Yea!!!!!! Sarah Kane!!!!! I'm so excited you're finally reading her!!!
Blasted is one of my least favorite of her works. As in, I've only read it like 3 times instead of 800. (Cleansed is my faaaaavorite. Pheadra's Love I've only read once because I didn't really like it much the first time through so I'll have to revisit it. But her later works are fucking INCREDIBLE, I can't wait for you to read those ones.)
Anyway, the point is I don't have much insight on Blasted because most of my focus has been on her later works. A few points though. 1) My interpretation is that when the soldier said "same cigarettes," he was talking about Col, not Cate, but he's not specific. 2) It was Ian who was arguing that there is no God, not Cate.
Also, even though I haven't gone into much depth analyzing Blasted, I do love what it says about the piece in the Introduction. If you haven't read it yet (you probably shouldn't until you've read the plays themselves) I'll copy some of it here so you can read it without worrying about reading spoilery stuff for the other plays.
Ian's behavior and language are unpleasant, repulsive even, and yet nothing in the writing is condemning him. No authorial voice is leading us to safety. As the play progresses, the moral unease grows until the scene finally changes and we learn that, during the night, Ian has raped Cate. Shortly afterwards, there is a knock on the hotel room door and, in the play's most daring moment, a soldier enters, apparently from nowhere, and brings in with him the terrifying fragments of a world blown apart by violence. It is as though through the act of rape, which blasts the inner world of both victim and perpetrator, has also destroyed the world outside the room. The play's form begins to fragment. Its structure seems to buckle under the weight of the violent forces it has unleashed. The time frame condenses; a scene that begins in spring ends in summer. The dialogue erodes, becoming sparse. The scenes are presented in smaller and smaller fragments until they are a series of snapshots: images of Ian, all the structures of his life destroyed, reduced to his base essence - a human being, weeping, shitting, lonely, broken, dying and, in the play's final moments, comforted... Blasted placed Kane on the news pages of tabloids as well as the arts pages of Broadsheets. While other playwrights might have relished the sort of impact her play created, for Kane it was difficult and depressing. Her simple premise, that there was a connection between a rape in a Leeds hotel room and the hellish devastation of civil war, had been critically misunderstood as a childish attempt to shock.
I think that last bit best sums up a lot of the interaction between Ian and the soldier. Ian is condemning the soldier for the atrocious things he's done and yet we know that Ian has raped Cate and has admitted to being a killer.
Well, in any case, that's all I have to say about Blasted for now. I'll have less to say about Phaedra's Love. But her other work I will write you a dissertation on.
At least I finally have someone to talk to about how mind-blowingly brilliant she is.
he was talking about Col Ugh, you're so right. I totally read that wrong.
It was Ian who was arguing that there is no God, not Cate. Precisely my point. She's the one saying that there's a God and yet she removes the bullets and calls it fate.
Ian is condemning the soldier for... I didn't really go into Ian because I just wasn't very interested in him. At least the soldier was honest about his wrong doings. I totally don't believe that Ian ever killed anyone. Even the soldier knew better because Ian just didn't get it. Here we have a man taking advantage of a woman who even he acknowledges is rather slow and waving his phallic symbol around claiming to be a killer, but when he comes face-to-face with the real deal, he's literally devoured. And Ian has excuses for his actions. He loves Cate, she was being a tease, he might need the gun and it's his "job" and they deserve to be wiped out... Yet when the soldier asks him about it, Ian couldn't even think up of a scenario until pressed, and even then he'd choose to shoot them quickly in the back of the head. That way he wouldn't have to look at their face or see into their eyes, quick enough so he wouldn't have to hear their cries. They're almost not human that way. On the other hand, the soldier made them wait for it and took what he wanted.
I don't remember where it was from... a movie perhaps? Anyway, this guy says that it's an insult to your victim if you feel sorry after killing them. What good is an apology going to do? At least if you had the intent to go through with it, then it really meant something. It's a twisted sense of logic, but I love it. God, what was that from? Not really anything to do with this, but that's what I thought of during that scene.
