Play Details
Context
Artistic Director
Stephen Daldry
Dates Performed
Thursday 12th January 1995
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Play Details
Synopsis
A nondescript hotel room in Leeds, where the boundaries between civility and savagery rapidly disintegrate
Ian, a racist, misogynistic journalist, checks into a Leeds hotel room with Cate, a vulnerable young woman half his age. Their toxic encounter serves as the starting point for Sarah Kane’s provocative and harrowing debut play Blasted. The uneasy dynamic between Ian and Cate is violently disrupted when a soldier bursts in and a mortar bomb suddenly strikes the room, catapulting the characters into a nightmarish war zone. As the play progresses, Ian, Cate, and the Soldier descend into increasingly brutal and desperate acts, blurring the lines between domestic abuse and wartime atrocities.
Kane’s visceral and poetic language creates a world where shocking violence coexists with moments of startling tenderness. The play’s unconventional structure, which abruptly shifts from naturalism to surrealism, mirrors the characters’ psychological disintegration. Blasted forces audiences to confront the interconnectedness of personal and political violence, challenging our notions of civility and exposing the fragility of social order. Through its unflinching portrayal of rape, cannibalism, and torture, the play offers a searing indictment of human cruelty while also exploring themes of love, need, and the possibility of redemption in the darkest of circumstances.
Cast & Creative
Cast
Kate Ashfield
Cast
Pip Donaghy
Cast
Dermot Kerrigan
Designer
Franziska Wilcken
Lighting
Jon Linstrum
Sound
Paul Arditti
What our readers say
What’s it like reading this play now?
To revisit this play after seeing it over a decade ago is to be reminded of the brilliance of Kane’s writing, as well as the utter horror depicted within it.
It is a masterclass of writerly stagecraft. Kane’s ear for speech patterns is stunning. Her ability to use the ‘realist’ mode to create such scarcely believable – scarcely bearable – scenarios and to make them utterly truthful is devastating. It has hardly aged at all.
What did is it tell us about the past and present?
Kane wrote Blasted while war was raging in the Balkans and horrific human rights abuses were taking place. Today Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine and news of atrocities akin to those of decades ago are reaching us. In some European countries the right is on the rise and violence against minorities is on the increase. Women continue to be subject to misogyny and verbal, physical, and sexual violence. Blasted speaks to today as much as it did to the 1990s.
What films or music does it make you think of?
The Russian film Loveless (2017). It has a very different scenario – not of war, but of a lost child in the city – but laced with similar brutality and bleakness and, as the name suggests, where compassion has been squeezed almost to extinction.
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