Edward Bond (born 18 July 1934) is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter.He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Bond is broadly considered one among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama. Edward Bond was born on 18 July 1934 into a lower-working-class family in Holloway, North London. As a child during World War II he was evacuated to the countryside but was present during the bombings on London in 1940 and 1944. This early exposure to the violence and terror of war probably shaped themes in his work, while his experience of the evacuation gave him an awareness of social alienation which would characterize his writing. At fourteen, with his class he saw a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth by Donald Wolfit which was revelatory. He later explained that this performance was the first time he had been presented with traumatic experiences comparable to his own in a way he could apprehend and give meaning to. At fifteen, he left school with only a very basic education, something from which he derived a deep sense of social exclusion that contributed significantly to his political orientation. Bond then educated himself, driven by an impressive eagerness for knowledge. After various jobs in factories and offices, he did his national service in the British Army occupation forces in Vienna between 1953 and 1955. During his time in the army he discovered the naked violence hidden behind normal social behavior, and decided to start writing. Back in London, he educated himself in theatre while working, saw everything he could on stage and exercised his skill by writing drama sketches. He was especially impressed by the performances of the Berliner Ensemble in the summer of 1956. In June 1958, after submitting two plays to the Royal Court Theatre (The Fiery Tree and Klaxon in Atreus' Place, which Bond keeps unpublished) he was invited to join its newly formed writers' group. Mid-1960s to mid-1970s: first plays and association with the Royal Court After three years studying with writers his age but already well-known (like John Arden, Arnold Wesker, and Ann Jellicoe), Bond had his real first play, The Pope's Wedding staged as a Sunday night 'performance without décor' at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962. This is a falsely naturalistic drama (the title refers to "an impossible ceremony")set in contemporary Essex which shows, through a set of tragic circumstances, the death of rural society brought about by modern post-war urban living standards. Bond's next play Saved delves into the lives of a selection of South London working class youths suppressed - as Bond would see it - by a brutal economic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift eventually into barbarous mutual violence. Among them, one character, Len, persistently (and successfully) tries to maintain links between people violently tearing each other often by notorious directors such as Peter Stein in Germany or Claude Régy in France. The subdued Edwardian-set comedy The Sea (1973) shows a seaside community on England's East Coast a few years before World War I. The failure of this historical class war eventually drives him to a madhouse. claiming that removing this pivotal scene would alter the meaning of the play. The Fool (1975) reinterprets the life of the rural 19th century poet John Clare. including its most controversial scenes. then artistic director of the Royal Court. Her two sons are made conjoined twins.to pieces. Bond and the Royal Court continued to defy the censor. While Bond's work remained banned for performance in Britain. Bond then produced two pieces exploring the place of the artist in society. the play was controversial everywhere but is now considered as a 20th century classic. In 1974 Bond translated Spring Awakening (1891) by the German playwright Frank Wedekind. The play shows the social causes of violence and opposes them with individual freedom. In 1976 Bingo won the Obie award as Best Off-Broadway play and The Fool was voted best play of the year by Plays and Players. repeatedly asking himself "Was anything done?". Saved became the greatest international success of its time with more than thirty different productions around the world between 1966 and 1969. about the suppression of adolescent sexuality. dominated by a dictatorial lady and overwhelmed by the drowning of one of its young citizens. The Lord Chamberlain sought to censor it. The play takes place in a contorted version of the court of Queen Victoria. but Bond refused to alter a word. the play is (rightly) subtitled "a comedy" and was intended as optimistic after the gloomy mood of his previous plays. Bingo (1974) portrayed the retired Shakespeare as an exploitative landlord. who eventually commits suicide. an impotent yet compassionate witness of social violence. and Victoria is portrayed as a lesbian. This would remain the major theme throughout Bond's work. The play was directed by William Gaskill. The Theatres Act 1843 was still in force and required scripts to be submitted for approval by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. Nurtured by his experience as a child evacuee to the seaside. and Bond's was the first translation to restore Wedekind's original text. At that time. It involves Clare in the Little port Riots of 1816. Saved included