Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

The first book to focus exclusively on playwright Sarah Kane’s approach to mind and mental health; it brings together archival material, healthcare contexts and contemporary performances. As such, it offers an important re-evaluation of Kane’s oeuvre, revealing the relationship between theatre and mind, which lies at the heart of her theatrical project. Drawing on performance theory, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this book argues that Kane’s innovations generated a ‘dramaturgy of psychic life’, which re-shape the encounter between stage and audience. It uses previously unseen archival material and contemporary productions to uncover the mechanics of this innovative theatre practice. Through a radically open-ended approach to dramaturgy, Kane’s works offer urgent insights into mental suffering that take us beyond traditional discourses of empathy and ‘mental health’ and into a profound rethinking of theatre as a mode of thought. It makes a case for the relevance of Kane’s work to understandings of contemporary diagnostic categories and places it in urgent debates about mental health in the medical humanities.