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Unybook: arodrigueslopez Blasted By Sarah Kane Review Blasted was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, in London on the 12th of January 1995. The main characters are Ian and Cate . Ian is 45 and Cate is 21. Ian is a racist homophobic journalist. Cate is an epileptic, possibly retarded vegetarian. They both are in a hotel room in Leeds. Ian is dying of lung cancer and liver disease and uses this as blackmail to have sex with Cate. Cate doesn’t want to have sex with him, nevertheless, Ian rapes her. The next morning a soldier goes into the room. A bomb destroys the room. The soldier rapes Ian and sucks his eyes out and, afterwards, commits suicide. Cate escapes and comes back with a dying baby. She buries the baby once dead and leaves for food. Ian eats the baby and is weakened but still doesn’t die. In the last scene, Cate feeds him bread and gin. Cate stutters when in stress. Ian is well aware of this but puts her in this situation throughout the play and constantly denigrates her and insults her. Cate suffers verbal abuse and sutters, up to the point in which she has an epileptic attack. They had an affair years ago. Cate seems to still be in love with him but at the same time she hates him. Even though she says that he has changed, she also says that he used to treat her terribly. He begins to panic every time she says she will leave him and says that he loves her. Ian doesn’t believe there is a God that could make him suffer so much and is in favour of suicide. To live is a punishment for him. Cate thinks suicide is a cowardly act. But he still asks Cate to pray for, as if he still had some sort of hope of living. At the end of the play, he goes crazy and eats the baby, ending an escalation of cruelty and madness that dominates the play. Ian says he knows he will die but does he truly accept it? He doesn’t act like he cares and constantly makes fun of the fact that he is dying to cover up his feelings. He acts in such a terrible way to cover it up, and as he is suffering, he believes he can get away with it. At one point he admits to being scared of dying, also killing himself and being killed. Ian, nevertheless, lives on gin and cigarettes. Moreover, he avoids situations by lighting a cigarette. He also has a gun and picks it up, unloads and reloads it continually when in stress. Ian needs to be in control. He is not in control of his diseases and tries controlling everything else around him. For example, he says Hitler was wrong about killing the Jews, instead he says it would’ve been better to kill the queers, the wogs and football fans. Ian doesn’t believe in a meaningful life, which is why he might be against the idea of having children, in order to avoid them all the suffering. He wants to show himself as a strong independent man, but he is constantly between fear and aggression, love and hate.

Unybook: arodrigueslopez

Cate goes along with his insinuations most of the time but somehow thinks about it twice every time. If she seems to give him false hopes it may be because she is in love and has, herself, some hope left. Ian takes advantage of her, forcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do. But, we can’t say that it is completely Ian’s fault. Cate suffers from a desire to be loved making the love between them so dependent up to the point that we can suggest Cate is masochistic for staying with him. Ian points his gun to her in a couple of occasions as well, demonstrating an authority over her. It seems that authority in the play is measured in the cruel acts that one commits. This is why the Soldier appears as a bigger authority than Ian. They seem alike in many aspects. They both drink and smoke and they are afraid of being lonely. The Soldier has done the worst brutalities that Ian could think of though. He is in some way a personification of what Ian is at a greater scale. The Soldier seeks himself in Ian’s character asking him if he has done the cruelties he has done. He even asks him if he has ever raped someone before killing them. As the Soldier seems himself in Ian, this is why he doesn’t kill Ian, but himself. The Soldier has no name, he represents all soldiers. Soldiers are normally traumatized because of the cruelties they see and take part in at war. This Soldier in particular is seeking for revenge of those who cruelly killed his girlfriend and takes in on Ian. The topics of life and death are treated in different ways. For Ian, death is an escape from a cruel life but at the same time something scary. Cate, is much younger, and sees life as a fight and death as inevitable, but not an escape. The Soldier lives to take others lives away to finally take away his own life. He is the one who less appreciates life. The main theme of the play is sexism and sexual violence mainly portrayed in the act of rape. Still nowadays, when we think of rape, we think of a female as the victim and the male as the rapist. Rape is a taboo topic and is important to talk about the topic and create awareness. Blasted’s playwright is a woman, but she claims to be neutral on the topic of sexism. Gender issues and playwrights gender are unseparable facts. If the playwright were a man, we’d have a quite different interpretation on the characters and the theme. How do we confront rape in the play then? Critics have juggled with the idea that the fact that both Ian and Cate are raped, could be to eliminate gender roles, both men and women can be raped or a more complex thought. Cate’s rape is a warm-up before the cruelty that occurs afterwards. In times of peace, Cate is raped, by the contrary, Ian is raped during the war. Ian’s rape is more shocking because of the manner it is staged while Cate’s rape is a more passive rape, as if she were not there. Cate also quite possibly is raped when she leaves for food offstage.

Unybook: arodrigueslopez

Ian’s rape is the ugliest, and somehow seems like a form of justice to Cate. The fact that he is a male victim for a change doesn’t eliminate gender roles, as when Ian is raped, he is raped “as a woman”, passive and weak. He is feminized and it comes down to the fact that he is raped because Cate is not there. He turns into an abused dependent man. The audience might feel revengeful of him, or empathetic. Ian rapes are simply violent because of his own suffering. While, the Soldier’s rape is out of revenge, which is why the audience might feel revengeful. Ian’s final words to Cate in the play are ‘Thank you’. He is the weakest he has ever been, and has just suffered what he had done to Cate himself. Does this mean he has realized what it feels like or is he simply saying so Cate doesn’t leave him blind on his own?. In my opinion, Cate would fall one thousand times and more for him if she had to. Nowadays, there are still women suffering verbal abuse and rape every day. Many women are killed as well. But what shocks me is that there were records of sexual abuse prior to the deaths of many of these women. Cate and Ian had an affair years ago, surely she had suffered abuse before. I think there’s a difference between being in love and being stupid. Never go back to someone who treated you badly, at any level, either man or woman....