BLASTED | STAGE REVIEW
The Other Room, Porter’s Bar, Cardiff, Fri 27 Feb
Often considered an anti-war play, director Kate Wassberg wanted the audience of Blasted to feel as though the horrors of war were right at their feet.
A decade old, the confrontational message of the play is still just as prevalent; War is not a story on the Evening News, but all around us, something that ‘may as well be taking place in a hotel room in Leeds.’
Many believe Sarah Kane wrote the disturbing piece as a comment on British indifference toward war. Using shocking, sexually-violent scenes tactically to highlight our discomfort and denial toward what is inflicted on communities near the front line. This is also what Kate wanted to present and indeed did. The play delved much deeper, however, and brought up many other taboo issues. Themes of abuse (on others and ourselves), co-dependence and revenge were all heightened by the intensity of the intimate space and muscular delivery of the three actors, there was literally no avoiding what was to come.
Blasted begins as a chamber piece where a young woman is seemingly being groomed in a hotel room and eventually raped. The character of the groomer, Ian, is easy to dislike. Played as repellent and overbearing, in between bigoted rants he remarks that he stinks and his constant feral need to come amidst the dis-pleasantness assures us so. Kate has a nervous stammer and with her childlike mentality and random seizures, she makes an easy victim for Ian, who is adamant that what he does is out of love.
The couple are beyond believable and the sickening co-dependence is hard yet addictive to watch and dissect.
The audience are then suddenly thrust, as many are, into the nightmarish realms of War with very little notice. Ian meets a disturbed solider who lists the victims he has tortured in graphic detail and tells Ian that he will be no exception.
Almost as a dying ritual, the solider re-enacts the horrendous violence inflicted on his dead girlfriend onto Ian. This involved simulated sodomy with a machine-gun and eye gouging.
The solider begs Ian, who we find out is a corrupt journalist, to tell people of the extremities of War and then commits suicide. The playwright removed preconceived comfortable ideas we may have of fair play in war as the disturbed solider lived to only inflict the worst pain on everybody he met and, then, to die. Kane was concerned with connecting us viscerally to the action, rather than form and linearity, and gave only as much context to the characters as needed for their actions.
Among further stomach-churning acts by the end of the play Kate sadly learns how to use sex to bargain for survival among the carnage of war. Her physical and spiritual torture becoming currency for food – directly echoing Ian’s accusation of her belonging to more ‘primitive’ surroundings. However this is learnt behaviour from inside the walls of hotel room in a ‘civilized time’. Many people found this particular piece too uncomfortable to fully engage with, however the tale’s capacity for destruction and denial, abuse and self pity is too blunt to ignore.
words SINNEAD ALI
Blasted, The Other Room, Porter’s Bar, Cardiff, until Tue 07 Mar. Tickets:£12.50/£5-£10.50 conc. Info: www.otherroomtheatre.com