Local company tackles ‘feast of filth’
STAGE RARITY: Pi Theatre celebrates 20th anniversary of the controversial in-your-face play by Sarah Kane
Brutality, sexual assault, violence and excessive gore.
No, this isn’t a preview of what to expect in Sunday night’s season five première of Game of Thrones. It is just some of the content found in Sarah Kane’s work Blasted.
At the time of its première in 1995, the late U.K. playwright’s first work was critically lambasted, and championed by only a few noted supporter such as Harold Pinter.
Twenty years later and her five plays are occasionally mounted around the world, enjoying particular appeal in Germany where their themes of pain, torture, perversion and psychosis seem to resonate with audiences.
In English Canada, the reception has been less favourable, with only one other production, even though Kane’s work is taught in most theatre programs. This week Vancouver’s Pi Theatre presents the western Canadian première of the show the Daily Mail called “a disgusting feast of filth.”
“The reviewers didn’t expect to get what they got when they arrived at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in February that night in 1995,” says Pi director Richard Wolfe. “They left outraged at the representations of violence in the play and horrified at what Kane felt was being reported daily in those same papers about the Bosnian conflict.
“Unlike Quentin Tarantino, who she despised, these acts are not cartoon — they draw a line between domestic, small-scale violence and the bigger picture in full-scale war.”
In Blasted, an utterly unlikeable journalist named Ian (played by Michael Kopsa) is in a Leeds hotel room with a disturbed and naive young woman named Cate (Cherise Clarke) he is attempting to seduce.
Then a soldier (Raresh DiMofte) enters the room with a sniper’s rifle and utter and ultraviolent chaos ensues, leading to a twisted final redemptive resolution.
The play doesn’t adhere to any strict form and demands the viewer be able to move from a naturalistic/realist style into Beckettesque absurdity.
While a fairly common method employed today in many plays and films — particularly those imbued with Latin American magical realism — Blasted was boundary pushing at the time. This gave critics one more reason to go after the piece.
All of this adds up to the kind of active art that Pi Theatre aims for in its mandate to present theatre that challenges and inspires discourse.
“Kane helped usher in what has been called In-Your-Face theatre, although she never called it that,” says Wolfe.
“But with Pi’s 30th anniversary and the play’s 20th anniversary, it seemed a good time to present it. The actors are all loving it because, unlike normal people, actors love subjecting themselves to psychological pressures and stress.”
Based upon around-the-block lineups and mostly positive reviews for a recent London West End production — the Guardian notes that the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts still “dubs the show a disgrace” — tastes have changed for Kane’s work.
Wolfe hopes local audiences will come out and get a taste of something that “is a little rock ’n’ roll, a little outside and a lot different.”