Blasted

Few plays have aroused as much controversy in recent years as Sarah Kane‘s
Blasted did when it premiered at the tiny Royal Court Theatre
Upstairs in 1995. Not many people actually saw it, both because of the limited
seating capacity and the brevity of its original run, but you had to have
been living in Outer Mongolia not to have heard about it – it made national
news headlines and was the talk of television’s Newsnight – and what you
heard probably made you relieved to have missed it. This was an instantly
notorious play which featured scenes of mutilation, male rape, eye-gouging,
and ultimately, the cannibalism of a baby. One tabloid labelled it “a
disgusting feast of filth”.

But its young author – making what was her theatrical debut – proved to be a
dynamic and incredibly influential new voice in the theatre, and was not to
be dismissed so lightly. In the all-too-short but shining career that
followed – tragically brought to an end by her suicide just four years later
– she proved that she wasn’t just out to shock, but to make a serious point,
too.

And now, with the play that started it all revived in the much larger
downstairs main house as part of a retrospective of her entire repertoire,
Blasted re-emerges as both bleakly brilliant and powerfully prescient, and one
of the defining plays of its age.

In its chillingly naturalistic account of a dismal sexual relationship, being
played out in a Leeds hotel room, between a paunchily wary journalist and his
timidly damaged girlfriend, Cate, the first hour is merely ominous, rather
than horrible. But as a war erupts on the streets outside, and a soldier
invades the now bombed-out room and proceeds to urinate on the bed, the
horrors begin to pile on with nihilistic inevitability. The grim reality is
that horrible things do happen in war; but it’s even more unsettlingly close
to home that Kane has set her play so close to home.

As directed by James Macdonald with an awesome clarity and played with
unyielding focus by the stunning Neil Dudgeon as the journalist, Kelly
Reilly as his girlfriend, and Tom Jordan Murphy as the soldier, this is
an altogether frightening as well as riveting evening.

While Kane’s later work – not least Crave, virtually a poem for four
isolated voices – took a less confrontational and more elegiac tone, there’s
no denying the visceral power and pure poetry of this writing.

Mark Shenton