Thirty years ago, the late British writer's debut play Blasted was castigated as a "feast of filth". Now though, revivals of her work are showing she was ahead of her time.

Blasted, the 1995 debut play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane, begins with a couple, Ian and Cate, entering a Leeds hotel room. Ian, a tabloid journalist, is unimpressed, and in the following moments he brandishes a revolver, utters a stream of racist slurs, and commits acts of sexual violence against Cate. It is easy to fixate on these details which set the tone for a play that only gets more harrowing, building to a truly sickening final scene.

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With its staging at London's Royal Court Upstairs, Blasted became the biggest theatrical cause célèbre in the UK for decades – and reviewers were scathing. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph called it a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and even suggested that Kane was mad. Jack Tinker from the Daily Mail's review was headed "This Disgusting Feast of Filth". Many of the press viewed Blasted as a grotesque waste of taxpayers' money, mindlessly squandered by a 23-year-old enfant terrible who was – shockingly – female.

The critical tide later turned, with some of those reviewers apologising to Kane for misunderstanding Blasted. Thirty years on, Kane is part of the theatrical canon – a production of 4.48 Psychosis, the final play she wrote before taking her own life aged 28, is currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, while a revival of her 1998 work Cleansed is being staged by director Rebecca Frecknall at North London's Almeida Theatre next year. While revivals of Kane’s plays are not universally appreciated, they always invite new responses and revelations in relation to contemporary conflict and oppression. But at the core of each work is an abstracted meditation on love. "No one play is the same as the other," Graham Saunders, Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC. "It would be difficult to believe that the writer of Blasted was the same person who wrote 4.48 Psychosis".

Alongside playwrights including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, Kane was part of a movement in British theatre in the 1990s often described as "in-yer-face", a phrase defined in the New Oxford English Dictionary as "blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid". Yet that is what many of the critics who saw Blasted attempted to do – to run away from the confrontational aspect of the play by burying it with outrage. Midway through, a third character enters the play: a soldier who details war crimes he has witnessed, confronting the repulsive Ian with the realities of conflict. Kane does not merely gesture towards the then-contemporary horrors of the Balkans War, but rips the stage open and has them erupt into the theatre itself. Blasted removes the temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and trauma, forcing us to face the very worst of humanity.

The daughter of a journalist, Kane was born in 1971 in Brentwood, Essex, and rejected her Christian suburban upbringing from the age of 17. In Ravenhill’s obituary of Kane upon her death in 1999, he quotes her saying: "There is an attitude that certain things could not happen here. Yet there's the same amount of abuse and corruption in Essex as anywhere else, and that’s what I want to blow open". She drew influences from her musical loves (including Joy Division, Pixies, and Radiohead), modern playwrights, (especially Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter), and classical drama. The latter influence was brought to the fore in Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, first performed at London's Gate theatre in 1996. Taking a story already........

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