Staged in a limited run at the Royal Court in 1994, Sarah Kane's first play proved to be the most notorious debut in British theatre in the last 20 years.
To the fairly standard fare of nudity and four-letter words it added simulated oral sex and male rape (once the focus of a famous legal action in The Romans in Britain), and a character sucking out and eating the eyeballs of another who subsequently exhumes and eats a dead baby.
The strange thing, in this revival from Graeae Theatre Company, is how relatively unshocking it is. People still regularly faint in graphic productions of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, but here nothing is real and giving us the stage directions (Graeae is a theatre company run by disabled theatre practitioners and accessibility is its keynote) locks everything into a deadpan, matter-of-fact framework.
It is difficult to guess how posterity will regard Blasted, if at all. But it does seem surprising that some early reviewers appear to have missed its obvious seriousness of purpose. And rather than the gratuitous outpouring of filth some suggested, its Jacobean excesses and surreal narrative look precisely calculated.
It has a dreamlike tendency to shift contexts, starting in a bland hotel room where Ian, a middle-aged journalist mixed up in some murky secret service operations, is spending the night with his much younger former girlfriend Cate. The couple have a strange, barely sexual, relationship.
Suddenly there is a war going on outside which later bursts in as the hotel is hit by a mortar, followed by one of the soldiers who are taking over the city we started off thinking might be Leeds.
It's a metaphor for the closeness of the complacent West to the then war in Bosnia, and the play questions how far below the crust of civilisation bestiality lies.
It is well performed by Gerard McDermott and Jennifer-Jay Ellison as Ian and Cate. David Toole, whose amazing performances with CandoCo introduced what you might think was a contradiction in terms - a fine dancer without legs - proves himself to be also a resourceful actor: so much so that we quickly become involved with his character rather than his disability or his ability to transcend it.
* Running time: One hour, 30 minutes (no interval). Until Saturday.
Terry Grimley
