The Horrific Beauty of Sarah Kane - BLASTED
Sarah Kane, May 1998.
"I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it."
Sarah Kane
03 Feb 1971 - 20 Feb 1999
Trigger Warnings – Mentions of rape, cannibalism, suicide, mental health, war and child neglect.
Thumbnail Photo Credit - Soho Rep Theatre.
There’s still lots we don’t know about late British playwright Sarah Kane. Personal and precious stories are locked away with the people who knew her closest. There have been no formal documentaries, and her brother has given no permission. I think it should stay that way. For a woman who burst open the British theatre in the 90s, the industry, with critics leading the charge, tried their hardest to burst her open too. Her wit, dark sense of humor, and compassionate analysis of our world rendered efforts to silence and push her into obscurity, utterly useless. Giving her the most peaceful and respectful privacy is the sweetest revenge against an industry that was too ignorant to engage with her work when she was alive. She was one of the most groundbreaking playwrights we’ve ever seen. There’s still so much to delve into. She left us 5 plays and a short film, that all to some degree, tackle love, violence, rape, war, murder and the mind-numbing processes of excess. I’ll be digging into the work she left for us to devour.
If you haven’t heard of Sarah Kane, here’s a brief intro. She was a British playwright, who shot to relevance when her first play, Blasted, was programmed at Sloane Square’s Royal Court Theatre. Kane would admit in an interview with Dan Rebellato that the court didn’t really know what to do with it. She goes on so far as to say she thought they were ashamed of it, so they scheduled it into a dead spot, just after Christmas, hoping no one would notice. Oh, but they did. The normal thing is that shows in the smaller upstairs of the court could have a press night with a whole crowd that was just reviewers and journalists. On this day, there was. The main character of Blasted, Ian, is a journalist, who meets a grisly, albeit funny end.
Blasted takes us into a Leeds hotel room at first. Expensive, like it could be anywhere in the world, Kane would explain. It puts us in a comfortable position, not demanding too much of us… yet. What unfolds at first is deeply uncomfortable, but it turns itself inside out so you can’t explain or predict unless you’ve read or seen it. We’re introduced to Ian, a middle-aged tabloid journalist and all-around bad dude. We meet Cate, a young woman with a stutter. A deep interrogation of control and manipulation ensues as they thrust us into a relationship with a clear power imbalance. Cate stutters when she is nervous, which Ian takes full advantage of. As we try to make sense of the relationship we’re seeing, we also become privy to the fact that Cate has blackouts. Ian also uses these to his advantage, eventually sexually assaulting her. But that’s not the most curious thing about Kane’s first play. She twists and turns their relationship until it is knotted tightly. There are some points when you don’t know who is in control. Is Kate’s naivety disarming for Ian? Does she know? Does she harness it? Cate’s undercurrents of influence are much more subtle than the physical abuses of Ian. Ian’s dependence on Kate is cerebral. He clings to her youth, to give himself another shot at life before he dies. He clings to her naivety by pumping her full of stories and showing her his gun, which he has for his more dangerous journalistic endeavours. He needs her to believe in him, in his masculinity. If not, he is nothing.
Blasted at Bergenprosjektteater.
He shows sexual dominance and rapes her when she is showing signs of independence and falling out of his illusion. He takes advantage of one of her blackouts. She awakens the next day and hates him. Some of the tensest 10 minutes ensure the morning after and are a testament to how intoxicatingly evil abusive relationships can be in any form. They strip you of everything. In this moment, I think they strip Cate of everything but her hate. This is the part of Blasted, where I was at a crossroads. Will the only thing we know about Kate is how we see her after her sexual abuse? What happens next pulls me in further and further every time I read or watch it.
The entire world changes. The sexual violation is so evil and unfair that it changes the very physical space we’re in. By force. In its sheer malevolence, the act and its perpetrator, Ian, transports us to a war zone. We can only look on as the land beyond the hotel room is filled with fire and violence. As we cross the war zone with Kate and Ian, it brings feelings of the relationship between a survivor of sexual assault and their body. How you see it, how you think others see it, how you think you may see it for the rest of your life. How you see the person who has changed your body forever, and how your body is in an almost stalemate while you heal, like a soldier, waiting in frozen time for the bomb to drop. Your body, perhaps an internal battlefield.
If there’s one thing Sarah Kane was impeccable at, it was comeuppance. When we think about justice, whether restorative or other, questions of how much is too much, who gets to decide and where does empathy live, come into the minds of those who have been wronged. Sarah Kane cleverly makes Ian face his maker, in the eyes of a soldier. As the soldier bursts through the door with his own gun, he becomes the reflection of everything that Ian has pretended to be. When he is met with this image of hyper-masculine violence and the practicalities of killing someone (the soldier has some cracking lines when he talks about the war—not for the faint-hearted), Ian can’t function with it. His entire persona melts throughout the rest of the play. When he finally meets his death, and he does, BRUTALLY, we seem detached from him, because the layers of his personality have been being peeled back.
Fayssal Bazzi as the soldier, Malthouse theatre
Kane was urgently telling us about the mundane or individual emotions and day-to-day practices that we do that can lead to war and genocide. We, even in the privilege of the West, devastating other countries, making refugees in nations we have yet to hear of, are still only a few inches away from civil war. Always. The events inspired her. The Bosnian Genocide was horrific, and images of crying women desperately calling out for the UN are scorched in the minds of anyone who dares to learn about it. Kane wanted to bring us into contact with our human propensity for severe violence. We are all capable of dictatorship or wiping entire races or ethnicities off of the planet, which is why we make caricature villains out of our dictators; to hide away our own abilities to be just as evil. Every single one of us. Ian and Cate are the seed, the Soldier and the teleportation to a war zone, the tree.
We don’t feel for Ian in his last moments, and even then, he must endure. He is terrorized by the soldier, in the form of rape, gouging out Ian’s eyes and raping him, only to kill himself after. Even in death, his suffering is not over, and it shines a mirror on our own limitations for empathy. But there’s a symbolism that I think is beautiful here. The soldier, being everything that Ian has said he is, has brought Ian into direct contact with himself, who he wishes he was and what it’s actually like to be it. As he suffers under the weight of the extension of himself, found in the soldier, he becomes overwhelmed and succumbs to it. The soldier also serves as a direct consequence of his actions. A brutal and twisted personification of true empathy, putting him through a rape, as he has done to Cate. As he is blinded, Cate returns to find him laying next to the soldier. She brings with her a baby that she has rescued. It dies shortly after, and an argument ensues around the futility of a burial and what it would mean for this child they know nothing about.
In the culmination of one of the most devastating plays ever to be on a British stage, Kane takes us through the gentle complexities of the human condition. She makes Ian fully vulnerable and susceptible to his fate. He yearns for comfort, even hugging the soldier’s body. The relationship becomes full circle, with the path opened for Ian to become completely reliable on Kate as she becomes his sole survival mechanism.
Kane played with the most human of conditions; love and reliance. Anything else that manifests on her stages is a symptom of a lack or abundance of love. She thrust herself into the extremes of humanity to make us see ourselves in all our flaws. Not only this, she brought us into contact with the beauty that can come out of our flaws, or the hubris that will envelop us if we don’t deal with what is in the shadows.
