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Topic Summary

Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: February 06, 2011, 08:11:13 PM »

How would she have developed?  Who knows.  Some playwrights I really liked Pam Gems,  Peter Shaffer, ended up producing less interesting work and became ultimately disappointing.  Some just developed more and more like Caryl Churchill.

If you look at Mark Ravenhill, a playwright and friend of Sarah.  He started with plays like Shopping and F*cking and Faust not Faust, which I don't particularly like (but I have only read not seen).  Later he moved to The Cut with Ian McKellen and Ghost Story with Juliet Stevenson, both really good.  And he did the Barbican's pantomime Dick Whittington where he showed he really understood what pantomimes are about (fun- it was funny).  But he also disappoints a lot, particularly the short (15 minute) plays.  For me he is very much hit and miss.  But just as Sarah moved on from Blasted to Crave, he has also moved on.

Caryl Churchill still produces interesting work and she has now done over forty plays- imagine 40 Sarah Kane plays.  I can't think of one that I have seen (lots) that was not worth watching.

Sarah did attack the present in Phaedra (the royal wedding) so maybe she would have tackled Big Brother etc.  And given her sense of humour (David Beckham articles, references to Star Wars in her plays) it would be interesting to see her given the challenge of pantomime or something similar.  Also seeing an Ian McKellen, Juliet Stevenson, Sam West, Mark Rylance doing one of her plays- those four in Crave!!

Sad that we won't see more of her work, but we do have the five plays and one film, and I still want to see thenm every time they are performed.

Iain
Posted by: malmo58
« on: February 03, 2011, 05:14:07 AM »

Sarah would have been 40 today.

Any speculation about what directions her work would have taken by now is of course pure guesswork, but I have a feeling that at some point in the last decade she would have written something addressing the present celebrity culture - the boom of the gossip magazines (and the people who are famous mostly for being in them) and the phenomenon of game shows such as X Factor and Big Brother.

Remember her today.