Blasted - Theatre play PDF

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BLASTED BY SARAH KANE Blasted was the first play written by the English playwright Sarah Kane. It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre of London on 12 January 1995 and was directed by the English drama and cinema director James Macdonald. This was a work that in 1995 caused a lot of controversy due to the themes treated and the rough nature of the play: death, violence and unmoral behaviours of the characters are shown without filters and in the roughest way. And this constant appearance of repellent and shocking elements had a negative impact in some critics and some part of the audience of the 90s, who claimed that Blasted was a work with the mere purpose of disturbing and confusing the spectators. Nonetheless, over time, the work of Sarah Kane have ceased to be seen like that and some authors have begun to speak of Blasted as a more complex and depth play that explores the consequences of war at a psychological and emotional level, and how this situation explains the existence of violent, harmed and “blasted” minds that we can see on stage. The plot of the play is structured in five different scenes in which we can see, gradually, how the action, the tension and the violence between the characters go in crescendo, till the scene five, in which finally the action reaches its climax point. In the first scene we know about the context and the setting of the play: we are settled in a room of a very expensive hotel in Leeds and we are at war. And then we are introduced to the first two main characters, Ian and Cate. This first scene is used by the author to show us the odd relationship between these characters and the personality of each one. Ian, who is a war journalist, is depicted as a sexist, racist and homophobic person that is humiliating Cate constantly and taking advantage of the naïve and surmise nature of hers, to obtain pleasure. In this part we only know about the violence through the language: the disrespectful way Ian addresses Cate and the new in the newspaper that talk about the massacre of a serial killer in Leeds. But we can’t see the explicit use of violence.

However, this “calm” situation changes from the second scene with the appearance of the third and last character of the play, the soldier with the sniper. This character turns the table. From this moment, he becomes the authoritative and powerful character that uses violence to impose his will, and Ian is reduced to the place of defencelessness in which Cate was before. But now, the violence shown is not the same of the first scene. Now the violence has evolved to a more explicit and real level. The violence begins to be more physical and less verbal and this fact increases the tension exponentially. Finally, with the explosion of the bomb at the end of the second scene, the last three scenes show to the audience a dreadful and chaotic landscape of destruction in which the violence continues growing in harshness until the end. We have episodes of rape, mutilation, murder and even cannibalism that display the traumatic and psychological consequences of war. It is interesting to add that this unfolding of violence was a technique used previously during the 50s. For instance, in Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, the violence realises this same journey from a trivial violence into a physical and real one. Nonetheless, Look Back in Anger, although it was pioneer in the display of violence in drama, didn’t reach the level of roughness that Kane reached with Blasted in 1995. Regarding some stylistics traits of this work, we can stand out, firstly, the parallelism between the endings of each scene. Each one of them finishes with a blackout and rain. Nonetheless, the rains are not the same, but they are related with one of the four seasons: the first one is a spring rain, the second a summer rain, the third an autumn rain and the last one, a winter rain. And if we understand the spring as the season that inspires us positive things as light, colours or love, and winter as the opposite, then we can interpret that the author wants the audience to think of the story as a story of degradation. The language used by the characters is direct. They don’t beat around the bush and go straight to what they want to transmit with the use of simple and short sentences. This trait confers to the plot a great dynamism. Moreover, the language used by the characters flees from formalities and euphemisms. In this way, the author is not afraid of showing offensive words such as “wog”, “coon” or “nigger” to refer to a black person; or words as “dyke” or “lesbos” to speak of lesbian girls. This rough language

contributes in the creation of a violent and “blasted” atmosphere, which is after all, one of the objectives of the play. Finally, the principal themes of the play could be the sexual violence; the active and authoritative nature facing a surmise nature; the perversions of the mind and the havoc of war. CRITICAL EVALUATION The violence harshly depicted on stage is, perhaps, the main trait that defined the style of Sarah Kane as a playwright. Not only in Blasted, but in other plays as Cleansed (third play of the author which was performed for the first time in 1998), the appearance of dark and violent scenes related with sexual harassment, mutilation, cruelty or pain are constant. For many people, this was only the result of a perverted and depressed mind (Sarah Kane committed suicide on 20 February 1999), and they think that her works only searched simply to scare and shock the audience. But, independently of the opinions that a spectator can have with respect to the work of Sarah Kane, this particularly style of hers rises an interesting questions: Should the authors show explicit violence on stage or they should not? Can a fictitious work affect (in a harmful way) physically or emotionally the audience? During the Greek drama the religious and aesthetic conventions established that the audience should not witness any act that “impinged” on a human or animal body. They weren’t even supposed to show any person hurting in any way other person. Nonetheless, there were some plays as Prometheus Bound in which the plot itself requires to show a type of pain or agony that couldn’t be concealed. Over time, drama has evolved harmoniously with the mind society and its capacity of bearing violent scenes on stage. However, there have always been some works that have broken the conventional cannons of drama, shocking the audience and provoking controversy: Prometheus Bound in the Ancient Greek, The Importance of Being Earnest in the 50s or Blasted at the end of the twentieth century. It is the labour of the critics to analyse if these works have acted as ground-breaking and bold plays, or if on the contrary, they only sought to confuse the audience.

Perhaps we still lack of the perspective to judge fairly the plays of Sarah Kane. There have been works in other artistic territories as the cinema, that were condemned initially as disgusting films and now are cult works: Straw Dogs (directed by Sam Peckinpah) and Scarface (directed by Brian De Palma) are good examples of that. From my point of view, the quality of a work bases on two principles: the ability of telling a story in an interesting way and the ability of provoking emotions on the spectator. No matter the techniques used, violence, comedy, terror or love, if and when those two needs are fulfilled. Sergio Pellicer Llosá 06/11/2018

BIBLIOGRAPHY Sommerstein, A . 2010. “The Tangled Ways of Zeus”. Oxford University http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.001.0001/acprof9780199568314-chapter-3 The classical eye (03/03/2016). How far should we go when depicting violence?. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-far-should-we-go-when-depicting-violence-55560 Goodman, W (18/12/1983). Is there a moral limit to the violence in films? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/18/movies/is-there-a-moral-limit-to-the-violence- infilms.html...