Blasted – Footnotes
The obvious origin of the title of the play is the blast of the mortar bomb at the end of scene two that opens “a large hole in one of the walls”, and shatters the naturalistic unities of the play itself. Kane said herself, however, that her first connotation of the word “blasted” was as slang for extreme drunkenness, which of course refers to Ian’s determined alcoholic consumption and state.
Kane also revealed that she had been reading Shakespeare’s King Lear when she was writing the play, and in our conversation Graham pointed out the particular parallel between Gloucester’s and Ian’s blinding, and their both being foiled in their attempted suicide. In general the psychological landscape of all of these characters’ lives is ravaged by violence and trauma, as is the country itself by war. Metaphorically the play is a modern rendition of “the blasted heath” of Lear’s ruined world.
in Ghosts in 2015
Photo: Hugo Glendinning
in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days
Photo: Donald Cooper/Photostage
Sarah Kane explicity cited a number of influences on her writing of Blasted, associating these with specific sections within the play. The first section of the play she said was “very influenced by Ibsen.” With this reference Kane is first acknowledging the social realism of the first part of the play, which is more conventional in form and focusses on a dysfunctional domestic relationship of a sort. In his book Love me or kill me, Graham Saunders makes a further intriguing link with Ibsen between the syphilis that afflicts Dr Rank in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Oswald in Ghosts, and Ian’s terminal lung cancer. As with Ibsen’s characters, Ian’s disease symbolises his moral corruption.
Kane referenced Bertolt Brecht as an influence on the second section of the play, perhaps in the way that she self-consciously explodes the form of the play. More significantly, as we’ve already touched on, she also declared her “deliberate reworkings of King Lear”.
Kane admitted that the third section of the play owed a large debt to Samuel Beckett. She said that she was reading Waiting for Godot at the time that she was writing Blasted, and the sparse language and bleak imagery of the final part of the play are informed by Beckett’s dramatic vision. The image of Ian’s head poking out of the floor with the rain falling through the ceiling on his head echoes several of Beckett’s entrapped characters: Winnie in her mound of earth, Nag and Nel in their dustbins, Hamm in his chair (also blinded). As Graham also points out in his book, there is the same overall sense of the characters being trapped indefinitely in the hotel room, as characters are in the confined spaces of Beckett’s world. Ian and Cate are also trapped in “a relationship of mutual co-dependency” as many of Beckett’s characters are.
I was struck by one other influence that Kane cited. She had also read Bill Buford’s memoir from 1990, Among the Thugs, in which Buford spends time infiltrating gangs of football hooligans. Of course Cate tells Ian that she likes to go the football, to which Ian replies “Didn’t you get stabbed?”. Ian’s own vicious attitudes and behaviour are not unlike the thugs Buford describes in his disturbing study.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – March
Before the theatres went dark this month I was lucky enough to see Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Bridge, and spend more than seven hours in thrall to Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National. Plus, some thoughts on what we miss when there is no theatre.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – February
Another great mix of shows this month, from Tom Stoppard’s new play, to Ibsen, Beckett and newer plays in smaller London venues.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – January
The January roundup included both classic plays, such as The Duchess of Malfi, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, as well as recent musicals Dear Evan Hansen and Girl from the North Country …
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