a scene featuring the stoning to death of a baby in its pram. This is encapsulated by the successful escape of a young and promising couple from this narrow and oppressive society. as did a scene in which the character Len eats another person standing in a queue in front of him. and then makes his own poetry the depository of the spirit of this rural rebellion against the growth of modern industrial capitalism. The play had always been censored or presented with major cuts since its writing. and in 1967 produced a new play. the surreal Early Morning. This made the play extremely scandalous. From the 1970s to the mid-1980s: broaden scope of practice and political experiments . an adaptation of Webster's The White Devil for Michael Lindsay-Hogg to re-open the Old Vic and a libretto for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to open at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: We Come to the River. Bond accepted an Honorary Doctorate by Yale University (though thirty years before he was not allowed to sit for his eleven-plus examination) and he began to take up students workshops in Newcastle. both the Northern Ireland conflict and the social crisis of the winter of Discontent. Hecuba. on one hand Stone and A-A-America (pronounced as a sneeze). and he was commissioned to write plays both by renowned institutions and fringe activist companies. alludes directly to the Falklands war and shows an idiotic aristocrat stealing the brain of a gifted worker and sending him to die in a war in a country that "sounds like the name of a disease". though often disagreeing with the aesthetic choices of its productions [23] or protesting at not being consulted sufficiently. In 1977. being (in Bond's view) politically counterproductive and supportive of reactionary violence. expanding his range of writing and his collaborations. as a half-musical parody of Restoration comedies. For example. the daughter of servants. Bond's working relationship with the Royal Court progressively slackened. respectively for Gay Sweatshop and the Almost Free Theatre and. recognized the genuine support the company gave to his work. His early 1980s plays were directly influenced by the coming to power of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher and the profound social changes they were bringing about. in 1976 he wrote. against the Athenian empire. it shows the fight of the decayed Trojan queen. who she once saved from a firing squad. Restoration. whose compassionate nature doesn’t prevent them being exploiters and collaborationists during the German occupation. two agit-prop-style plays. Durham and Birmingham. set in a fantasy Trojan War and based on Euripides' Trojan Women. succeeding only when she abandons the aristocracy and the interests of the state to physically meet the proletariat and join the people's cause. based on the recent events in the UK. The Woman. and by the mid 1970s he had found a new partner in the Royal Shakespeare Company.[25] the play shows an eventually successful revolution whose leader nevertheless constantly faces the human cost of political change and experiences as futile an ideology of compassion. Comparable to Lear. The most accomplished among them was The Worlds.Bond remained a successful playwright in England all through the 1970s. His plays were requested by institutional and community theatres.[24] In 1977 the RSC commissioned a new play for the opening of their new London theatre. on the other. the RSC revived and toured his plays regularly until the early 1990s. written for a youth festival. and Bond. for which he wrote several plays. rejects the values of the former. Beginning with Bingo in 1976. written for the Newcastle University Theatre Society. One is the daughter of former landlords. deals with working class support for the Tories by showing a servant accepting his conviction and eventual execution for a murder committed by his cynical and silly master. Derek. for premieres and revivals. The other. Set in an imaginary medieval Japan and based on an anecdote from the classical Japanese poet Bashō. the Warehouse. The English Cat). which would be The Bundle. Bond assigned the same political concern to his next play. However. (In 1982 the pair collaborated again. . less successfully on another opera. Summer deals with the moral ambiguities of capitalism through the conflict of two women in socialist Yugoslavia. although remaining generally unsatisfied.[38] and he directed workshops for RSC actors with Cicely Berry. but considered this production a failure.[35] In 1985. Peter Hall at the National Theatre repeatedly refused to allow him to direct his new play Human Cannon. He only agreed to return to the RSC in 1996 when he directed In the Company of Men. Bond directed his last four plays in London between 1978 and 1982: The Worlds and Restoration at the Royal Court and The Woman and Summer at the National Theatre. Bond gained the reputation of a "difficult author". and Bond complained undiplomatically about their lack of artistic engagement[31][32] and had crude rows both with some reluctant actors and theatre managers. During the mid-1980s.[27] These latter two introduced the South African actress Yvonne Bryceland. though poorly reviewed. written for Yvonne Bryceland and the wide stage of the Olivier. whom Bond admired. especially for its innovative use of the huge open stage.