Blasted is one of my least favorite of her works. As in, I've only read it like 3 times instead of 800. (Cleansed is my faaaaavorite. Pheadra's Love I've only read once because I didn't really like it much the first time through so I'll have to revisit it. But her later works are fucking INCREDIBLE, I can't wait for you to read those ones.)
Anyway, the point is I don't have much insight on Blasted because most of my focus has been on her later works. A few points though. 1) My interpretation is that when the soldier said "same cigarettes," he was talking about Col, not Cate, but he's not specific. 2) It was Ian who was arguing that there is no God, not Cate.
Also, even though I haven't gone into much depth analyzing Blasted, I do love what it says about the piece in the Introduction. If you haven't read it yet (you probably shouldn't until you've read the plays themselves) I'll copy some of it here so you can read it without worrying about reading spoilery stuff for the other plays.
Ian's behavior and language are unpleasant, repulsive even, and yet nothing in the writing is condemning him. No authorial voice is leading us to safety. As the play progresses, the moral unease grows until the scene finally changes and we learn that, during the night, Ian has raped Cate. Shortly afterwards, there is a knock on the hotel room door and, in the play's most daring moment, a soldier enters, apparently from nowhere, and brings in with him the terrifying fragments of a world blown apart by violence.
It is as though through the act of rape, which blasts the inner world of both victim and perpetrator, has also destroyed the world outside the room. The play's form begins to fragment. Its structure seems to buckle under the weight of the violent forces it has unleashed. The time frame condenses; a scene that begins in spring ends in summer. The dialogue erodes, becoming sparse. The scenes are presented in smaller and smaller fragments until they are a series of snapshots: images of Ian, all the structures of his life destroyed, reduced to his base essence - a human being, weeping, shitting, lonely, broken, dying and, in the play's final moments, comforted...
Blasted placed Kane on the news pages of tabloids as well as the arts pages of Broadsheets. While other playwrights might have relished the sort of impact her play created, for Kane it was difficult and depressing. Her simple premise, that there was a connection between a rape in a Leeds hotel room and the hellish devastation of civil war, had been critically misunderstood as a childish attempt to shock.
I think that last bit best sums up a lot of the interaction between Ian and the soldier. Ian is condemning the soldier for the atrocious things he's done and yet we know that Ian has raped Cate and has admitted to being a killer.
Well, in any case, that's all I have to say about Blasted for now. I'll have less to say about Phaedra's Love. But her other work I will write you a dissertation on.
At least I finally have someone to talk to about how mind-blowingly brilliant she is.
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It was Ian who was arguing that there is no God, not Cate. Precisely my point. She's the one saying that there's a God and yet she removes the bullets and calls it fate.
Ian is condemning the soldier for... I didn't really go into Ian because I just wasn't very interested in him. At least the soldier was honest about his wrong doings. I totally don't believe that Ian ever killed anyone. Even the soldier knew better because Ian just didn't get it. Here we have a man taking advantage of a woman who even he acknowledges is rather slow and waving his phallic symbol around claiming to be a killer, but when he comes face-to-face with the real deal, he's literally devoured. And Ian has excuses for his actions. He loves Cate, she was being a tease, he might need the gun and it's his "job" and they deserve to be wiped out... Yet when the soldier asks him about it, Ian couldn't even think up of a scenario until pressed, and even then he'd choose to shoot them quickly in the back of the head. That way he wouldn't have to look at their face or see into their eyes, quick enough so he wouldn't have to hear their cries. They're almost not human that way. On the other hand, the soldier made them wait for it and took what he wanted.
I don't remember where it was from... a movie perhaps? Anyway, this guy says that it's an insult to your victim if you feel sorry after killing them. What good is an apology going to do? At least if you had the intent to go through with it, then it really meant something. It's a twisted sense of logic, but I love it. God, what was that from? Not really anything to do with this, but that's what I thought of during that scene.
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