Graham Saunders

" Voici un livre pionnier, qui aura une influence déterminante sur toutes les études à venir sur le théâtre de Sarah Kane. Graham Saunders a parlé avec les metteurs en scène, les acteurs et tous ceux qui ont travaillé avec elle et la connaissaient intimement. On peut entendre le bruissement des pages de manuscrits, les pas dans les salles de répétition, les tasses de café des étudiants qui discutent tard dans la nuit. " Edward Bond

Sarah Kane et le théâtre

Love me or kill me

Formerly Head of History Department Graham Saunders, PhD

Love Me or Kill Me is the first study of Sarah Kane, the most significant British dramatist in post-war theater. It covers all of Kane's major plays and productions, contains hitherto unpublished material and reviews, and looks at her continuing influence after her tragic early death. Locating the main dramatic sources and features of her work as well as centralizing her place within the 'new wave' of emergent British dramatists in the 1990's, Graham Saunders provides an introduction for those familiar and unfamiliar with her work.

Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes

'Love Me Or Kill Me'

Anne Etienne

This book incorporates a wide theoretical, cultural, literary and historical engagement in exploring the tension between dramatic productions and the forms of censorship they encounter from creation to reception. The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship offers global new insights into censorship practices, examining attempts at repression motivated either by fears that audiences gathering together to watch live dramatic events will lead to sedition and mass uprisings, or by moral or religious squeamishness requiring the establishment of institutional systems of censorship to curb or suppress the stage. As such, the Handbook aims to initiate redefinitions of what we understand or experience as censorship. Who knew theatre could (still) carry so many threats, or be so widely provocative and dangerous? This is an extraordinary and often eye-opening set of thirty-six individually insightful, wide-ranging and oftentimes disturbing essays, each of which offers unique insights into theatre censorship practices and their impact within a specific political and moral culture. There is a particular emphasis on the recent and current, and the authors speak with first-hand knowledge and from direct experience not only about the restrictions but also how artists sometimes negotiate and evade these. What makes the book so especially fascinating and illuminating is seeing so many examples juxtaposed together. This enables the reader to hear the essays and the cultures talking to and alongside each other. The collection repeatedly breaks fresh ground, and the editors deserve enormous credit for gathering and effectively curating so many reports from the front-line. Steve Nicholson, Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield, UK Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders’s book is a wide-ranging, incisive and compelling collection of reflections and case studies on the theatre industry’s relationship to censorship and self-censorship from a historical and contemporaneous perspective. An impressive array of authors have been assembled for this volume representing, among them, views on the subject from Spain, Denmark, Norway, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Iran, Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, Japan, Ireland, Australia, Russia, England and more. The book is by turns surprising in its curatorial and narrative design and wonderfully effective at delineating the complex and thorny paths that create socio-political cultures where the censorship and self-censorship of theatre artists thrives and/or is efficaciously contested and rebelled against. Of note is a through line of argument in the book around less overt modes of surveillance that police artists’ imaginations and thereby the work they create and produce. At a time in the world where many governments are increasingly seeking to limit artistic expression, this book is a necessary reminder of the many freedoms that have been fought for in theatres around the globe, and how the power of being unsilenced must never be taken for granted. – Caridad Svich. Playwright & Translator This is a truly excellent collection of incisive studies. It is wide-ranging, impressively global in scope, with an illuminating balance of the historical and the contemporary. In its impressive and well-realised ambition, demonstrated by the well-focused intelligence and academic flair of its many contributors, this collection is both magisterial and vital. It is an essential contribution to censorship studies, fascinating and inspiring, a must-read for anyone interested in the subject. – Aleks Sierz. Theatre critic and author of Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (2011) & Good Nights Out: A History of British Theatre Since the Second World War (2021)

The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship

This book examines British playwrights' responses to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries since 1945, from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Using the work of Julie Sanders and others working in the fields of Adaptation Studies and intertextual criticism, it argues that this relatively neglected area of drama, widely considered to be adaptation, should instead be considered as appropriation - as work that often mounts challenges to the ideologies and orthodoxies within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and questions the legitimacy and cultural authority of Shakespeare’s legacy. The book discusses the work of Howard Barker, Peter Barnes, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s Theatre Group, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Dennis Kelly, Bernard Kopps, Charles Marowitz, Julia Pascal and Arnold Wesker.

'Upstart Crows'

Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama

An accessible, informative and critical introduction to Patrick Marber's award-winning (and often studied) play.

Patrick Marber's Closer

Graham Saunders offers an important study of one of the most controversial and talented playwrights of recent times. His survey includes a concise biography, in-depth analysis of Sarah Kane's work, and interviews with Kane and those who helped to put her work on stage.

The Playwright and the Work

About Kane

Lauren De Vos

From the controversy in 1995 that heralded Blasted, to her death in February 1999, Sarah Kane built a reputation as an established playwright of international stature. This is the first volume of collected essays by some of the leading scholars in their field, providing a comprehensive approach to the body of work she produced in this brief period. Essays included cover the political, literary, and theatrical identities that have exerted influence on Kane’s work, as well as a discussion and assessment of her innovative theatrical experiments and the performative issues that arise from within the plays. Sarah Kane in Context examines one of the most controversial and influential dramatists who emerged during the "In-Yer Face" generation of British dramatists in the 1990s and provides an essential guide to Kane for students and scholars alike.

Sarah Kane in Context

Love Me or Kill Me is a study of the most significant British dramatist in post-war theatre. Included is previously unpublished interview material with Sarah Kane herself.

Graham Saunders

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