BLASTED

11/11/10, Lyric Hammersmith

1 hr 45 mins. No interval (there was one in the original production at the Royal Court in 1995, someone said, but the audience walked out in droves; this way they lock you in for the duration).

The notorious Sarah Kane shocker, and we've seen it at last. And frankly, none of us much enjoyed it. It owes a big debt to King Lear, to Beckett, to schlock-horror splatter movies and to reports of the war in Bosnia, but lacks the profundity and universal resonance of the first two, or the visceral impact of the third, and imports the fourth unconvincingly to Leeds.

The chief difficulty is that it's impossible to empathise with the characters, who seem drawn from stock and equipped with a repertoire of tics and verbal routines that don't quite add up. Beckettian bafflement and boredom was the result.

Some of the shock moments were pretty shocking. A soldier eats the eyes of a man he's just raped. A dead baby is eaten (truly revolting, that). But we wanted it to end not so much because it was shocking but because the violence made us uncomfortable without justification. And perhaps it's a reminder that the most powerful things are sometimes left unspoken or merely hinted at.

The scene is a hotel room. There are the sounds of civil unrest outside but the hotel seems to function normally, with room service and hot and cold running water. It's quite plush, though one of the first lines is "I've shat in better places than this".

There are just three characters. A middle-aged, alcoholic journalist (Danny Webb) apparently dying of lung cancer, a noisy boor who wears a gun in a shoulder hoslter. A girl (Lydia Wilson, whom we saw in Pains of Youth) of indeterminate age (16? 18? 21?) with whom he seems to have had a (presumably underage) sexual relationship at some point in the past. And a soldier (Aidan Kelly), who bursts in half-way through with a gun, abuses, rapes and mutilates the journalist (the girl having escaped through the bathroom window, apparently) and then lies dead during the last few scenes, though how he died we're not told and we don't see.

The characters have rudimentary backstories. The journalist has a wife and child. The girl has a mother and a younger brother with learning difficulties and, implausibly given the civil war outside and her apparent lack of education, she is hoping to get a job as PA in an advertising agency. The journalist scoffs at this, brtually, as he does virtually everything. We know he's a journaslist because at one point he phones through his story to a copytaker. It's about some tragic death abroad and he has presumably been to see the family, but the story he phones over is the kind of finished piece, including quotes from a Foreign office spokesman, that only a sub in the newsroom would produce, not a reporter on the road. The soldier too has a backstory: a girlfriend or wife who was brutally assaulted and killed. We are given the details though curiously I have forgotten them.

The dialogue, which is interspersed with long periods of silent action, is brutal, allusive and sometimes repetitive. The girls says she loves the journalist though what she means by that, and what we're meant to believe she means, is unclear. At the start he takes all his clothes off, grabs his willy and sasys "Suck on this". She refuses (too disgusted?) though later she does give him a blow-job. In bed overnight it seems he rapes her because she complains next morning of pain, struggles to get dressed and says she can't piss or shit; on the other hand, when they woke uop she was still wearing her bra and knickers. Was the assault imagined? Or does the actress not do nudity?

Halfway through there isd a massive explosion which destroys the hotel room leaving only a dark landscape of beams and struts, and the hotel bed. (Maybe it's this that kills the soldier??).

Towards the end the journalist, blinded, helpless and starving, is visited by the girl (why?) carrying a crying baby she's found. The baby dies and she buries it under the floorboards. At the end he digs the corpse up and starts to eat it, then climbs into the hole so that all that we can see of him is his head. It's immediately beneath a hole in the roof through which rain comes down to soak him. The girl returns (why had she gone? why does she come back?) and sharesd a morsel of food with him. By this stage the lights have gone down, leaving only a spotlight on the journalist's head. He says "Thank you". Blackout.

Redemption of sorts, I suppose, in an otherwise profoundly nihilistic play, though one that nags away at you demanding explanation and elucidation, which may be the mark of an effective piece of theatre.

4.48 PSYCHOSIS

23/3/10, Barbican

In Polish. The last play Sarah Kane wrote before her suicide, translated and apparently reimagined by a Polish company, TR Warszawa. Well-reviewed at Edinburgh a couple of years ago.

We never saw the original in English, so it's hard to tell how true this version is. Here's an illuminating review on The Arts Desk, from which I gather that the original is potentially a much richer text, in which every line can be spoken by any of the characters, and that this version limited the play's potential by turning it into a detailed investigation of female breakdown.

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1235:448-psychosis-theatre-review&Itemid=27

Here's what I wrote before reading the Arts Desk review.

It's a cry of anguish, a suicide note, a near-monologue, a glimpse into the ghastliness of mental illness and of a rational (indeed, highly talented) mind plunged into the perpetual nightmare of deep, deep depression.
The first words are "I am sad". The last words are "Watch me vanish".
The central character, presumably a Kane self-portrait, has a desperate craving for love, and an irresistible urge to attack and vilvify those who offer it. There is a contempt for doctors and their patronising, incomprehending comprehension; a series of tirades aimed at anyone who tries to offer compassion or help (the doctors are pretty dry sticks and may deserve it, but the fellow-inmate who says "I want to be your friend", the lesbian lover scarcely seem to though they are in their ways as needy as the central figure).
Not very dramatic, then, and D went to sleep. The text is clearly a gift to a certain sort of East European theatre director. I thought ti was moving and absorbing, but that was down to the staging and the central performance, not to the disjointed, collage-like text.
There was a large cast, though most had nothing to do but walk on for a few minutes and a few lines, while the central character railed at them. There were long silences.
The set represented some kind of institution, a hospital clearly, with a row of basins and a lavatory against the back wall. There was a table, brought on and off as needed, and some chairs. From time to time a portenouts male voice-over intoned numbers, counting down from 100 to near zero, which were also projected against the back wall of the set. And at one climactic moment loads of numbers were projected onto the back wall, falling in cascades, as two doctors prescribed what seemed like random doses of drugs to which the numbers related. The heroine, if we can call her that, was caught in the projections too and there was loud music (what?). The 4.48 of the title refers, apparently, to the time of day when suicides are most vulnerable.
There were downright mysterious elements to the staging -- like a wall, vertical to the audience, which moved in stages across the stage from stage left to right, and through which characters occasionally walked.
Pills were a constant motif: held in the hands, scattered (bouncing across the stage), being crunched by the actors. There were frequent blackouts: a theatrical technique of course, but also a psychological condition (I wonder if the term has the same double meanings in Polish?).
The coup de theatre came near the end when our heroine, who has progressively disrobed during the performance, is seen with her back to us against the rear wall, looking into a mirror and speaking (clearly amplified). Blackout. The lights come up and she is still there but curiously changed: old, bent, wrinkled. She turns and sits on the loo, sideways to the audience, chin resting on her hand in a pose like Rodin's Thinker; a light comes on downstage to reveal our heroine on a chair in a similar pose, sideways to the audience.