[28] The Woman was the first contemporary play performed in the recently opened Olivier auditorium and. considering her the ideal female interpreter. These conflicts are still highly controversial. Bond continued writing plays in the knowledge that they would not be staged in Britain except by amateur companies. Bond's work had a new beginning with the trilogy of The War Plays. he attempted to direct his War Plays at the RSC. Bond had planned to write about nuclear war since the early 1980s. and Bond and those with whom he has clashed continue to settle scores in letters. He found a means to do so after testing a storyline with Sicilian students in Palermo. To . The theatres and their actors accused him of being authoritarian and abstract in his direction[23] and unrealistic in his production requirements. books and interviews. He nevertheless regularly accepted revivals and sometimes got involved in these productions. Motivated by the threats of the last years of the Cold War and the political activism it provoked in Britain and Europe. which contributed to keeping him away from the major English stages.[26] He therefore began directing his own plays and progressively he made this a condition of their first production.[36][37] He then decided not to allow his plays to be premiered in London by institutional theatres without proper working conditions. Bond's working relationships as a director with both the National Theatre and the Royal Court were highly conflicted.[26][29][30] However.[33][34] He felt that British theatre had no understanding of his intention to revitalise modern drama and could no longer fulfil his artistic demands. After staging Lear in German at the Burgtheater. but left the rehearsals before the premiere after disastrous sessions.[40][41][42] The turning point of the 1980s Nevertheless. in the mid-1980s. the production was acclaimed as an aesthetic success.[39] Except for two plays written for the BBC in the early 1990s (Olly's Prison and Tuesday). in Vienna in 1973. accepting very bad working conditions. and then violently criticized the production and the theatre. With his notoriously uncompromising attitude. Bond felt he needed practical contact with the stage to experiment with his ideas on drama and improve his writing.Controversial directing attempts and quarrels with the institutions During the late 1970s. In the Company of Men shows a desperate fight by the adoptive son of an armaments factory manager to be who he is in a cynical.[43] He saw in this a deeply rooted force in the individual preserving an innate sense of justice that he theorized as 'Radical Innocence'. aborted and burnt to death in the nuclear global bombings. The Tin Can People (written for a young activists' company). from a political perspective. These desperate efforts to stay human or be human anew in an inhuman situation would be the purpose of most of the characters in Bond's subsequent plays. Between 1984 and 1985 he wrote three plays to meet various requests. Bond's plays explored in depth a gloomy vision of a future society (in 2077) where the potential menaces of social breakdown and bio-political control have become real and . In Olly's Prison. More innovative in structure. comes from the future to accuse the society of the audience of his murder. each student who improvised as the soldier refused to kill a foreign child and paradoxically returned home to kill their own sibling instead. According to Bond. intrigue-ridden neo-liberal business world that Bond considers the mirror of our postmodern times. a soldier realises he cannot shoot the victims any more.[45] This discovery also gave him the key to write on nuclear war. in which a mother kills her child because she can no longer feed her. imaginary section resembling a gloomy fairy tale. with a second. Jackets. questioning public acceptance of it and collaboration with it by ordinary citizens. where she rebuilds her humanity bit by bit by meeting other survivors.point to the barbarity of a society which planned to kill the enemy's children to protect their own (that being how he saw the logic of nuclear deterrence). In Tuesday. The first. realistic part reproducing the historical Babi Yar massacre. Recent years From 1997 to 2008. Coffee exposes the cultural roots of violence. His next play. is a short agit-prop play in which a child.[44] Subsequently he built on this concept a comprehensive theory of drama in its anthropological and social role that he intended to go beyond Brecht's theories on political drama. a man who has killed his daughter and forgotten his crime tries to find meaning in his life. in the sterile global wilderness that nuclear war has made of the world. which he united as The War Plays. It contrasts an initial. not to just to condemn the atrocity of war in a general way but. It focuses on a soldier who kills his baby sister and his mother who tries to kill her neighbour's child to save her own. The second. The third. As in the Palermo improvisation. The play then follows her twenty years later. where the same characters are among the victims. and eventually decides instead to shoot his officer and escape with the girl. he suggested an improvisation in which a soldier was ordered to kill a child of his community to curb mass starvation. denounces capitalist society's ideology of death. the scope