It’s been proven yet again: Sarah Kane’s explosively graphic play, Blasted, is not impossible to stage. Director Will Detlefsen and company have managed a respectable feat by even selecting the play, which includes Saw-worthy depictions of rape, eye-gouging, and baby-eating. But the team’s most significant accomplishment is not the successful execution of gory stage-tricks (though they were pretty damn good). The true artistry lies in their keen exposure of the real blood-and-guts of Sarah Kane’s play, the psychosocial manifestations of violence.
Detlefsen represents Kane’s violence thoroughly and completely. There is no sex with pants on or conveniently-covered stage combat, and every orgasm is reached in due time. Perhaps the most disturbing bit of stage action is actor Logan George’s hurried eating of two full English breakfasts with one bare hand, simply because he performs the action fully. But Detlefsen’s direction, while thorough, is also simple and minimal, staging the text sans flourish or unnecessary abstraction. And the simplicity is a rich simplicity, replete with sharp textual understanding. A deep current of palpable emotional trauma courses steadily through every violent scene, leaving no empty displays of horror. The Soldier [Logan George] extracts and eats character Ian’s eyes, avenging his dead girlfriend who had been tortured the same way. Having finished, the Soldier becomes engrossed by a wave of empathy for his girlfriend’s murderer, and in one very delicately treated moment, George bellows, with Medean agony, “Poor bastard. He ate her eyes!”
There is nothing in Blasted more tender and revolting than Logan George’s performance. George alternates masterfully between the Soldier’s straightforward apathy and wild passions, all through the filter of a very consistent spoken accent, the origins of which are left intriguingly vague. Actor Marié Botha also has several shining moments as Cate. Botha’s performance is an emotional banging-on-prison-walls, hands ever poised to kill her abusive lover, yet frozen by conflicted empathy. Botha cries on a dime, a useful skill for a text with so many demands for tears, but she excavates much sensitivity and variety from the role despite the constant watery eyes. When sandwiches are delivered to the lavish British hotel room that she shares with her older lover Ian [Jason de Beer], Botha’s Cate, a vegetarian, cries softly at the discovery that they are all filled with meat, a wonderfully tender picture of a young girl in adult surroundings, hungry, and far away from home. On the whole, performances are strong and grounded, with the occasional bit of shallow, not-fully-digested Cate/Ian dialogue. The only unfortunate choice is Cate’s recurrent uncomfortable giggle, which is in this version a manic, inhuman cackle that smacks somewhat too much of cheap horror films in an otherwise rich production.
Blasted owes much of its richness to its incredible team of designers. Jason Sherwood’s chic hotel room set brilliantly incorporates the gorgeous early 20th century interior of the Duo Theater. Cate enters and marvels at the ceiling decor and the sumptuous painted murals on the theatre’s walls. Gold-stained moldings mirror the theatre’s antique gold-stained proscenium. Sherwood’s sleek wall of glossy black tile amidst the Duo’s old-fashioned luxury, therefore, is cleverly suggestive of a modern renovation to a turn-of-the-century hotel. The famous scenic challenge of the second half of the play, the hotel room obliterated by an unexplained blast, is successfully tackled, with only a mildly long scene change. The post-explosion set is particularly well-lit by designer Marika Kent, who evokes morning light and sun streaming through debris with admirably few instruments. Aidan Zev Meyer’s electronic tones provide a simple and effective sonic landscape, and Olivia Hunt delivers shockingly real special effects. Overall, a solid design.
Detlefsen’s Blasted is a successfully executed staging of a difficult play. But, more importantly, it’s a keenly relevant one. Detlefsen subtly accentuates the unsettling satire underneath this seeming horror flick of a play. The Soldier’s harrowing monologue, a lengthy list of atrocities he’s witnessed, draws into the theatre vivid images of contemporary international conflicts that a Western audience might rather put out of mind. Ian, a wealthy Briton, responds predictably, shrinking away from the Soldier’s verbalized experiences with repetitions of phrases like “Enough!” In that moment, Ian feels uncomfortably familiar, a posterchild of privilege who turns off the TV before the depressing nightly news. And the Soldier, with Logan George’s mysterious accent, becomes a ‘foreigner,’ a man from some country where violence happens daily- somewhere far away. Detlefsen and team, with shrewd dramaturgical understanding, seem to suggest that the true horror of Kane’s violent landscape is its placement, not ‘somewhere else,’ but ‘here.’
Not Your Average Down Town 