Blasted left me shell-shocked

Having heard of Sarah Kane and her work, I was very nervous about seeing Blasted and rightly so. I knew that Kane would address many taboo issues, such as masturbation, homophobia, racism, and particularly war, but I found that there is really no preparing for confronting a show like that. Yes, confronting. The thing I found most overwhelming about the production was the focus on fear and survival. In the first scene, Ian carries a gun into the hotel room and throughout the show, this gun is constantly being moved around, whether being carelessly placed on a table or being pointed in one of the character’s faces. I found myself gripping the arms of my chair just waiting for the gun to go off. This show is stressful. The show addresses survival on other levels as well though. The relationship between Ian and Cate is ambiguous, but it is clear that Ian needs, or at least thinks he needs Cate. He constantly asks to be held just for comfort; he cannot survive without her. Perhaps on the most obvious level, Kane tackles surviving war and the trauma that war brings. She offers two views of this. Cate wants to survive and even prostitutes herself for food, whatever it takes. However, the soldier, whose girlfriend was gruesomely murdered, has endured too much and decides to kill himself. At what point did he decide to give up? In a bizarre way, I realized that the show is about balance, or the tipping point. When is that gun going to go off? How much trauma can one experience before being pushed over the edge? What I found most interesting was that a production about balance is so unbalanced, as it completely hurdles the audience into facing issues such as death, rape, war, suicide, cannibalism without a break. During the show I remembered wishing that the show would just lighten up for five minutes, giving me a chance to process what I was viewing (at this point a dead baby was being eaten). The juxtaposition between the show itself and what I perceived its message to be still leaves me perplexed and somewhat disturbed. Although the title refers to the bomb that hits the hotel, I believe that the title works on another level. I don’t know about the other audience members, but the show that featured a baby being eaten, a man having his eyes eaten out, a man being raped by a soldier, and a soldier committing suicide left me completely shell-shocked.

by Hannah Franklin