This chapter contextualises playwright Sarah Kane’s work within the socio-historical and cultural milieu of Britain in the 1970s–1990s period, charting the varied feminist theatres dealing with sex, gender, race, class and embodiment at the time. Considering Kane’s five professionally-produced theatre plays (Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis), her three unpublished student plays held in the Women’s Theatre Collections at the University of Bristol (Comic Monologue, Starved, What She Said), and her screen play Skin in this cultural context, I introduce feminist and queer dramaturgical readings arguing that she presents a complex political representation of women, desire, negation and agency indicative of a theatrical optimism (S Kane 1998a; S Kane 2001). The dramaturgy of Kane’s work frequently sets up heteronormative binaries to debate and contest them (Rayner 2009). It addresses erasure—in particular bisexual and lesbian erasure—incarceration, sexual violence and racism. It militates for an intervention in these abuses through a politically-informed structuring that interrupts and fractures the rehearsal process. This requires the cast to define and debate clear ethical frameworks for performing sex, gender and violence, to engage experimentally with theatrical ideas, and to consider their own intersectional relationship to power, desire, time and becoming; a process many working on her plays find transformative.