Blasted ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Kelly Reilly as Cate, Neil Dudgeon as Ian

Production photography by Ivan Kyncl.

Direction: James Macdonald. Design: Hildegard Bechtler Lighting: Jean Kalman Sound: Paul Arditti

Cast: Neil Dudgeon, Tom Jordan Murphy, Kelly Reilly.

“Five years ago I was rudely dismissive about Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Yet watching its revival last night I was overcome be its sombre power. So what has changed? The space, the design, the lighting, the cast and James Macdonald’s production are all radically different. But, above all, one sees the play through the perspective of Kane’s tragically short career and her obsession with love’s survival in a monstrously cruel world.

“… Initially I was stunned by the play’s excesses. Now it is easier to see their dramatic purpose. Kane is trying to shock us into an awareness of the emotional continuum between domestic brutality and the rape camps of Bosnia and to dispel the notion of th remote otherness of civil war. Even now, I think she overstates her case and ignores the specific tribal, territorial motives of the Balkan conflict. But her work is part of an honourable tradition, ranging from Peter Brook’s US to Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, which seeks to warn us that we enjoy no special historic immunity from violence and that there is a direct link between private and public fascism.

“Seeing the play now one is also struck by the density of its references and its strange element of hope. I detected allusions to Shakespeare’s Lear, Beckett’s Endgame, Pinters’s Dumb Waiter and even to Eisenstein’s unfinished film, Que Viva Mexico, in the unforgettable climatic image of Ian’s head protruding through the floorboards. And there is more than a touch of Bond’s Saved in the final conciliatory gesture between Ian and Cate which implies that love has precariously survived this catalogue cruelty.

“Macdonald’s production is infinitely superior to his Theatre Upstairs original not least because it implies from the start that we are in a world of fear and apprehension: Hildegard Bechtler’s superbly disintegrating set and Jean Kalman’s foreboding lighting add to the air of menace. And Neil Dudgeon’s complex Ian blends bludgeoning coarseness with a pathetic need for affection. Kelly Reilly’s Cate also moves astonishingly from wounded innocence to tremulous experience while Tom Jordan Murphy’s soldier is not just a bestial gun-wielder but a man driven to desperate excess. Of course, Kane’s play is flawed; but it survives today as a humane, impassioned dramatic testament.”

THE GUARDIAN

Let me tell you that time, notoriety and its familiarity as a text have not diminished Blasted’s power to shock you to the core in performance. The opening night of this tense, mesmeric, hauntingly lit production left me badly shaken. Watching the play again, I have come to the conclusion that Blasted is one of those rare works of art that create the criteria by which they should be judged.

Last time, most critics (myself included) dismissed, as evidence of puerile gratuitousness, the joltingly unforeseen form of this play in which, halfway through, a bomb drops, horror is piled on horror, and the world outside seems obliterated. The sheer visceral impact of this shift to a rock-bottom existential reality was such that notices tended to become catalogues of violated taboos, climaxing on the consumption of a dead baby. It would be quite wrong to claim that one can now view Blasted with anything like detachment. It gets under you skin too much. But it is possible to appreciate the care and daring simplicity with which the play’s two halves are linked. In the shape of a soldier on the run from a brutal civil war, Blasted famously sends Bosnia-like horrors erupting into an anonymous Leeds hotel bedroom where Ian (Neil Dudgeon), a racist, right-wing tabloid hack, has raped and taken sordid advantage of nave, epileptic and underage Cate, played here with a disturbing mix of damaged, childish dependency and stuttering, frantic aversion by the excellent Kelly Reilly.

As the hotel is devastated by the bomb blast and Tom Jordan Murphy’s eerily hushed soldier buggers the journalist and eats his eyes, the play performs, as it were, the blackest and bleakest of jokes. The logic runs like this; Ian’s paper is interested only in stories of kinky, personal scandal, and horror on a larger, systematic scale abroad is beneath its notice. So Blasted gives fascist little Englander Ian a massive dose of such horrors. The shattering of the barrier between these worlds invites you to recognise that an isolated rape in a Leeds hotelroom is on a continuum with the depraved mentality that creates rape camps in Bosnia. Ian is wrong to avert his eyes; that’s why he loses them. But there’s nothing preachy or gloating about the tone of the play, which is shot through with gallows humour (“You can’t get tragic about your arse,” declares the soldier, deadpan, after sodomising Ian. Where he comes from, getting off with anal rape would be considered lucky.) And it ends with Beckett-like snapshots of human extremity: a blinded man with his head sticking out of a hole being fed by his victim. I somehow don’t think we’ve heard the last of Blasted’s reverberations. –

THE INDEPENDENT 5 April 2001

Well, I was wrong. When Sarah Kane’s Blasted opened at the tiny Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1995, I was convinced that it was meretricious rubbish produced by a young writer with an adolescent desire to shock.

