How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s

Ravenhill recalled that upon telling Kane that he thought Cleansed was brilliant, she smiled and replied, “Yeah, well, I’m in love”. A couple of months later, when she directed Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck at the Gate, Kane removed the possibility of redemption for any of the characters. “Yeah, well, I fell out of love,” Kane explained. As explored in her final two plays, 1998’s Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, Kane had fallen out with the idea of love itself. She wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon to detach herself from the associations of her name, allowing her to explore a free-flowing poetic narrative through the voices of four characters called C, M, B, and A. The characters mostly exchange single lines, until A bursts into a long monologue about all the little romantic things she wants to do with her lover. The stream of consciousness twists and turns between anger and love in the manner which defines Kane’s worldview.