Ana Mª Sánchez Manzanares

NIUB 16119180
Essay on Sarah Kane’s “Blasted”

QUESTION 3
“Blasted has a carefully crafted, yet radical structure which it is crucial to recognise in
coming to an understanding of its concerns.” (Graham Saunders)
What is “radical”, in Aston and Savona’s terms, about the structure of Blasted, and in
what ways does the play’s radical dramatic shape relate to its central concerns? What is
its effect on the spectator? You should support your arguments by close reference to the
play and any essay(s) in your Dossier that you consider relevant.

What were the effects that had Sarah Kane’s Blasted?

Blasted is the first play by the British author Sarah Kane. It was first performed

in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Britain, in the 1990s, experienced a

moment of uncertainty and anxiety. At that time, in Britain it was felt a social decline,

isolation, loss of objectives, it was an individualistic world, but in necessity of

establishing connections between people. In the 1990s, it took place the renaissance in

new writing for the stage, called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. In this kind of plays, the language

is filthy, there's nudity, people have sex in front of you, violence breaks out, one

character humiliates another, taboos are broken, unmentionable subjects are broached,

conventional dramatic structures are subverted

In opposition to ‘classic’ and ‘bourgeois’ theatre, Blasted is a radical play. The

radical drama took place on the 20 th century onwards. It challenged the ‘bourgeois’

scene division and the construction of the plot that followed the Aristotelian model of

preparation – rise – climax – fall - conclusion. The play Blasted is divided in five

scenes, but not following the Aristotelian model. They are very different in length.

According to Aston and Savona, in performance, ‘radical’ plays disrupted the mimetic

patterning of speech and gesture based on the naturalistic emotional identification

 Ana Mª Sánchez Manzanares
NIUB 16119180
Essay on Sarah Kane’s “Blasted”

between actor and role. The radical texts did a deconstructive representation. In this

case, each scene ends with a rain. A whole year goes by with the use of seasons, but the

action is only one day approximately, it is not clear. The author uses a strange use of

time by foregrounding it.

This new style of writing had different kinds of receptions on the spectator. The

play had supporters, but it also received some of the most aggressive reviews. Probably,

the title of the play does not refer to the context only, but to the impact they play had on

audiences. Kane said that she

“wasn’t at all aware that Blasted would scandalize anyone. At the time [she]

wrote it, [she] didn’t even expect it to be produced. [She] thinks it is a shocking

play, but only in the sense that falling down the stairs is shocking—it’s painful

and it makes you aware of your own fragility, but one doesn’t tend to be morally

outraged about falling down stairs. The thing that shocks [her] most is that the

media seems to have been more upset by the representations of violence than by

violence itself”.

When you are in war, in a violent way, without warning, the life of people is

completely split up. This is the precise moment which Sarah Kane wanted to reproduce

in her play. A great part of the audiences critiqued this kind of plays. As Kane says

“The shock wasn’t about the content, not even about the shock of the new, but

about the familiar being arranged in such a way that it could be seen afresh. The

press was screaming about cannibalism live on stage, but, of course, audiences

weren’t looking at actual atrocities, but at an imaginative response to them in an

odd theatrical form, apparently broken-backed and schizophrenic, which

 Ana Mª Sánchez Manzanares
NIUB 16119180
Essay on Sarah Kane’s “Blasted”

presented material without comment and asked the audience to craft their own

response. The representation of violence caused more anger than actual

violence”.

The play Blasted shocked because of its explicit sex and violence, it was also

disturbing because of its innovative structure. In this play, she portraits depression and

hopelessness. In-Yer-Face theatre is the kind of theatre which takes the audience and

shows the image until they get the message, so the audience is forced to see something

close up to them. The New Oxford English Dictionary defines in-yer-face theatre as

something “blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid. It implies

being forced to see something close up, having your personal space invaded. It suggests

the crossing of normal boundaries. In short, it describes perfectly the kind of theatre that

puts audiences in just such a situation. In-yer-face theatre shocks audiences by the

extremism of its language and images; unsettles them by its emotional frankness and

disturbs them by its acute questioning of moral norms. It wants audiences to feel the

extreme emotions that are being shown on stage.

 Ana Mª Sánchez Manzanares
NIUB 16119180
Essay on Sarah Kane’s “Blasted”

WORKS CITED:

o Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text

and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

o Kane in Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre. Faber and Faber, 2001

o Kane cited in Stephenson and Langridge, 1997, p.130-1