‘I was amazed that it made people so angry’
Vicky Featherstoneformer artistic director of the Royal Court, op Blasted. In the play, journalist Ian brings the much younger Cate back to his hotel room in Leeds and tries to seduce her. Then a soldier enters brandishing a gun, triggering scenes of rape, violence and cannibalism. Premiered at the Royal Court, London, in 1995.
I first met Sarah when we were both at the Bush theatre. One day she said to me, “Oh my God, a play has been accepted at the Royal Court!” I remember being shocked by the vile response to Blasted. When I went to see it for myself, I was amazed that people were so angry about it. When you look at it and understand what she was writing about, you can see that there was no other way the piece could have been. That’s what’s special about Sarah’s writing.
The anger directed at the violence in her work showed a detachment from what we saw on the news, the war crimes that we did nothing about. This is happening now. Famously, however, Sarah always talked about her plays being about love. When Cate returns to Ian at the end of Blasted, it is an act of love. You think you’re looking at one thing – and then, without any tangible logic, it slides into something else.
Sarah always said, and I think this is still the case, that people don’t know how to write about form in the theater and that form has to defy what we already know and surprise us in some way. Some of the vitriol towards her stemmed from the fact that it was indefinable. She cared deeply about writers and felt a great responsibility to meet them. It is one of the greatest tragedies that she would have had no idea – and would have been so happy about – that her writing affected and affected people and that we are still talking about it 25 years after her death.
‘Sometimes people laugh at the violence at the end’
Stefanie Reinspergerby the Berliner Ensemble, op Phaedra’s love in which she currently plays the leading role. The play, a radical variation on Seneca’s Phaedra, is about the destructive relationship between Queen Phaedra and her sex-addicted stepson Hippolytus. Premiered at the Gate Theatre, London, 1996.
We stage Phaedra’s Love as a monologue and repeat the rape scene. I play all the roles: first you see Hippolytus’s perspective, then Phaedra’s. I always like to use my body as an instrument, especially in Sarah’s work. You need to discuss how to show the rape, how to make it as truthful as possible. So that was really a challenge, finding a way to do that with just myself.
Sometimes people start laughing at the violence at the end because it’s so absurd. Everyone in the audience is afraid of me because I like hanging out with them. The first part is really physical and loud. Robert Borgmann, my director, said to imagine jumping into the audience with your bare butt – it has to be brutal. But after those first twenty minutes you just have the text, and the text is so beautiful and loud. What she does is so intelligent, with all these ups and downs. That’s really rare.
I think about Sarah’s life a lot. It seems that there is a resurgence of interest in her work because she was a female author who wrote about violence and love. I mean, look at our society right now. Those topics will never go away.
‘We were booed once. It felt like quite an achievement.”
Daniel Evans on Cleanedin which rape, suicide and torture alternate with moments of tenderness in a university-like setting. One character has his tongue cut out and his feet cut off. Evans played in the premiered at the Royal Court in 1998.
I devoured Cleansed when I first read it. After Blasted there was an expectation and Sarah exceeded it – because Cleansed dares to go to places of deep, existential pain to talk about love. She could say so much with so few words. We rehearsed in a very cold hall, which wasn’t great for a play with a lot of nudity. We always had to take heaters with us. I remember Sarah arrived one day and said she wanted to make a change. The intention was to turn a comma into a period. I remember thinking, “Is that it?” But then I realized it completely changed the meaning.
We were booed once, which wasn’t very pleasant. But after all, we’re in England, where people don’t often boo, so it felt like quite an achievement. It was a very physical production. I think most of us were naked at some point.
James Macdonald was the director and Jeremy Herbert designed some scenes to make it look like the audience was watching from a bird’s eye view. Suzan Sylvester had to do this dance where she was in a harness, and she put it back in during the last week of running. It was a huge shock, but obviously very exciting when Sarah said she would play the role. She was so calm. She had to learn a dance, be naked, fly. But at least she already knew all the lines. It felt like she was speaking her absolute truth, without embellishment. There was no sense that she had developed habits, as actors do over time. Her actions encouraged us to emulate that.
‘You can set it up anywhere and cast anyone’
Tinuke Craig on To long fora revival of which she directed in 2020. A non-linear, poetic work with dialogue, the piece encompasses rape, incest, drug addiction, murder and suicide, as well as beauty and love. Premiered at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in 1998.
I read Crave when I was in college. I actually read all of Sarah’s plays in one evening while listening to Antony and the Johnsons. I remember Crave’s extraordinary monologue about what obsessive, destructive love feels like – how draining love sounded.
The play offers the director a lot of freedom and also a lot of structure. The characters have letters for their names – A, M, C and B – and it’s up for grabs as to what those letters mean. You can set it up anywhere and cast anyone. The possibilities are endless. It gives you enormous scope and you really have to ask yourself what you think is happening. On the other hand, there is a rhythm that is inescapable: musical, syncopated and specific. That rhythm determines how it should feel. As for what it’s trying to achieve, the clues are in the form. You just have to choose one of the millions of ways to get there.
Crave is about despair and not knowing, but it is also an incredibly knowing piece. It’s full of winks and nods and understands the cruel ironies of life. For us, it was about creating a space that plumbs the depths of our secret thoughts: the parts of ourselves that are needy, desperate, and shameful. It’s really naked.
‘I was afraid to identify with it’
Vinay Patelplaywright and screenwriter, op 4.48 Psychosis, Kane’s latest work consists of 24 sections with no specific setting, characters or stage directions. The title refers to the time in the early morning hours when despair and clarity merge. Premiered at the Royal Court in 2000, a year after Kane‘s dead.
When I first read this, the way Sarah talked about depression and medicalized despair felt very distant to me, partly because it exists in South Asian communities not to really talk about depression. I always thought that the way you deal with the feelings she was trying to express was not just to leave people with this feeling of misery, but to write things that lead them out of it.
Rereading the piece, I’m struck by how it drives home the idea that you’re always looking for a consistent version of yourself – and that you’re doomed to never find it. There’s something about the silence of the morning that allows you to have that kind of sanity and clarity, because the world is quiet. Your thoughts may be a little clearer. I realize now that I was afraid to identify with those kinds of things.
The last line of the play is ‘please open the curtains’ and there is a longing to get past that despair. Kane responds to a time when everything seemed solid and safe, so the idea of shaking people out of their despair felt important. But now despair is just one click away. It’s really constant. How does that affect the way you respond to a work like this?
• In Great Britain and Ireland, you can contact Samaritans on freephone 116 123, or by email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. You can contact youth suicide charity Papyrus on 0800 068 4141 or by email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat at 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service is Lifeline 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org