“Reviled. Respected. Revived.” That’s how the Lyric Hammersmith is tagging its production of Sarah Kane’s controversial debut play, notoriously the subject of frenzied media outrage on its first outing at the Royal Court. Given Blasted’s baggage, Sean Holmes decision to program it is a bold one, but not – as some have suggested – a brave one. Whether savvy or cynical, however, I’m still undecided.
Certainly there’s a case for it. Fifteen years is long enough for a new generation of audiences to have emerged – despite the Royal Court’s own restaging in 2000 and Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubuhne production imported by the Barbican in 2006 – and it is a text that leaves you craving to experience it. And yet – in keeping with last year’s revival of Comedians – there is something uneasy about it’s programming, about the way it guarantees bums-on-seats and media attention. I can’t shake the idea that Holmes might be intent on making his presence – and that of the Lyric more generally – known.
I suppose what I’m saying is that Blasted has become fossilized. We arrive prepared, braced. We already know of its horrors: anal rape, eyeball extraction and cannibalism. We turn up to take up its challenge, to see if we can stand it. As I was leaving, I overheard a female voice boast of having “thrown up a little in my mouth.” That, I think you’ll agree, is absolutely not the spirit of the piece. That’s to take it as a game of chicken. Atrocity bingo. That is to turn up to tuck in to the “feast of filth” that The Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker spoke of in 95.
Back then, John Peter defended Blasted in The Sunday Times, writing, “Theatre is only alive if it is kicking.” Holmes’ production delivers a firm nudge under the table, but it doesn’t really unleash the full force. In fact, it seems rather palatable. There’s a warped grace and a hollow beauty. It’s almost entrancing, addictive even, but it doesn’t really slap you around until you’re forced to admit humanity’s horrifying potential. His production is, more often, quite sympathetic and often calmly rational.
Largely, I suspect, that has to do with Paul Wills’ design, which – in conjunction with Paule Constable’s lighting – lends the whole the timbre of a graphic novel. In the first half, Wills’ gives us a widescreen set, shallow and elongated. His glossy hotel room, gossamer curtains wisping against the back wall, is a palette of off-whites and pastel greys. It feels funereal, even to the point of resembling an oversized coffin. The drowsy, warm morning light that floods in through the windows catches the edges of its characters, throwing them into soft silhouette.
But Wills’ mistake is to all but obliterate that world with the bomb that blasts the play apart half-way through. When the third scene is revealed, all that is left of the hotel is the vast frame of its concrete skeleton. It looms high above, like an echoing, dusty cathedral. Suddenly, this is the void. It’s purgatory. It’s the non-place of Beckett. It is a stage.
And that scuppers the play’s potential to really horrify. Kane’s play exists in the collision of two worlds we thought distinct – one inner-city Leeds, the other a war-torn elsewhere. The first, charting Ian’s callous manipulation, abuse and domination of Cate, contains the seeds of the second, with all its inhuman atrocities. Its violence must burst into a world that feels familiar. The war-zone must come to Leeds.
The near-total obliteration of the hotel, however, removes the concrete reality of the second half’s violence. They are too easily witnessed as metaphor, rather than as continuation. Wills’ design lets us off the hook by denying Kane’s text its own inner-logic.
But all this feels unfairly negative given a text that somehow contains its own impossibility. Though he may not capture the raw, guttural energy of Blasted, its animal savagery, Holmes delivers a brilliantly detailed staging that grips like a vice.
What he does find, particularly in the stunning first half, is the humanity, often cold and rational. Danny Webb’s Ian seems to tactically assess the changing situation, applying a touch more pressure onto Cate, retreating and trying a different tack. Cate’s laughter at his initial clumsy attempt at seduction, stripping unseen and announcing himself with a flourish, wounds him and that wound, you feel, drives him on. From thereon in, for all the traces of fondness between them, they are at crossed purposes: when one jokes, the other is po-faced. Neither can comfort the other: when Ian attempts a genuinely tender hug the next morning, his rasping lung splutters into action, delivering a coughing fit into her ear.
Webb gives a fantastically nuanced turn as Ian. For the most part he’s gnarled, even his attempts at gentle whispers come out with a croaking edge. At one moment, sat on the bed with Cate bathing next door, he manages to seem a soft, harmless creature, almost a Wethers Original grandpa, deflated and waiting, passing time with half-thoughts. Lydia Wilson is more streetwise than one might expect as Cate. She inserts the stuttering insecurities carefully without tipping Cate into the territory of vulnerable fuck-up. Instead, she seems young and, by the end – walking through the detritus, babe in arms – dishevelled, thin and somehow older. As the soldier that intrudes, Aidan Kelly is suitably sizable, but somehow too steady. He towers over Webb’s Ian, but one never feels the unpredictable threat.
And that runs through the entire production. In paying so much attention to the motivations and build-ups, Holmes denies the horrors an animal, ravishing quality. Its telling that the most head-turning of moments comes at the end of the second act, just after the soldier’s entry. Kelly kneels, sliding out a tray with two cooked breakfasts and starts eating. He tears through sausages, scoops handfuls of scrambled egg and fills his cheeks. It goes on for ages, sniper rifle always trained on Ian, and Kelly never slows down in his gorging. In that moment alone – though the torturous and sexual acts demand it as well – does this Blasted gain an unstoppable momentum, acting on its base urges and cravings without thinking and fulfilling a bodily need because it has no choice.
I suspect, given that even after his final, lonely shit Webb’s Ian wipes, Holmes has set out to expose traces of human dignity and survival. It’s just that Kane’s text demands otherwise. It needs disgust and deprivation. It must act on impulse with consequences forgotten. It must lash out and lose control. Only then can it hang its head in human shame.
Photograph: Simon Kane
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