of which will be to explore the limits and possibilities of humanity. again uses the Palermo improvisation and sets up a confrontation between two young men manipulated by military conspiracies. It shows a community of survivors living on an infinite supply of canned food running berserk when they feel threatened by a stranger and destroying all they have as in a reduced nuclear war. a young deserter tries to tell the truth about the war but is destroyed by society. Great Peace (written for the RSC) re-enacts the Palermo improvisation in a city barely surviving in the aftermath of nuclear bombardment. first in medieval Japan. then in contemporary urban riots. Red Black and Ignorant (written for a Festival dedicated to George Orwell). where social relationships and memory have been abolished. where they are now relayed by the National Association for Teaching of Drama. there has been renewed worldwide interest in Bond's work and ideas on drama. From 1995 to 2009 he wrote seven very different plays dedicated to young audiences for this company: At the Inland Sea (1995).[50] Have I None. Eleven Vests (1997). During the early years of the 21st century. In Germany. The Crime of the 21st Century. In 1999. Have I None (2000). he has held several conferences with participants drawn from a wide audience[52] and has directed many workshops in Paris and elsewhere. This collaboration has brought Bond's theories on drama to broader attention in England. The Under Room (2005) Tune (2007) and A Window (2009). Big Brum appears to be the only professional company in England for more than two decades that Bond is openly writing for and allowing to premiere his plays. the 'Wapos'. In the United States. he wrote The Children to be played by pupils at Manor Community College in Cambridge. Bond's other partnership of recent years has been with French director Alain Françon who premiered In the Company of Men[47] in 1992 and produced an acclaimed version of The War Plays at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994.[46] This other contribution to drama intended for young audiences has been performed ever since in many schools and theatres in England and abroad and counts as one of Bond's international successes. but some of whom try to find a human dimension to their lives and desperately attempt to escape the alienated and criminal conditions they are trapped in. of which he remains an associate artist. shows a few outcasts who have fled the over-controlled cities to hide in a no-man's-land where they try in vain to rebuild their humanity by creating a semblance of community. Woodruff also directed Saved (2001) and Chair (2008) at Theatre for a New Audience in New York. Among recent productions are revivals of Lear at the Crucible Theatre Sheffield featuring Ian McDiarmid and Restoration with added . The first in this cycle. interest in his plays has remained high since the seventies. Have I None. To Françon and his actors Bond dedicated People and Innocence. with strong support and involvement from Bond. He has been invited to take part in conferences and workshops all over Europe and America. Robert Woodruff and the American Repertory Theatre produced Olly's Prison in 2005. Coffee and The Crime of the 21st Century. on scholastic and military authoritarianism.[48] re-introducing Bond's work to France where his plays and theory have since become highly influential.structural. with Have I None. with David Haig and Eileen Atkins. which. and where people are harassed by the resistance of their imagination and panicked by strangers.[49] The Crime of the 21st Century.[53] In Britain his plays are now regularly revived in community theatre and in 2008. he had his first West End production in a career of almost fifty years with Jonathan Kent's revival of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Born and Innocence follow the actions of militarized policemen. consumption and possession standardized. One was the Birmingham-based theatre-ineducation company Big Brum. Chair and The Under Room show the monotonous life of the cities. in which a youth confronts the legacy of the holocaust. who perpetrate atrocities on reluctant civilians during mass deportations. The Balancing Act (2003). he calls The Colline Pentad and considers his major project of the past decade. Bond found two new partners in the mid90s who would keep alive his impulse for writing. Françon continued to promote Bond's work when he was head of the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris from 1997 to 2010 and. Born[51] and Chair. staged Coffee. Though isolated from the institutional British theatres. In France. technology.songs. Notably. serious prose prefaces to his plays. including the prefaces. In 1999 he published The Hidden Plot. provisionally entitled There Will Be More. Sarah Kane From Wikipedia. The Broken Bowl and The Edge. Eight volumes of his Collected Plays. These contain the author's meditations on capitalism. Bond himself directed a revival of The Fool[54] and took over the direction of There Will Be More. Bond has been conspicuous as the first dramatist since George Bernard Shaw to produce long. He has published two volumes from his notebooks and four volumes of letters. The Lyric Hammersmith presented the first London production of Bond's Saved for 27 years in autumn 2011 in a production by the venue's Artistic Director Sean Holmes. During the autumn of 2010 The Cock Tavern Theatre in London produced six of his plays simultaneously (one chosen from each decade). His Collected Poems was published in 1987. violence. 