The English playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999)  studied drama at Bristol University, graduating with first class honours and going on to complete a postgraduate degree in playwriting at the University of Birmingham. Her talent was apparent in her very first attempt at writing for the stage, Blasted, which she began while still a student. She, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson were the three most important representatives of in-yer-face theatre, a genre that flourished in British drama during the 1990s, and which presented the reality of its characters’ lives in an aggressively raw, violent and unfiltered way that was often shocking to audiences. However, Kane stood out from her contemporaries in her readiness to write from her own experience about the futility of existence, but also thanks to her poetic, almost lyrical use of language. She was partly inspired by expressionist theatre, while her plays tackle the themes of pain, one-sided and obsessive love, desire, redemption, despair, and death. Through her characters, she explored the struggle of the psyche and the emotional void felt by people in the modern world. Sarah Kane believed that their inability to survive is the consequence of the harsh reality in which they are trapped. She suffered from depression and spent a period in a psychiatric hospital. Her final play was about suicide; shortly after it was completed, she took her own life at the age of 28. She left a legacy of five plays and one short film.

 

A short list of her plays:
Phaedra's love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 psychosis.

 

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy’s and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia (Crave)

If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse. (Crave)

 

Death is my lover and he wants to move in. (Crave)