By Peter Maddern
Watching Blasted last night I couldn’t help but think of Tracey Ermin’s Bed which we saw in all its dirty delights at the Saatchi exhibition last year – was this nothing more than Bed for theatre? For like Bed, there is nothing nice about Blasted even the somewhat regally decked out hotel room that the ill and addicted Ian takes his occasional lover Cate to gets verbally trashed before patrons are even comfortable in their seats.
Director, Netta Yashchin in her notes to the program says of playwright Sarah Kane ‘[her] art was something natural, like rain, like water, like piss, like food, like sex.’ Well, we certainly had full measures of all those elements in Blasted even if the result did not exactly seem ‘natural’. Is this a tale of how violence from the outside will eventually make its way inside, a parable about how we are all the same or some feminist fancy where man is always violent and the only creature capable of decency is woman? The viewer can make up their own mind but as an experience in the grotesque it succeeds handsomely.
As for the production, far less conjecture is required. Yashchin and stage designer Wendy Todd do an excellent job of setting the scene and the effects of the blast in the hotel room are quite convincing. The structure of the seating in the Space to create the hallway in the hotel room door with the bright lights that beamed in with every new arrival was also highly creative.
Patrick Graham as Ian answers the call for a performance without inhibition and delivers on the dilemma of at one time being in control and powerful and at another being rendered lame and impotent. Mark Saturno’s soldier comfortably rests as a menacing, warped warrior rather than as some comic book character and Anni Lindner delivers as Cate, the supposedly naïve girl who finds her way into the ensuing mess at the outset.
The problem with Blasted is the play itself. Is all this nastiness a required part of the story or just there to shock? The unexplained absence of Cate for 20 minutes and the death of the soldier the work of a creative writer or signs of her laziness? The play with the guns was all contrived and often trite and given their history together, the premise that Cate is naïve seems somewhat generous.
So, bottom line, if you found Ermin’s Bed just the most exciting thing you have seen or heard about, then Blasted is for you. If not, this is a long 90 minutes in a world without redemption.
Kryztoff Rating 3K
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