2012 will see two new plays performed by Big Brum Theatre in Education Company. toured in 2006 by the Oxford Stage Company. commissioned for this occasion and performed although unfinished. a collection of writings on theatre and the meaning of drama. post-modernism and imagination and develop a comprehensive theory on the use and means of drama. are available from the UK publisher Methuen. the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation. Publications Since the early 1970s. including a new one. search Sarah Kane . if slowly. Kane died in 1999. such as Graham Saunders. sexual desire. London. and two newspaper articles for The Guardian. For a year she was writer-in-residence for Paines Plough. exploration of theatrical form and. in her earlier work. throughout her adult life. Essex. a theatre company promoting new writing. she rejected those beliefs.[4] However.[5] Before that. she studied drama at Bristol University. Kane was a committed Christian in adolescence. where she actively encouraged other writers. torture — both physical and psychological — and death.[1] Critics. Essex. and went on to take an MA course in playwriting at the University of Birmingham. pain. They are characterised by a poetic intensity. a form of drama which broke away from the conventions of naturalist theatre. Later. Skin.[2] Kane's published work consists of five plays. have seen her work as part of what Sierz calls the In-Yer-Face style of theatre.Born 3 February 1971 Brentwood. Cleansed. however. two days after taking an overdose of prescription drugs. United Kingdom 20 February 1999 (aged 28) London. and raised by evangelical parents. Born in Brentwood. the use of extreme and violent stage action. she had worked briefly as literary associate for the Bush Theatre. one short film. she wrote consistently. 4. graduating in 1992. including Aleks Sierz. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love.48 Psychosis Sarah Kane (3 February 1971 – 20 February 1999) was an English playwright. she committed suicide by hanging herself by her shoelaces in a bathroom at London's King's College Hospital.[1][3] Kane struggled with severe depression for many years and was twice voluntarily admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London. Kane herself. led by the playwright David Edgar. After attending Shenfield High School.[6] Works . pared-down language. United Kingdom Playwright English British MA University of Birmingham Died Occupation Language Nationality Education Alma mater Literary movement In-yer-face theatre Notable work(s) Blasted. when. as well as scholars of her work. identify some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. It was later seen to be making parallels between domestic violence and the war in Bosnia. by taking this setting in an English Northern industrial town and suddenly transporting the action to a war zone. The action is set in a room of a luxurious hotel in Leeds where Ian. and he in turn publicly defended Kane's play and talent.Kane originally wanted to be a poet. where they were given a public performance."[16] Blasted was produced again in 2001 at the Royal Court. Kane's first play was Blasted. London 1997). suggests that "The argument is made through form. The critic Ken Urban says that "for Kane. which makes it the most existential of the arts. if in slightly more muted terms. The Daily Mail drama critic Jack Tinker wrote a review headlined "this disgusting feast of filth. simple-minded young woman. Blasted was fiercely attacked in the British press. reality magnified. Howard Barker. The narrative ultimately breaks into a series of increasingly disturbing short scenes. Its scenes of anal rape. Kane said. the play takes on different. suggesting she should show her work to the Royal Court Theatre in London. a racist and foul-mouthed middle-aged journalist. armed with a sniper's rifle.[13] Harold Pinter (who became a friend). From its opening in a naturalistic –though troubling– world.." The critical realism that the first scene sets up is "literally blasted apart" in Scene Two. however. through the shifts in styles in Blasted."[7] Blasted Main article: Blasted Apart from some writing which she would dismiss as "juvenilia" (some of it reused in later plays Crave and 4.. directed by James Macdonald.[10] and Georg Büchner.[9] Other dramatists whom Kane particularly liked and who could be seen as influences include Samuel Beckett. That's how she constructs the argument."[17] Skin Main article: Skin (1995 film) . She wrote that she was attracted to the stage because "theatre has no memory. and between emotional and physical violence. by most other critics. and other forms of brutality. hell is not metaphysical: it is hyperreal. The assistant director of this production.I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind. opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995. The agent Mel Kenyon was in the audience and subsequently represented Kane. praised by fellow playwrights Martin Crimp. appears in the room.[1] The completed play.