Social and Personal Suffering are Connected

Suffering and cruelty run throughout all of Sarah Kane's work, and though her pieces are intimate - dealing with individuals and their private struggles - they nonetheless contain analysis of larger social struggles. In this collection, the social and the personal are inextricably linked.

Indeed, the final cries of anguish Kane wrote, in "4.48 Psychosis", involve a chronically depressed woman expressing guilt over the atrocities of Bosnia and the Holocaust. To the suicidal individual, she implies, no person is innocent in a world where people suffer grave cruelties. "Blasted" is dedicated, in fact, to linking the cruelty of a dysfunctional affair with the unequivocal brutality of the Bosnia conflict.

"Cleansed", however, is the most unabashed linking of atrocity and depression. The individuals contained in Tinker's concentration camp are all struggling to forge a relational connection with someone else. Tinker's dedication is to testing these...