SARAH KHANE
BLASTED & PHAEDRA'S LOVE
BLASTED
The first representation took place at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, on 12 January of 1995.
The cast:
IAN, he is 45 years old.
CATE, a 21 years old woman.
SOLDIER, a young soldier.
The space is a hotel room in Leeds, it looks very expensive. There is a mini-bar, and a double bed. There is also a bouquet of flowers.
There are two doors, one is the exit to the corridor and the other leads off to the bathroom.
We don’t know what time is it, anytime. The play starts on evening and finishes the other day.
The two plays by Sarah Khane I have read had a common topic: Violence.
In this play we will see the violence that a war cause, the suffering of the people and what a desperate person is able to do in this cases.
Ian is an ill man, he is dying and anything has importance for him know. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot and of course, he loves Cate and he wants making love to her, anymore is important now, because there are people looking for him to kill him.
Cate is here because she loves him too, but she is insecure and she doesn’t know what to do, stay with him, forget all the problems or go home with her mother.
She doesn’t want to die, and is easy to find the difference between them, he is calm, aware of the danger, he is not frightened, he is a killer and he has nothing to lose.
On the other hand, she is young, inexperienced, she has a lot of reasons to live.
The day after, we see the VIOLENCE and cruelty a war has. The soldier arrives to the room, and he will abuse of Ian. He will punch him, he will rape him, and he will pull out Ian’s eyes. He has tried to suicide himself before but Cate has impeded it.
We continue seeing more violence; a bomb explodes, the soldier dies.
Cate arrives with a baby, another example of desperation, a mother who abandons her daughter. The baby will die.
The desperation will appear on Ian, he is starving, and the starvation will force him eating the baby, an awful image, so violent, but he has nothing to lose, he is nearly to death and nothing will change his mind.
To sum up, this play is an example of the violent works Sarah Khane has write, with blood, suffering, sex, rapes and desperate characters who will do a lot of instinctive acts.
PHAEDRA'S LOVE
The characters of this play are:
Hippolytus, Phaedra, Theseus, Sophia.
The space is their house, a big mansion, and the time is the actual present
The play by Sarah Khane is again plenty of violence, like in Blasted.
This time, the play is a reworking of the Seneca’s play, where Phaedra, married with Theseus, will fall in love with Hippolytus, Theseus’ son. She commits incest.
Hippolytus is a despicable, revolting man, who has nothing to do except masturbating himself, eating hamburgers and watching T.V.
But Phaedra falls in love with him, she will start a sexual relationship with Hippolytus, who hasn’t got real interest in it, but he will take advantage of the situation and will have sex with her a lot of times.
After having sex with him, Phaedra will be incapable of keeping this secret, and she will confess it. The people will know this secret and they two will be damned by the
society, they will be tortured and definitely killed.
I think this play has an excessive number of violent scenes, it seems a gore film, with rapes, masturbations, oral sex, severing of penis, etc…..
Maybe Khane reflects the cruelty and brutality of our society, the wish of watching pain and suffering, the sensation it produces, or maybe Sarah Khane was a sick person, a mad woman who wrote this violent plays before killing herself when she was 29.