[15] who considered it "rather a tender play". but decided that she was unable to convey her thoughts and feelings through poetry. first tries to seduce and later rapes Cate. an innocent. whose play Woyzeck she later directed (Gate Theatre. created one of the biggest theatre scandals in London since Edward Bond's Saved[1] in 1965.[1] Kane wrote the first two scenes while a student in Birmingham."[11] This reaction was shared.[12] Blasted was. Kane admired Bond's work. nightmarish dimensions when a soldier.48 Psychosis[8]).[14] Caryl Churchill. Joseph Hill-Gibbins. cannibalism. "The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war. "Marie" was Kane's middle name and she was brought up in the town of Kelvedon Hatch in Essex.[1] The play was performed under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon. nor does it give any setting for the play. rather than Phaedra.[18] Phaedra's Love Main article: Phaedra's Love Kane was then commissioned by the Gate Theatre. In this reworking of the myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus. London. It places a young woman and her brother. It was first shown at the London Film Festival in October 1995 and televised by Channel 4 in 1997. Eliot's The Waste Land.[20] Crave marks a break from the on-stage violence of Kane's previous works and a move to a freer."[1] Directed by Kane. Cleansed Main article: Cleansed Cleansed premiered at the Royal Court's theatre downstairs in April 1998. rather than describing. It dispenses with plot and unlike her earlier work.[1] It has four characters. it was first performed at the Gate Theatre in 1996. at times inspired by her reading of the Bible and T. The film stars Ewen Bremner. Phaedra's Love was loosely based on the classical dramatist Seneca's play Phaedra. depicting a violent relationship between a black woman and a racist skinhead. it is Hippolytus. to write a play inspired by a classic text. a disturbed boy. but also so that the play could be viewed without the taint of its author's notorious reputation. with its highly specific stage directions. a gay couple and a peepshow dancer within this world of extreme cruelty in which declarations of love are viciously tested. The play contains some of Kane's wittiest and most cynical dialogue. Yemi Ajibade and James Bannon. overseen by the sadistic Tinker. Kane had written the play after reading Roland Barthes' assertion that "being in love is like being in Auschwitz. if any. but given a contemporary setting.Skin was an eleven minute screenplay written for Channel 4. the actors should perform on stage. sometimes lyrical writing style. Kane described it as "my comedy. and was directed by James Macdonald. It is Hippolytus' emotional cruelty which pushes Phaedra to suicide. Marcia Rose. violent action on stage." Crave Main article: Crave (play) A change in critical opinion occurred with Kane's fourth play. S. Kane reversed classical tradition by showing."[19] Cleansed is set in what Kane in her stage directions described as a university but which functions more as a torture chamber or concentration camp. partly because the notion amused Kane. each identified only by a letter of the alphabet. Crave. . which was directed by Vicky Featherstone and presented by Paines Plough at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1998. a British TV station. who takes the central role. This was at the time the most expensive production in the Royal Court's history. It pushes the limits of what can be realised in the theatre: stage directions include "a sunflower pushes through the floor and grows above their heads" and "the rats carry Carl's feet away. gives no indication what actions. Reception Though Kane's work never played to large audiences in the UK and was at first dismissed by many newspaper critics. Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression. dispenses with plot and character. it may have been influenced by Martin Crimp's 1997 play Attempts on Her Life. and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play. Kane had written of her admiration for Crimp's formal innovations. her plays have been widely performed in Europe and South America. written when she had lost "faith in love. frequently woke in the morning."[5] According to Greig.48 Psychosis Her last play.As such.m. Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work. Kane regarded it as the "most despairing" of her plays. directed by James Macdonald. At the time. which similarly dispenses with setting and overall narrative. In 2005. This. In November 2010. was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000.48 Psychosis. the theatre director Dominic Dromgoole wrote that she was "without doubt the most performed new writer on the international circuit". the title derives from the time — 4:48 a.48 Psychosis Main article: 4."[25] . in her depressed state."[24] At one point in Germany. there were 17 simultaneous productions of her work. at the Royal Court. it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Greig as having as its subject the "psychotic mind. the theatre critic Ben Brantley of the New York Times described the SoHo Rep's "shattering production" of Kane's Blasted (which had opened two years previously) as "one of the most important New York premieres of the decade.[21] The work is highly intertextual."[22] 4. 4.[23] Fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill has said her plays "have almost certainly achieved canonical status. — when Kane.