and more, it feels like they’re really mirrors of each other. But you can also see the progression in the writing, which is that in the earlier plays, she’s trying to depict in image and in metaphor and in action what it feels like for her to be in the world.
And by the time you get to 4.48 Psychosis, she’s just going, “I’m just going to tell you. Just listen to me.” You know? Sometimes we’ve talked in rehearsal about, maybe one of the things that 4.48 Psychosis is doing is presenting an extremely logical and convincing argument for why, in the face of what it is to be in the world right now, you might take your own life. And that’s not to say that the play is a suicide note, it’s a work of art, but it is also fact that two weeks after she completed and submitted the play to her agent, she took her own life. So that there is a clarity and a conviction in 4.48 Psychosis. I used that word bracing already, but it is bracing and provocative to be in the presence of such clarity.
Jeremy Barker: One question I have is, Sarah Kane’s work has often been seen as a reflection of a gendered experience of the world. The nature of sexual violence does seem to be such a part of it. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to the two of you, in particular ,is asking what does it mean for cisgender men to be directing her work at this moment?
Tom Creed:I think the question is different in relation to the two plays, in a way, because I think Crave deals with with sexual violence in a way that 4.48 Psychosis doesn’t so much. Of course, Marty and I have talked about a lot about what it is, for two men to work on this text. On the one hand, none of her plays have been produced professionally in Ireland for a long time as you’ve described in New York. So other people aren’t producing the plays. We’re not taking opportunities to work on these plays away from other people. And the plays will be there for other interpretations. We’ve spent some time thinking about an essay that Édouard Louis wrote entitled “Your Identity Isn’t Private Property,” where he talks about a question that a heterosexual director asked him: “If I haven’t experienced homophobia, can I work on your material?” And he said, “Of course, my identity isn’t private property.” He’s really articulate, about how it cannot be the case that only people who have suffered or people who have been oppressed can be the ones that have to tell those stories. Because sometimes, we tell those stories so that they don’t have to. Édouard Louis wrote a book about his experience of sexual assault, and then Thomas Ostermeier put it on so that he didn’t have to do it. And so, sure, there are questions around opportunity, there are questions about representation. But I think that for me, this is an issue about identity being something that’s available in the process of making art and in the process of communicating these ideas on behalf of people who are—in the case of Sarah Kane—not around to do that anymore themselves.
Alec Duffy : I’ll say that one of my goals in presenting this play is to share the work of this writer with a newer, younger audience that isn’t necessarily aware of Sarah Kane. I speak with a lot of young people in the theater who have heard of Sarah Kane, but have no experience reading or seeing any of her work. What I would love is if our production inspired someone to say, “This is not the way to do it. I’ve got an idea of how to do it, and with certain people and whatnot, and a certain experience behind that this production lacks,” and then does their own production. I think that would be fantastic.
I’ll just add that in June, I used, some airline miles to go over to London and visit Sarah’s hometown in Kelvedon Hatch, which is in Essex, about two hours from London, because I wanted to see if a visit there would unlock anything about this very mysterious text, which is rife with historical references of her own, which she refused in her lifetime to reveal. She had initially considered annotating Crave, and releasing an annotated version, much like The Wasteland, where, she would state, “Oh, this happened to me when I was in high school,” or, “This is the hospital that I had to go to when I was hospitalized for mental illness.” But she never did, or she decided not to. So I thought, well, maybe there’s something about being in that space that would reveal something to me. My experience was very interesting. I took the bus out, took the train to the bus. There’s about a hundred houses in this tiny village. It’s very well located, but a bit distant from any kind of city atmosphere or anything. There was one tavern in town, that was pretty much the only retail establishment. I went to that tavern, had lunch, and I asked people around me whether they knew Sarah Kane, or who she was. And no one did. From her hometown. But that was a real shock, because I thought that, you know, given Sarah Kane’s stature for us in the theater world, in academia, I thought that she would be…kind of a known controversy of the town 30 years on, but that was not the case.
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