Sarah Kane was the daughter of Peter and Janine Kane, both of whom were English journalists. Peter was a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror, and the family members, for a short time during Kane’s teenage years, became fervent born-again Christians. Kane renounced her Christianity in her early twenties but admitted that the violent imagery she found in the Bible inspired her work as a playwright. Kane joined local drama groups as a teenager and directed plays by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov. For a time, she skipped school altogether to work as an assistant director for a production at a school in London’s Soho district.

Kane attended the University of Bristol, acting in school plays and directing a number of student productions, including Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (pr., pb. 1982). After graduating with top honors in drama, she enrolled at the University of Birmingham, where she received her M.A. degree. While at school, Kane gained a reputation for nightclubbing and having affairs with women, though her work does not contain noticeable lesbian themes.

In 1996, her first full-length play, Sick, composed of three monologues (Comic Monologue, Starved, and What She Said) was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. However, it was her play Blasted, which she had written in 1994 while at Birmingham University and which was presented at the students’ end-of-year show, that brought Kane to the forefront of the New Wave theater scene.

The first professional production of Blasted opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in January, 1995, in a secondary theater that held sixty-two seats, forty-five of which were occupied by critics. No more than a thousand people saw Blasted during its short run, but the virulent critical response to Kane’s violent imagery and language splashed her name not only across newspaper arts sections but also across the pages of the British tabloids and made her the topic of television gossip shows as well. The play did have its share of admirers—among them, playwright Harold Pinter, whose hand-delivered fan letter to Kane shortly after seeing Blasted was among her most cherished possessions. Before Kane’s death, Blasted had already been produced in Germany, Austria, France, Australia, Serbia, Belgium, and Italy.

In 1995, Kane also wrote the teleplay for Skin, a short film about a black woman who comes into contact with a skinhead and the unexpected twist as to who will be the victim. During her season at Paines Plough, Kane wrote Crave. Because of the critical outrage over Blasted and because Kane wanted theatergoers to judge the play on its own merits, Crave was first presented under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon.

Critical outrage and accusations of what was perceived as a childish attempt to shock depressed Kane but did not deter her from continuing her work, and actors, directors, and producers with whom she worked—as well as fellow playwrights Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and Steven Berkoff—continued to defend her as a thoughtful, brave, and angry poet.

Kane battled mental illness and depression throughout most of her adult life, each new bout of depression affecting her more seriously than the last. In the two years before her death, she checked herself into mental hospitals several times and was treated with a number of antidepressant drugs. After her death, Tom Fahy, a psychiatrist who treated Kane in 1997 at Maudsley Hospital in London, told British reporters that Kane had told him she expected to be dead by the time she was twenty-seven.

On February 18, 1999, at the age of twenty-eight, Kane left...