SARAH KANE Blasted

A play first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, on 12 January 1995. It is a contemporary play written in prose and constituted by five scenes.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

IAN: A young Welshman who has always lived in Leeds. He is a killer even though his legal job is as a journalist. He is quite sharp and unsensitive in his saying and has some racist and fascist ideas. He used to have an affair with Cate which ended time ago. Now he feels he loves her and it seems he wants to resume their relationship.

CATE: A young woman from the South. She is, maybe because of her age, somewhat ingenuous and weak when she is with Ian. He insults her and makes her angry quite often. She also has some psychological problems which carry her to reasonless hysterical laughing, repentine faints and some other weird behaviour.

SOLDIER: A uncompassionate soldier who boasts about the terrible crimes he has commited. He is cruel and senseless. He has become and animal, reckonless, and instinctive because of his experience as a soldier.

PLOT: Cate and Ian are in a hotel room willing to spend the night together. They have a strange relationship, she does not really love him and he has a very material and sexual concept of their relationship. Therefore, they start a big quarrel which ends in Cate fainting. Afterwards, he wants to have sex with her but she does not. They just stay there in the bedroom chatting and eating.

Next morning they wake up and she finally accepts to have sex with him. Then he confesses he is a killer and she hurts him. After having breakfast, she goes to have a bath and somebody knocks on the door. Ian goes to open and a soldier comes in. He looks for the girl but she has already escaped.

The hotel room has been blown up by a mortar bomb. The soldier starts to brag about all kinds of atrocities he has committed. Afterwards, the soldier rapes Ian. After this, he just sucks Ian’s eyes and eats them.

The soldier commits suicide with his own gun. Cate enters the room and sees Ian. She is carrying a baby. Ian asks her to stay with him as he feels helpless and really bad. He wants to commit suicide himself but Cate removes all the bullets off before giving him the gun.

The baby has died on Cate’s arms and she buries it. She leaves for something to eat. Meanwhile, Ian starts to behave senseless and hysterical. He ends up eating the baby’s corpse. Cate comes back seeming to have been raped. She carries some food which she shares with Ian.

SPACE: The play is developed just in one space. This makes the play not being so attractive as other plays are.

TIME: This play is really up-to-date. Other plays or books are also about the same topic, but this play differences the others.

LITERARY RESOURCES: There are not concrete features of stylistic resources, but we can notice a really big amount of violence and energy on the writing. A resource may be the way Cate speaks when she is nervous and she starts to stammer.

PERSONAL OPINION: It is a very hard play as lots of details are given of the strongest atrocities that a human being can commit. That could be the main theme of the play therefore. It shows how human beings can get to be really worse than animals to other human beings. The lack of respect towards the others and oneself. The senselessness of war and all which it carries. All this is illustrated in a tragic story with no happy ending. At first, we contemplate a not totally consented relationship between Ian and Cate. Then, we see the dark background of Ian as a killer. The appearance of the soldier is the worst thing that could happen. A being who brags about what crimes he has commited. A being whose humanity disappeared time ago, before war started and he was living with his girlfriend. A being who does not even care about living or dying. And then the catastrophe of war. Which gets Ian and Cate somewhat insane as well. Ian ends up blind wanting to die and having eaten a baby corpse. Cate seems to have consented her rape to get something to eat. We have arrived to a point where everything is permitted. The main values of respect to life, freedom, humanity have disappeared. Now it is chaos, now it is human denigration time.

Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Aina García Coll
Universitat de València Press
aigari@alumni.uv.es