Sarah Kane is basically the most baller playwright I've read lately. Up until recently, I had only familiarized myself with 4.48 Psychosis, which is an entirely different can of worms to delve into for another time and place. But, I checked out a book of her complete plays from the library and thought I should read up a bit. I started with the play, Phaedra's Love. If you're ever planning on reading it, I encourage you to look up a summary on the Ancient Greek play, Hippolytus, by Euripides, beforehand. I had to read the ancient play for my love poetry class. It made reading Kane so much richer for me because I had previously just seen the plot as an ancient text.
Opening up Phaedra's Love, I thought I knew what type of plot to expect. But, Sarah Kane's writing has an extreme shock value that I was not anticipating. I haven't seen this play staged, but I have no idea how extreme sex scenes, evisceration, castration, and violence to such an extent could ever be depicted on stage. Kane goes there in her writing. There is no restraint in the level of 'taboo' she is willing to touch. I hate to ruin the story, but the incest in itself is so difficult for the contemporary reader to swallow. If you consider yourself conservative in your openness to extremely experimental and racy subject matter, this piece is not for you. But, if you are the opposite in your thinking, you may like it. I don't love everything about the extreme perversity. When I closed the book, I had no idea what I had just read. But, I knew it was something that fascinated me, and I wanted to read more. These plays make me grind my teeth, cringe, and become physically uncomfortable. But, I love them. I would say that these plays would work in film form because they are so graphic. But, the intensity of live theatre is what makes reading it so astounding, and I wouldn't want to blemish that purity that Sarah Kane intended when writing. So, if you ever want to try something different from the good old classics of American theatre, read some Sarah Kane. But, don't say I didn't warn you.
