A scene from Blasted
On Jan. 12, 1995, British playwright Sarah Kane's Blasted opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London and ignited the last great theatrical controversy of the 20th century.
The newspaper critics were fierce in their attacks, appalled by the 23-year-old playwright's depiction of extreme violence - rape, torture, even a character gnawing on the corpse of a baby. The Daily Mail called the play a "disgusting feast of filth."
Soon after, however, artists rallied to Kane's defence. Heavy hitters such as Edward Bond and Harold Pinter praised Blasted's invention and bravery, while Caryl Churchill said she found it "rather a tender play."
Fifteen years later, Blasted - in which a mismatched couple meet in an expensive hotel room in Leeds only for it to explode into a war zone - is getting its professional English-Canadian debut in Toronto directed by Brendan Healy, the new young artistic director of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
Actor Michelle Monteith, who plays a young woman named Cate, actor and director David Ferry, who plays tabloid journalist Ian, and Healy sat down to discuss the horror and the beauty, the reputation and the reality of the play with The Globe and Mail.
Why has it taken so very long for this play to be produced in English Canada? It's been studied in our universities for at least a decade and is regularly produced throughout the rest of the world, including Quebec.
Brendan Healy: That's a question for all of us. It's the kind of play that makes people very nervous - partially because the violence and the sexuality of it is uncomfortable. There's also a production demand that's intimidating: Canadian theatres are notoriously underfunded, so it requires a lot of creativity to make it work.
David Ferry: I think that some people read the surface of the violence and sexuality in it, rather than going deeper. For me, it's actually not about that stuff at all. Although I can even understand why some of the people in the original reviews in London were going: "Gasp! Horror!"
Michelle Monteith: There's obviously violence and terrible things happening to the people in the play, but there are also profound moments of delicacy.
Ferry: And love. Sarah Kane talked about the love story, endlessly, sometimes to deaf ears. The more we play our scenes, the more we discover the profound aching heart that is underneath the play.
There's certainly a perception that Toronto theatre audiences avoid difficult theatre and so it's financially risky to produce it. And yet, before Blasted has even opened, you've had to extend the run. A young director recently complained to me he felt that the practitioners in this city are actually more conservative than the audiences. Is there some truth to that?
Healy: I think so, totally. We always feel like our livelihoods are so precarious that we do have to be conservative - or make safe choices. But, unfortunately, really good art can only come out of risk. That's when the real stuff happens.
Ferry: I do think that the audience is more interested in challenge than some of the practitioners. Many of the practitioners in this city are joined by an attachment to a subscription-base audience that's still the same it was 25 or 30 years ago. We see it in the age of the audience.
Healy: I have been amazed by the fearlessness of the actors in this city, though. I think they are also craving experiences that require a kind of risk. As soon as I announced that I was doing this play, the onslaught of interest from actors was really encouraging.
Michelle, you have the most direct experience of working on Kane having also performed in Jennifer Tarver's recent production of Crave for Nightwood Theatre. What made you want to return to her troubling world?
Monteith: I love the honesty of her work. I love the challenge that it presents to the actors. I love the listening that's required of the actor. I guess what draws me to her is how hard it is.
What do you think was the reason behind the over-the-top reaction the play initially got from critics?
Healy: Kane's description of the experience was of realizing that she'd written a play about a middle-aged, white, middle-class journalist who is violent and then is the victim of violence. And she was sitting in a room on opening night full of middle-aged, white journalists reviewing this play, at which point, she realized that she was toast. That's her interpretation.
Monteith: I remember Kane saying that she was so surprised at how people responded to her depiction of [violence like]what was happening in Yugoslavia - and not at what was happening in Yugoslavia. Writing about it made people more angry than what was happening.
Healy: It's a play that, for me, is disturbing in that Kane explores violence and exposes a lot of violence and she almost explains why the violence happens, but she doesn't quite. A lot of the reviews were asking: Why show all this suffering? Why show all this pain? And the playwright refuses to really answer that. It's more of a portrait of pain.
Ferry: Like with Edward Bond's Saved - and going back to the first production of A Doll's House - where critics had similar reactions, I think a lot of it was predicated on the investigation of form. She did something that wasn't being done. She started with a well-made play - in the first part, it's almost Ibsenite social realism - and then she literally blew the play up and blew the stage up and brought in Brecht- and then Beckett-like writing.
Healy: They called it crazy. It's kind of like with Stravinsky - people who are great innovators in form who get dismissed as insane because they are operating outside what is the convention. We think as a society we've seen it all, but every once in a while someone does something new. It's hard to think of a play since Blasted that has done that.
Has that initial negative reaction helped fuel the success of the play since then?
Healy: There's a media hit on the play that helps a certain aspect of it. But in many ways, we had to get beyond the shadow that the play casts and start really exploring it authentically. I feel like even now I'm trying to get beyond the reputation of the play in order to see the beauty, the delicacy, that love story.
Though written in the 1990s, Blasted really seems like a product of "the age of terror." Obviously, terrorism wasn't invented on Sept. 11, 2001, but for a lot of people that's when the violence that's going on elsewhere burst into our hotel room. How much was Kane ahead of her time?
Healy: Clearly, I think she was. It's one of those rare instances where the play is more relevant now than when it was first written.
Monteith: Absolutely. I think I read that two out of the four London subway bombers actually came from Leeds.
Ferry: She was far-seeing - she saw 9/11, she saw the subway bombs.
Healy: She really got the civilization on the brink of losing its security. That, to me, was completely a prescient moment, when she could clearly see that we are going to be in a very paranoid place for a very long time.
Kane, of course, didn't live to see that age. She committed suicide in 1999 at the age of 28, having written only five plays. How does that affect the way we view her first play in particular?
Healy: It's an impossible thing to get over, because the nihilism that exists in every crevice of Blasted is all the more loud because she killed herself. But you do also realize that she wrote out of a place of hope and she wrote to survive. When you get inside the play, you see this incredible testament of life in it.
Blasted runs at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre until Oct. 17.
This interview has been condensed and edited.