On a Burning Altar
By Caridad Svich
Blasted
By Sarah Kane
Soho Rep
46 Walker St.
Box office: 212-35203101
The violation and near sacrifice of a colonial
body is at the center of Sarah Kane's 1995 play Blasted, now
receiving its New York premiere at Soho Rep under Artistic Director
Sarah Benson's direction. Ian -- a bigoted Welsh journalist -- enters
an anonymously corporate, boutique hotel room in Leeds at the top of
the play, with the specter of illness haunting him, sex on his mind,
and a young, lower-class epileptic woman named Cate, whom he has been
molesting for years, in tow. The play thus begins as an encounter between
two damaged, complex souls: an aggressor and his victim. A one-night
stand is in the offing, and the first half of the play focuses on the
violent, sexually explicit, demeaning dance of desire between them.
Outside, a war is raging, and soon that war, embodied by a distraught
and mentally destroyed young soldier, will come literally crashing into
the room of wayward privilege and temporary protection.
Damaged youth and the abuse and misuse of adolescents
by an older generation enthralled to sex and consumerism is a theme
that runs through many New Brutalist plays of the 1990s. This genre
of British writing included Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and F***ing,
Jez Butterworth's Mojo, American expatriate Phyllis Nagy's
Weldon Rising, and Philip Ridley's Pitchfork Disney.
This theme reached its apex in David Harrower's Blackbird.
Since Sarah Kane's suicide in 1999, critical discussions of her work
have tended to view it through the lens of autobiography and her troubled
relationship with depression and despair. Enough time has now passed,
however, to reconsider it in the context of the era when it was written.
In 1996 the Royal Court Theatre and Out of Joint
presented Ravenhill's provocatively titled Shopping and F***ing
at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, directed by Max Stafford-Clark.
The play became the buzz of London and attracted a large target audience
of theatergoers under 25. The Cool Britannia youth aesthetic dominated
the English arts scene in the 1990s from then on, but it did not begin
with Ravenhill's signature play. The real, unlikely catalyst was Sarah
Kane's Blasted the year before (also at the Royal Court), along
with the media uproar over it.
Critic Aleks Sierz in his book In-yer-face
Theatre (2001) says that Kane's play was significant as a cultural
marker because of its extraordinary vision as well as for the controversy
it excited. He also notes, though, that even Blasted was not
the first work of its kind. The spirit of shock was already in the air
(again) in visual arts, performance, and film, often described in a
facile manner as "the Quentin Tarantino effect." Theater, always slightly
behind culturally, was just beginning to catch on. Blasted
contains scenes of extreme violence, but it is not the superficial shock-fest
that the scandal surrounding its London premiere suggested. It is a
text founded on the ethics of despair and an investigation of the irrational
in human existence. Only many years after Kane's death would the play
be seen by reviewers as more than a string of escalating acts of physical
and emotional violence.
The media scandal around Blasted did
draw attention to the untapped vitality of new voices writing for the
theater, and actually encouraged producers to seek out, commission and
program their venues with plays written by and aimed at the 20 to 30-year-old
bracket. Stephen Daldry, artistic director of the Royal Court for much
of that decade, was the chief promoter of these new voices, and the
Royal National Theatre Studio, the Bush Theatre and other venues were
also supportive. A savvy media player as well as a strong, ambitious
stage director, Daldry (whose work will be on Broadway this season with
his staging of his film Billy Elliott) made the Court the top
destination for writing that would focus on the post-Thatcher generation.
Writers such as Judy Upton, Nick Grosso and Joe Penhall were encouraged
to write drama without having to write state-of-the-nation plays, as
David Hare, David Edgar and others did before them. Young was hip and
cool. Old was stodgy and out. Nothing new in a hipster-focused international
media culture, of course, but England (and specifically London-based
theaters and critics) embraced the youth phenomenon with a vigor quite
unlike any other culture. Kane's career thus benefited greatly from
an almost myopic attention paid to young playwrights in England in the
1990s. Her death in 1999 also signaled for many the end of the New Brutalist
period--despite the fact that, after Tony Blair came to power in May
1997, New Labour's promotion of a revitalized arts scene in general,
and the youth movement in particular, were extremely useful to the new,
consumerist project of branding Britain as Cool.
There is a link, albeit modest, in the tenor
of the "angry young men's" writing of 1950s Britain with the New Brutalism
of the 1990s. Both movements marked a return to the domestic arena,
the private realm, in order to illuminate global concerns. Kane, in
Blasted and Cleansed (1998), examined societies in
collapse and ravaged by war, from the vantage point of a singularly
private vision. In the kitchen-sink dramas of John Osborne's generation,
drama also occurred in private arenas, not in the halls of power and
authority. Both movements also contained an unapologetic sense of impassioned
idealism and cautious hope, burning at the edges of their rage.
In the second half of Blasted, the stage
space is fractured by a mortar shell--an effect made extremely powerful
at Soho Rep by the extraordinarily canny scenic design of Louisa Thompson
and the lighting design of Tyler Micoleau. At this point, horror and
sorrow invade a space already marked by unfeeling sex, and by bodies
irrevocably stained by their cruelty and indifference toward each other.
Before that, Ian, played with clinical precision by Reed Birney, comes
to represent the colonial, patriarchal body. He demands and claims his
territory--Cate's damaged body and psyche--in the anonymous hotel space.
