Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane
Playwright The play Phaedra’s Love, by Sarah Kane, takes the classic Greek tragedy, Phaedra, and retells it in a modern-day setting. The play, which features incredibly violent and visceral scenes of sex, brutality, rape, and murder, is reflective of Sarah Kane’s writing style. Kane’s plays are known for being disturbingly violent and visual. As a playwright, Kane seeks to show rather than tell, taking inspiration from such playwrights as Edward Bond, Samuel Beckett, Howard Brenton, and Georg Buchner. Kane’s personal life highly influenced her plays and writing style. The central themes of her plays; sex, violence, death, and mental illness, are issues that Kane dealt with herself. Though Sarah Kane’s theatre career was short (only four years) she was able to accomplish much that helped her to develop her style and grow in popularity as a playwright. Kane was an excellent student, graduating with first class honors from Bristol University, where she studied drama, and going on to receive her MA from Birmingham University. Kane first exploded onto the London theatre scene in 1995 with her play, Blasted, which had scenes of rape, eye gauging, and cannibalism, conveyed with a brutalism similar to the final scene in Phaedra’s Love. The violence of Kane’s plays is directly influenced by her life in Brixton, where she was both a witness and a victim of extreme racism and homophobia. Phaedra’s Love was only Sarah Kane’s second play, but it followed many of the patterns already set by her previous work. Phaedra’s Love debuted on May 15, 1996, at the Golden Gate Theatre in London. Kane herself directed the debut production. The play features intense scenes of violence and brutality. The play also takes place in a setting designed to be dark, depressing, and hopeless. The play’s protagonist, Hippolytus, is unapologetically repulsive and sexually depraved. Kane however, attempts to paint him as a tragic hero by making him completely honest despite