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.

THE PAINS OF YOUTH

14/12/09, National (Cottesloe)

2 hrs 30 mins. A Katie Mitchell production of a Martin Crimp version of a Ferdinand Bruckner original more correctly translated as "the illness/disease of youth" and written in 1929.

The publisher's synopsis reads: "Vienna, 1923. A discontented post-war generation diagnose youth to be their sickness and do their best to destroy it. Promiscuous, pitiless and bored, six sexually entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the young, pretty maid, with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for the ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn't waste any time weeping - Desiree wants her."

Or: "The sort of play written once in every generation, depicting the moral corruption and cynicism of a frustrated and disillusioned youth in a world that is hopelessly out of joint."

Way over the top but rivetting and not unconvincing. They all had tics, hang-ups and neuroses galore: checking their watches, looking over their shoulders, teasing and taunting and probing and provoking one another. This was, after all, the city and era of Freud. It's the sort of play in which someone says: "Bourgeois existence or suicide. There are no other choices."

The cast doubled as stage hands, in grey suits and white gloves, taking props on and off as the action froze and the lighting changed, covering furniture with plastic sheeting, introducing and removing glasses and clothing in plastic bags: detectives at the scene of the crime, or perhaps museum curators handling fragile artefacts. In the first part I didn't see the point. In the second part it served to highlight some important stage business, including a crucial overdose.

The fashions were elegant: splendid ladies' underwear, hats, frocks. And pyjamas! (Not for sleeping in, though: they had nightgowns for that.) There was a great deal of smoking (in one case of attractively aromatic cigars) and a great deal of shouting.

Everyone seemed to be playing games of control and dominance with everyone else. Feder was monstrous and spooky and clearly very ill, physically and mentally, as played by Geoffrey Streatfeild (whom we saw as Prince Hal/Henry V in the RSC Histories); he took delight in corrupting the housemaid and sending her out "on the game". A insisted at the interval that Desiree (Lydia Wilson), or Dizzy, the aristocrat who was so clever she scarcely needed to revise for her exams and seemed to have extraordinary sexual allure for men and women alike, plus an alarmingly suicidal bent, was also "on the game". We pooh-poohed that, insisting that she just slept around; but in part two she suddenly announced she too wanted to try walking the streets with the corrupted maid (she was prevented and promptly took a fatal overdose) so A was effectively right and we were wrong.

Marie's lover, Petrell (or "Dolly"), was weak and spineless and easily seduced by the self-made, waspishly self-defensive Irene (or "Sally" as her janitor father had originally named her). The dominance games seemed to involve quite a lot of class (the maid was delighted to discover that she and Marie both came from Passau and that her father, a carpenter, had worked for Marie's father, a bourgeois builder). D also thought they involved gender role-playing and the notion that women could only be happy and fulfilled if they had a man, perhaps because at the end Marie was taunted by the monstrous Felder into marrying him. I didn't get that: indeed, the women generally seemed admirably independent and un-dependant. They were, after all, professionals in the making (though I'm jolly glad none of them were my doctor).

Marie was Laura Elphinstone, first class: we saw her in Lysistrata at the Arcola and possibly Tom and Viv at the Almeida.