Unrelenting emotional pain is another theme in these plays. Sarah Kane committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. This fact is inescapable as one reads her body of work. One must be careful not to view the work she wrote through the prism of her death, but the death has permeated it. Self-destruction is always on Kane's mind.
For many characters in Kane's canon - Ian, Hippolytus, C, Billy, and the protagonist of "4.48 Psychosis" - death is the final recourse from unremitting suffering.