Photo of Michelle Monteith by Omer Yukseker.
Blasted
By Sarah Kane
Directed by Brendan Healy
Featuring David Ferry, Michelle Monteith and Dylan Smith
Runs until October 17 @ Buddies in Bad Times
By Jen Handley
Buddies in Bad Times, where Sarah Kane’s Blasted had its English-Canadian premiere this week, has made much of the fact that when the play first opened in London in 1995, it was roundly rejected by critics in general, and by the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker in particular as “a disgusting feast of filth.” Plenty of playwrights, including Harold Pinter and Edward Bond, whose essay on Kane Buddies has included in the show’s program, have since come to her defense as an extremely courageous and innovative artist. After seeing the production at Buddies in Bad Times, I totally get where Tinker was coming from. Blasted is supposed to be disgusting, but I don’t see any evidence of the sense of relish they ascribe to Kane’s storytelling. Part of Kane’s goal was to “take the glamour out of violence,” and Blasted manages to do that by drawing a line from the “everyday” violence that ends up in tabloids to the kind of mind-bogglingly impersonal wartime violence from which most of us in the free world would like to consider ourselves estranged. And the director and cast of the Buddies production give Kane’s grueling material a serious run for its money.
The play begins with two people settling into a hotel room: Cate (Michelle Monteith), a jittery young woman who still gets a thrill out of jumping on the bed, and Ian (David Ferry), a middle-aged Welshman in a baggy leather jacket whose first words are, “I’ve shat in better places than this.” The first half of the play is a hopelessly lopsided power struggle between the two that I found pretty painful to watch. This isn’t because the actors aren’t terrific: they find subtle ways to heighten the tension without disturbing the painstaking realism of Kane’s script. Cate, waiting for and angry Ian to emerge from the bathroom, instinctively drifts to a spot where she’ll be least vulnerable to him, and Ian gives chillingly relaxed little laugh after dictating an article about a murder to his newspaper. Director Brendan Healy has managed to create a sense of dread that lasts through the play: it’s obvious from the moments the couple walks into their antiseptically white room that some calculated suffering is in store here.
If you’ve gotten this far in researching it and you haven’t heard about the series of violent taboos depicted in Blasted, I’m not about to deaden the shock by spelling them out, but suffice to say that the play takes a sharp turn at its midpoint that leads to an exhaustive exhibition of just how much people can hurt each other. The actors surrender to the terrifying scenarios they have to bring to life and make the material not just emotionally effecting, but really believable. It’s hard to process a lot of the awful things we read about or hear about but don’t see: Kane was committed to our seeing them, up-close and excruciatingly personal, and the Buddies production embraces that well-intentioned harshness with commitment and intelligence.
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