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Christopher Wixson, Comparative Drama, 22 Mar 2005
Near the play's conclusion, alienated space and alienated identity
become one as Ian, like Cate at the beginning of the play, merges with
his environment, helpless and victimized. Like the sufferers in the
soldier's stories, Ian and the dead child become part of the fragmented
stage space, their bodies telling the tale of their suffering. The baby
Cate buries under the stage floorboards becomes spatial, part of the
contemporary landscape that destroys innocence and vitality. (42) After
the baby's death, Cate prays that it will not "go bad places" (58),
wishing the baby to a better place. Jealous of the child's fatal escape
from the world or perhaps its lack of ongoing suffering, Ian attempts to
take the deceased baby's place in the space by eating the child, an
ironic act of bodily preservation as he climbs in the grave and Kane's
sly and decidedly immodest allusion to Jonathan Swift's modest proposal.
Ripping the burial cross from the ground, Ian climbs into the child's
grave in the floorboards, and the stage directions say he "dies with
relief" (60). However, after it begins to rain, he says "Shit," echoing
his opening line about the hotel room. Death and its promise of a better
place becomes another space that eludes and betrays him, and Ian must
accept himself as part of the landscape, as space to be conquered, as
entirely and miserably vulnerable. |
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Peter
Buse, Nach Dem Film, 12/00 All three characters in Blasted
seem to have undergone some form or other of
traumatic experience. The soldier has both
incurred and inflicted horrific violence during
the course of whatever war is taking place and he
continues to re-enact in their full brutality
these crimes. Ian, the journalist, has also been
involved in some sort of atrocities, but he
revisits his possible war crimes as phantasms, or
rather, they revisit him. Finally, Cate, as a
victim, is at once thrust into a compulsive
repetition of her previous scenes of abuse, and
yet, at the same time, resists the pattern of
repetition and attempts to halt it.
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Penny Cotton, Guardian
2 March 1999 Yet, for me, Blasted
and Phaedre
were simply boring. The audience was bludgeoned with a
tedious catalogue of rape, masturbation, sodomy, incest,
violence etc which seemed to orbit randomly around the
stage.
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BBC
Newsnight Review 6 Apr 2001 (link has gone) Miranda Sawyer:
...Sarah Kane writes by pairing her language down to the
bone and it's very quick. When you first go in, things
moved a little slowly
but I did enjoy it.
Ian Hislop:
It's sad what happened to her, but the play is really
pretty feeble. I found it not shocking but quite boring
at times. I think it's very badly written
I couldn't
understand why this was on. It seemed like the worst
student drama
I felt rather sorry for [the actors].
Mark Lawson:
I thought she had a powerful visual imagination. The way
you start off with the hotel and it's gradually
demolished over the four scenes. Almost like scenes from
modern art.
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Helena
Thompson and Joe Hill-Gibbins they did this exercise and came
up with as many as seven different meanings for a line,
which Sarah said was fine - then she told them she
expected them to express all seven.
(scroll down to the
bottom of the link)
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Peter Wynne-Willson I knew
Sarah Kane only briefly, and in a very particular context. I was brought
in to direct the 'workshop' of her play 'Blasted', which was at the time
only part-written, as the final element in her MA in Playwriting at
Birmingham University in 1993. I knew all about how extreme she was seen
as being before I even met her, having been taken on one side and warned
that she was 'difficult', and that the piece was 'problematic'. I think
this made me feel a little warm to her - anyone that the authorities
felt that about must be fighting the fight of the righteous, somehow. I
wasn't sure what I thought about the play. Sarah was serious about it,
without being solemn, and the contact with her in rehearsals was
certainly enjoyable - as well as challenging. I took the line that my
task was to use any skills I had as a director to make the piece she had
written work, in the way that was intended. We took it slow, worked with
unusual focus with the student actors, and played it head on,
relentlessly, with the same kind of slow, seething intensity and
bleakness that was there in the text. The effect on the performance day
was quite remarkable. It served to make every other piece of drama
presented there on the day - there were several - invisible. The scouts
from the front line of the new writing world sharpened pens and sought
Sarah out for conversation. It was no surprise to anyone that she was
snapped up, and that success was beckoning. No surprise, but something
of a shock…….
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Cath
Hart (link has gone-
www.media-culture.org.au) The show is
touted as an exploration of violence in different contexts, and
highlighting the similarities between them. But this explanation falls
flat after viewing. There isn’t enough in the script to unpick the
seams between global and local violence. Thankfully. A polemic on the
state of the world would have dumbed down the personal dynamic between
the characters. Rather, Blasted explores the point where public and
private chaos eclipse each other. |
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oceanfree.net
(link has gone- home.oceanfree.net/culture-fiona)
"I have to admit when I first read it I felt angry and
disgusted," begins Fiona [O’ Shaughnessy] "I felt like
flinging the play across the room. I found it terribly upsetting. It
made me sick. I wasn’t sure that it was the kind of play that was
going to be good for me at all. I felt it would have an adverse affect
on me and that it would invade my life. Of course, once the technique
kicks in that isn’t the case at all but I was still very worried
about it. After that first read I went off and took a bath. I read it
about 15 times more. This might seem strange but by the end I could
see the humour, and, of course, the humanity". |
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Whatsonstage
18 Apr 2001 (link has gone)
...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.
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