The play sparked off the theatrical controversy of the decade, with the majority of critics deploring what one tabloid called “a feast of filth”. With its eyeball-munching, anal rape, on-stage defecation and cannibalism, I suggested in a breathless report to the news pages that Blasted was like a modern version of Titus Andronicus, but patronisingly added that Kane couldn’t write as well as Shakespeare. Well, of course she couldn’t. Who could? Yet, seeing the play six years on, there is no doubt that it is an impressive, and serious, piece of work. I still don’t like it but I now admire it. Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, had genuine artistic vision and great dramatic talent. The world view that informs Blasted may have sprung from her own bouts of depression, but the same could be said of the plays of Samuel Beckett who, along with all those other daunting modern dramatists beginning with B – Brecht, Barker and Bond – was clearly a major influence on the play…

What is unmistakeable is the dramatic power of the play, the unflinching, uncompromising darkness of Kane’s vision, and her ability to combine it with sudden shafts of gallows humour. After Ian has suffered just about everything it is possible for a man to suffer, the rain starts falling through the roof onto his head. His one-word reaction – “s***” – reduces the house to hysterics. James Macdonald gives this harrowing piece an exemplary production, finding all its pain and, just as importantly, its humour. The atrocities now seem organic to the play, rather than mere theatrical shock-tactics, and the performances are outstanding.

Kelly Reilly is heart-catchingly poignant as the vulnerable, stuttering Cate, Neil Dudgeon is a sleazy tabloid hack to the life as Ian, though he grows into something deeper, while even Tom Jordan Murphy suggests the battered remnants of humanity as the rapacious soldier.

I can only apologise to Kane’s ghost for getting her so wrong the first time around. And may she now sleep in peace.

DAILY TELEGRAPH 5 April 2001

…Blasted is superbly played, maintaining irresistible tension moment by moment by moment. Impossible for an outsider to guess whether Macdonald just hit upon a superbly right cast, or whether it was his direction that raised them all to this pitch of cruelly precise exposure; but Neil Dudgeon’s portrait of Ian is formidably exposed and unsparing, and Kelly Reilly’s Cate as delectably funny and dim as she is touchingly graceful.

Her first long mime-scene (with more to come) discovering the delights of an hotel-room’s light-switches and video-handset, is just one of the reasons why the playing-time has swollen to its new length. For the Soldier the script offers fewer clues; Tom Jordan Murphy plays him flat, offhand, rather companionable, dead behind the eyes. Kane’s laconically suggestive text needs a lot of winkling out, and these three actors use their leisurely two hours to winkle it completely.

FINANCIAL TIMES 6 April 2001

“…Kane tries to make something real of the nastiness we read about and watch on television each day.

“She does so with an undercurrent of a yearning for love. Acts of kindness are chiselled out of the granite of cruelty and indifference, and that is when we hear her true, appealing voice.

“Deceptively dispiriting, Blasted is in fact theatrically, and emotionally compelling”

DAILY MAIL

“How shrill and silly the 1995 hullabaloo and hysteria seemed last night when Blasted returned to the Royal Court. It is, and always was, a play with a fine, moral purpose.

“…The justification for [the] sequence of atrocities is simple. Miss Kane, disturbed by the Bosnian war, set out to find fresh, dramatic way of showing how thin the line is between civilisation and barbarity. She wanted to suggest that civil war could happen anywhere, even here, right out of the blue. Her method is original. Blasted begins in a Leeds hotel room, which designer Hildegard Bechtler fasions in pretty sepia hues. Dudgeon’s utterly convincing middle-aged tabloid hack, Ian reeking of cancer, hatreds, cigarettes and alcohol, brings in Cate, a 21-year-old family friend.

“That this girl, poignantly brought to life by Kelly Reilly, stutters, is prone to fits and not very bright, makes Ian’s rape of her all the more repellent. But then, in a superbly realistic coup, the ceiling collapses and windows shatter in a bomb attack. An act of individual male violence gives way to the general brutality of war. Realism is replaced by nightmare symbolism. A soldier with machine-gun smashes his way in. The girl vanishes. The room becomes a miniature war-zone and wasteland.”

EVENING STANDARD