Shot down ... Sarah Kane's plays, such as Blasted above, attract just as much bile as praise. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The symposium on the late playwright Sarah Kane at the Barbican last weekend turned out to be the wrong place to look for serious reflection about her work. Those who knew Kane dutifully trotted out their stories, and there was a bare five minutes for questions from the audience after panel discussions.
At the Barbican forum Thomas Ostermeier, the director of Zerbombt (Blasted), claimed "nobody in Germany questions whether Sarah Kane was a good writer". The question over there is whether or not she was great.
Ostermeier certainly believes Blasted is a modern classic: "I was always afraid to do it because I was so deeply impressed by the play". All of her plays are in repertoire at Berlin's Schaubhune and, tellingly, Ostermeier said he doesn't have to worry about audience numbers when he stages them.
In his Tuesday blog, Brian Logan said the critical pendulum had swung too far in Kane's favour. Logan is quite right that the fuss surrounding the so-called "New Brutalist" generation has overshadowed some fine playwrights, though Kane is hardly to blame if they've been denied their time in the sun. But despite the creeping correlation of Kane's suffering with her talent (pace Plath), the state of debate is rather more healthy in Britain than it is in Germany.
Kane has detractors as well as obsequiously respectful admirers. The Telegraph's Charles Spencer has written that Blasted "still doesn't strike me as a masterpiece - it's too glib and derivative for that". The Evening Standard disliked the Oxford Stage Company's production of Cleansed as much as I admired its furious beauty. And we should remember that Kane's stuff hardly sets off the kerching of cash registers in this country. Zerbombt was only on for four nights and until very recently revivals have been few and far between.
Kieron Quirke's contention [in The Evening Standard] that Kane's world view is tediously self-righteous ("we're all screwed and racists and men are to blame") seems to me to be facile. But her plays are certainly a precarious mix of the crude and the sensitive. Kane often pushes the audience, as well as her characters, to the very brink of what we can bear and leaves us teetering there.
There are kinds of plays you can't say you find lethal without people assuming that you loathed them because they were too visceral, too truthful for you. And I suspect critics are increasingly afraid of being thought uncool if they express disgust with brutality on stage.
But I don't believe Blasted simply whacks us over and over with the same hammer. It moves beyond "shock theatre" to become a powerful reminder that people are capable of anything. I rate it, but I hope it never becomes heresy to dislike it.