Cate, played with shell-shocked anomie and humor by Marin Ireland, sucks
her thumb, in a gesture of regression, and falls into epileptic seizures
that suspend time and illuminate, in the form of brief visions, the
history of her fragile emotional state.
The two characters are caught in an unholy war
of domination, submission and protracted revenge. Ian's death-marked
body (racked by an unexplained cough and vestiges of what seems to be
cancer) seeks to conquer her youth and damaged psyche. Her pliant body
seeks comfort and alienation from him at the same time; the destroyed
and the destroyer are involved in an eternally symbiotic relationship,
as in Genet's work. A Soldier, played with cool ferocity and strange,
eerie tenderness by Louis Cancelmi, barges into the room. He terrorizes,
sodomizes and cannibalizes Ian, all the while mourning the brutal death
of his girlfriend in war and the deaths of all those he has murdered
in battle and in acts of mindless, psychotic wartime brutality. The
play, blasted out of civilization and ending on a note of ironic thanks,
ends up mourning for the colonized body: for states subjected to colonization
and for bodies rent by despair. In Blasted, what has disappeared
at the beginning of the play is improbably regained by destructive means
inthe end: an ability to experience sorrow. The point seems to be to
recognize civilization's disappearance and embrace an elemental saudade
(nostalgic longing).
Sarah Benson's committed, honest, and emotional
yet clinically detached production locates the play's mordant humor
and near nihilism, its strangely disembodied pain, and its equally strange
sense of hope. There is a practical, exposed quality to the final third
of the evening -- when the stage is trashed, broken apart, and de-glamorized
in every sense possible -- that demands that the audience consider what
is not "cool," easily digested and consumed by culture. If indeed we
live with war and its after-effects every day, how do we go on living?
And how are we implicated by our way of living in continuing cycles
of destruction and profit? The production and the play ask these questions
in a bracing and sometimes naïve manner. This, after all, was Kane's
first play, and while there's no question that it is an astonishing
first play, it nevertheless bears the hallmarks of a young writer exposing
her influences and sense of stagecraft to the light. In her subsequent
plays Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4:48 Psychosis and the
short filmscript Skin, Kane found more subtle and idiosyncratic
ways of communicating her concerns about society's ability to mourn
and embrace tragedy.
The young British writers of the 1990s were once
dubbed "the new nihilists" by Matt Wolf. To me, though, their works
are more usefully viewed as dialogic, elegiacally driven reactions to
the postmodern, nihilistic condition. They are like the 19th-century
plays and novels written in response to the industrial revolution, focusing
on how the human being might save himself or herself from turning into
a mere cog in the grand machine. Delineating short-circuited lives,
Blasted, despite its shock veneer, reveals a humanistic interest
in exploring how the individual is corrupted by capitalist greed and
unbounded power-broking (seen here in the arena of the bedroom). Ian
"buys" the outsider Cate a night out in the hotel in exchange for a
demand of forced sex. This othered Cate, victimized by Ian, then seeks
her revenge on his up-market clothes and status. The othered Soldier
then sodomizes Ian and blinds him to the world to which he has already
metaphorically blinded himself in his privileged shell. At the end of
the day the question is: who owns whom, and what exactly do they own?
From one point of view, Blasted is part
of a transgressive tradition. Two years after its premiere at the Royal
Court, David Cronenberg's film Crash (based on the J.G. Ballard
novel) appeared and created a minor scandal, as did A.M. Holmes' pedophilia
novel The End of Alice, and Marcus Harvey's Myra,
a portrait of the murderer Myra Hindley, which had been exhibited in
the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show. Kane's work as a whole can be
seen as part of a culture that was at the time wholeheartedly embracing
the liberating function of transgression and exhausting it at the same
time. By the beginning of the 21st century, transgressive art was recognized
almost uniformly by critics as a modern cliché. What, then, continues
to hold our interest in Kane's work?
Part of the answer is the way she deals with
sex: sex as commerce, image-making, subjugation and domination. In Kane's
work, nothing matters and everything matters. Constant, fickle arousal
is the norm. Sex is the field of play where all transactions are played
out, personal cost be damned. But in Blasted, of course, there
is a price paid. At the end of a night of rough sex and escalating violation
of Cate, Ian -- the money player struggling along in his middle-class
existence with his bigoted, white supremacist views -- receives a comeuppance
at the hands of the mad soldier. This soldier (whom Kane originally
conceived as a veteran of the Balkan conflict) subjects Ian, already
spiritually destroyed, to psychological and physical destruction.
This belated New York premiere of Blasted
serves as both a historical marker and a wake-up call challenging American
theatergoers and practitioners to face the atrocities of humanity head-on,
unblinkingly, rather than succumb to an increasing theatrical penchant
for unbounded whimsy and ineffectual decorativeness in new writing.
The production is a welcome, audacious and elegantly brutal (not "in-yer-face")
presentation of a play written in blood and fire, crackling with a writer's
bristling anger and caustic humor at humanity gone terribly wrong. I
can't think of a better time to experience Kane's blistering sacrificial
vision, as an empire wanes under the weight of hubris and war-mongering,
a world-wide market sways desperately, and a few hundred people in a
theater are asked to behold the specter of civilization splayed on an
altar signaling, to quote Artaud, "through the flames."