Blasted by Sarah Kane

D R . Ö N D E R Ç A K I RTA Ş
Sarah Kane
an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director.
known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain,
torture—both physical and psychological—and death.
her plays are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration
of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage
action.
After attending Shenfield High School, she studied drama at Bristol University, graduating in 1992, and
went on to take an MA course in play writing at the University of Birmingham, led by the playwright
David Edgar.
Kane's published work consists of five plays, one short film (Skin), and two newspaper articles for The
Guardian.

Anthologies
Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London: Methuen (2001), ISBN 0-413-74260-1
Plays
Blasted (1995)
Phaedra's Love (1996)
Cleansed (1998)
Crave (1998)
4.48 Psychosis (1999)
Screenplays
Skin (1995)
Depression and Suicide
Kane struggled with severe depression for many years
Whilst talking about how her play Phaedra's Love deals with the theme of
depression, Kane said "Through being very, very low comes an ability to live in the
moment because there isn't anything else. What do you do if you feel the truth is
behind you? Many people feel depression is about emptiness but actually it's about
being so full that everything cancels itself out. You can't have faith without doubt,
and what are you left with when you can't have love without hate?
First suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalisation
◦ In the early hours of the 17th February 1999, Kane in her Brixton flat attempted suicide by taking 50 sleeping pills
and over 150 antidepressant tablets. Kane's flatmate, David Gibson, awoke and found a suicide note from Kane
stating that he was not to enter her room. Ignoring this request, Gibson entered Kane's room where he found her to
be unconscious.

Suicide
◦ Shortly after 3:30am on 20th February a nurse discovered that Kane was not in her hospital bed. The nurse forced
open the door to the Brunel ward's toilets where she found Kane's dead body. Kane had been hanged by her neck
with her own shoelaces from the hook on the inside of the toilet door. Kane was only 28 years old when she died
Her Style
***Expressionist theatre
Kane herself, as well as scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, identify
some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy

◦ Expressionism was a movement in drama and theatre that principally developed in Germany in the
early decades of the 20th century. It was then popularized in the United States, Spain, China, the U.K.,
and all around the world. Similar to the broader movement of Expressionism in the arts, Expressionist
theatre utilized theatrical elements and scenery with exaggeration and distortion to deliver strong
feelings and ideas to audiences.
***In-Yer-Face theatre
The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility
of drama termed In-Yer-Face theatre, which broke away from the conventions of
naturalist theatre.
◦ In-yer-face theatre is a term used to describe a confrontational style and sensibility of
drama that emerged in Great Britain in the 1990s. This term was borrowed by British
theatre critic Aleks Sierz as the title of his book, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama
Today. Sierz uses in-yer-face theatre to describe work by young playwrights who present
vulgar, shocking, and confrontational material on stage as a means of involving and
affecting their audiences
Blasted
Kane's first play was Blasted.
Kane wrote the first two scenes while a student in Birmingham, where they were given a public performance.
The agent Mel Kenyon was in the audience and subsequently represented Kane, suggesting she should show
her work to the Royal Court Theatre in London.
The completed play, directed by James Macdonald, opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995.
The action is set in a room of a luxurious hotel in Leeds where Ian, a racist and foul-mouthed middle-aged
journalist, first tries to seduce and later rapes Cate, an innocent, simple-minded young woman.
From its opening in a naturalistic—though troubling—world, the play takes on different, nightmarish
dimensions when a soldier, armed with a sniper's rifle, appears in the room.
The narrative ultimately breaks into a series of increasingly disturbing short scenes. Its scenes of anal rape,
cannibalism, and other forms of brutality, created one of the biggest theatre scandals in London since Edward
Bond's Saved in 1965.
Kane admired Bond's work, and he in turn publicly defended Kane's play and talent.
Other dramatists whom Kane particularly liked and who could be seen as influences
include Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, and Georg Büchner, whose play Woyzeck
she later directed (Gate Theatre, London 1997).
Synopsis
The play is set in an expensive hotel room in Leeds. Ian, a foul-mouthed middle-aged tabloid journalist has
brought a young woman, Cate, to the room for the night. Cate is much younger than Ian, emotionally fragile,
and seemingly intellectually simple.

Throughout Scene 1, Ian tries to seduce Cate, but she resists. All the while, Ian proudly parades his misogyny,
racism and homophobia. The scene ends with the sound of spring rain.

Scene 2 begins the next morning. Ian engages in frottage with Cate during one of her fits. Afterwards, Cate
performs oral sex on Ian, biting him. Cate retires to the bathroom. A soldier unexpectedly enters the room
brandishing a gun, and finds Cate has escaped through the bathroom window. The hotel room is then struck by
a mortar bomb, and the scene ends with the sound of summer rain.
In Scene 3, the hotel room is in ruins; the bomb has blasted a hole in the wall. The soldier and Ian begin to talk, and it is
gradually revealed that the hotel is located in the midst of a brutal war. The soldier tells Ian about appalling atrocities that he
has witnessed and taken part in, involving rape, torture and genocide, and says he has done everything as an act of revenge
for the murder of his girlfriend. He then rapes Ian, and sucks out his eyes. The scene ends with the sound of autumn rain.

In Scene 4, Ian lies blinded next to the soldier, who has committed suicide. Cate returns, describing the city being overrun
by soldiers, and bringing with her a baby that she has rescued. The baby dies, and she buries it in a hole in the floorboards
and leaves, but not before arguing with Ian about the utility or futility of praying during a burial. The scene ends with the
sound of heavy winter rain.

Scene 5 consists of a series of brief images, showing Ian crying, and even hugging the dead soldier for comfort as he starves
in the ruined room. Eventually, he crawls into the hole with the dead baby and eats it. The stage direction then reads that Ian
dies. It starts raining, and Ian says "Shit". Cate returns, bringing sausage and gin. The blood seeping down her legs implies
that she has paid for this by having sex with the soldiers outside. She eats and hand-feeds the rest of her meal to Ian, who
says: "Thank you.
Attacks on the play
Blasted was fiercely attacked in the British press.
Blasted was, however, praised by fellow playwrights Martin Crimp, Harold Pinter
(who became a friend), Caryl Churchill, who considered it "rather a tender play".
It was later seen to be making parallels between domestic violence and the war in
Bosnia, and between emotional and physical violence.
Kane said, The logical conclusion of the attitude that produces an isolated rape in England is the
rape camps in Bosnia and the logical conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war.
Blasted was produced again in 2001 at the Royal Court.
The assistant director of this production, Joseph Hill-Gibbins, suggests that "The argument is
made through form, through the shifts in styles in Blasted. That's how she constructs the
argument, by taking this setting in an English Northern industrial town and suddenly
transporting the action to a war zone."
The critical realism that the first scene sets up is "literally blasted apart" in Scene Two. The critic
Ken Urban says that "for Kane, hell is not metaphysical: it is hyperreal, reality magnified".