By SARAH KANE (Methuen Drama; 2002)

It really took some doing to offend theatergoers in 1995.  The nineties were, of course, the grunge era, when “edgy” was in.  To do as Sarah Kane did in BLASTED, which offered a full blast of politically charged scatology and brutality a la the 1970s-era plays of Fernando Arrabal, and upon its January 1995 premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre became the most controversial happening of its day, was an almost unheard-of feat.  In 2021 this play would doubtless cause hissy fits throughout the western world, but back then…

The setting is a hotel room in Leeds, “the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world,” amid a civil war.  Here we’re introduced to 45 year old Ian and 21 year old Cate.  She, it seems, is Ian’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, and he a petty criminal from whom Cate can’t seem to stay away.  The ensuing two-way psycho-fest, marked by hatred, self-loathing and misplaced lust, comes to involve racial slurs, masturbation, physical abuse and fellatio.

The tryst ends when a soldier, whose attitude is summed up by the line “I’ve got a gun and you haven’t,” enters the room.  He adds a new set of outrages that include urination, anal rape, cannibalism and suicide, leaving Ian and Cate to finish up this deranged tango on their own, albeit with a dead baby along for the ride.

I’ve never seen this play performed, and so can’t say how it might play onstage.  Like most of us, all I’ve got is this play script, which is impressive in its stripped-down, fat-free narrative and superbly calibrated sense of rhythm.  The dialogue has the flow of David Mamet at his most inspired, albeit with a more politically oriented gist than Mamet’s drama generally contained (if this play resembles anything in the Mamet cannon it’s the notorious EDMOND, which like BLASTED was rife with racial slurs and violence).

Sweet and cuddly this play isn’t.  I imagine that—once again—it will be viewed as beyond the pale in the woke era, but the skill with which it was put together is undeniable, as is Sarah Kane’s talent for shocking the unshockable.  I don’t know that her work will ever displace that of the aforementioned Fernando Arrabal (whose dramas AND THEY PUT HANDCUFFS ON THE FLOWERS and THE ARCHITECT AND THE EMPEROR OF ASSYRIA have much in common with BLASTED), and precisely what political significance this play might have I’m not sure (the nature of the war in which its characters are engulfed is never hinted at, much less divulged), but it is an attention-getter without question.