What happens to a writer whose work shocked the establishment and who subsequently committed suicide? Some British writers embroider their authenticity by claiming to be the keepers of her flame. Critics who expurgated this play when they first saw it attend European conferences to analyse her legacy.
Sarah Kane has become an icon. Of what exactly no-one’s quite sure. (More) doomed youth. The person is gradually superseded by a myth. The plays become part of the canon. She will never say anything sardonic ever again, but her words can come back to haunt you.
The actress playing Cate in this production for the Berlin Schaubuhne, directed by Thomas Ostermeier looks a lot like Sarah Kane. This cannot be entirely accidental, and seems initially off-putting. It suggests the play sees itself as the authentic version. The tone of the production is polished, with gravitas. We are offered a sumptuous feast of pickled baby and sautéed cock. The production values put the average subsidised British theatre show to shame. The ceiling really collapses. The stage revolve is employed not once, not twice but four or five times, as though we are watching some grotesque slow-motion carousel. A wheel of immovable cruelty. It’s the most brilliantly integrated use of a revolve I’ve ever seen.
Blasted is, in this production, a lost act from the Book of Revelations; the one where hell descends to our earth because we have brought it upon us with our moral inadequacies and putrid materialism. It’s a hair’s breath away, dirty bombs waiting in the wings, even if the play was originally inspired by the Balkan war.
Nothing has changed, the cruelty is immovable. It’s easy to see why the play possesses what might be described as ‘universal appeal’. As the production comes to the end of a stately two hours, the baby is bitten, the journalist buggered, his eyes Gloucestered. The play enters a death-world which has lost its power to shock (what were all those critics getting so upset about back in the naïve nineties?). We are watching the inevitability of our decline. Suicide will soon seem like the last remaining sensible option.
In its baroque way, the production works. The play’s steel-eyed brilliance shines through. The set and the revolve and white noise TV screen compliment it. Yet it feels to me as though something’s been sacrificed with all this stateliness. The wit in the lines, the black theatrical humour. There aren’t many laughs. It’s all in danger of becoming a bit too literal. Or reverential. Occasionally it felt as though it was the writer as icon whose work was being staged, rather than the writer who used to walk amongst us.
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