Blasted @The Ramshorn

Sarah Kane's debut work Blasted has gained the notoriety of a “Video-Nasty” - which is to miss the point entirely. Like most of Kane’s work the atrocities of Blasted are mounted as an act of empathetic despair. If performed correctly there is no voyeuristic pleasure to be had here, rather the audience are forced to witness the horrors of war, without the pacifying gleam of video-editing or the comforting righteousness of a moral authority. We see war for what it is, irrational, hateful, and ultimately destructive.

It is to the credit of the cast that a sincere attempt has been made to flesh out the characters, adding layers and giving Kane’s caricatures a little third dimension. However, it quickly becomes clear that far from working with the text, the cast have been forced to fight against it. Kane was first and foremost a poet. Her characters are forces of nature rather than literal people. Trying to find a concrete character arc in Kane is like trying to get blood from a stone. The closest we can find is the shift between victim and victimised.

The character of Ian should be a terrifying monstrosity, but here John Love endows him with a soft-core. The cast seem comfortable allowing Ian’s sexist/racist vulgarity to be played for laughs and Cate, portrayed here as a strong and independent female, contradicts the reality of events shown. Cate is a stammering, seizure-suffering rape victim who only gains her true power through her final acts of prostitution.

It is noble to want to empower Cate’s character but it proves counter-productive. Kane herself made no attempt at logical humanisation, and doing so seems pandering. Cate does not act like a victim; Ian doesn’t not act like a perpetrator which makes the power shift that occurs when Solider enters seem somewhat redundant. While it can be argued that this allows the audience to become more empathetic, and the piece more moral complexity, the characters created by the performances seems to clash with the on-stage action, meaning the horror of the rape, or Ian’s discomforting sexual advances seem forced and unconvincing.
The result is a production which simply feels too polite and has none of the primal brutality needed to convince.