This week, Vancouver’s Pi Theatre will celebrate 30 years of bold and emotionally-charged theatre with Blasted: a play that, in its original London debut 20 years ago, was so controversial that it was met with overwhelming and fierce critic hostility. (One headline famously branded it a “disgusting feast of filth.”)
The Sarah Kane play – the first full-length work she ever published – has since been reexamined and performed for audiences around the world, and discussed in nearly every theatre history textbook, cementing Kane as one of the most provocative and influential playwrights of her generation.
Pi Theatre’s award-winning artistic director Richard Wolfe will bring Blasted to life April 10-25 in its Western Canadian premiere, featuring a cast of distinguished local actors in Cherise Clarke, Raresh DiMofte, and Michael Kopsa.
Only the second professional staging of Blasted in Canada, this rarely-seen play takes place in a “sordid hotel room”. Not for the faint of heart, Blasted recounts the dysfunctional seduction of a young woman by a corrupt journalist, while referencing all the greats: Beckett, Brecht, Shepard, in its examination of desire and cruelty.
According to the play’s notes, when a soldier abruptly enters the scene, “a harrowing chain of events is set in motion”, although none of that belies the rape, cannibalism, and eye-gouging to come.
“At the time,” explains Wolfe, tackling the play for the first time in his career, “Kane was responding to both violence that was embedded in the domestic situation of Britain – small, personal violence – together with her response to the Bosnian War in 1995.
“She said, ‘This is all happening on a continuum; this is all on a line,’” he adds. “You can see the seeds of violence in the personal and the small scale, that grow into institutional violence as war.”
When the play first came out, the perspective that the conflict in Bosnia could arrive at the doorstep of your average British family seemed “slightly exaggerated”, explains Wolfe. Despite the critics, however, the piece was defended by the famous playwrights of the day, such as Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill.
Today, Wolfe says, with the Canadian government using the threat of war on Canadian soil as justification for actions overseas, and the psychological impact of the graphic images available on the Internet coming literally into our living rooms, the piece works even more so as a commentary on global conflict.
Sadly, Kane committed suicide at the age of 28. In that time, she published five plays, many of them now seen as fundamental to the In-Yer-Face theatre movement taking place in Britain in the ‘90s.
“[Pi] is dedicated to bold and uncompromising theatre, plays, that are emotionally alive and intellectually charged. And Sarah Kane,” explains Wolfe, “both in terms of her short body of work and this particular play, fits those criteria.
“She was bold and uncompromising and highly emotional, experiential, and quite intellectual.”
• Blasted runs April 10-25 at Performance Works on Granville Island. Tickets start at $17 at PiTheatre.com
