"In Better Places": Space, Identity, and Alienation in Sarah Kane's "Blasted"

Author(s): Christopher Wixson

Source: Comparative Drama, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 75-91
Published by: Comparative Drama
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"In Better Places": Space, Identity,

and Alienation in Sarah Kane's Blasted

Christopher Wixson
My wound is my geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

- Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

of the task of new playwrights has always been to re-envision

theatrical representation to reflect cultural shifts. The political and
technological upheaval of the last quarter century has dissolved the old
map, the margins to a certain extent moving to the center, and engen-

dered the hope of a new freedom governing social relations, a culture

less hierarchical. Yet, for so many characters in contemporary English
plays, such a landscape is not so empowering. 1 Sarah Kanes Blasted ( 1 995)

employs graphic depictions of sex and violence as well as radical peripatetic spatial shifts that act as emblems of this alienation, challenging the

conventions of realistic theater by extending to the audience her charac-

ters' estrangement from their environment. This essay s title alludes to

the first spoken line of Kanes explosive play in which world-weary, tabloid journalist Ian enters a "very expensive hotel room in Leeds" and

wryly declares, Tve shat in better places than this."2 His comment not
only betrays his defensive insecurities but lays the groundwork for the
play s lavatorial sensibilities and the author s obsession (to be explored in
her later work as well) with what Michel Foucault calls heterotopic spac-

ing.3 With Blasted, Kane seeks to dismantle the old psycho-geographical

dramaturgy and construct onstage a new model of place and identity

from the devastation.

Committed to returning the repressed, Kane in Blasted strives to rep-

resent onstage what is often only implied or relegated offstage, moving

the margins to the center. She attempts to represent the political, ethical,

and existential unconscious while avoiding euphemism through abstract

75

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symbolism or metaphor. Her realism understands the subconscious not

as a Stanislavskian signified but as the matter of theater itself. She resists

neoclassical discretion in her representation of violence, mandating us

to confront what comfortable theatergoers in the West put aside in our
day-to-day lives.

Pared down to basics, Blasters plot concerns what transpires in a

Leeds hotel room between Ian, a middle-aged writer in poor physical
and moral health, and Cate, a young, innocent girl prone to strange un-

conscious fits. He manipulates and eventually rapes her, an act Kane

chooses not to represent onstage. The following morning, Cate bites Iars

penis and escapes through a bathroom window. A soldier arrives through

the door, and the room is hit by a mortar shell. Afterward, the nameless

soldier talks to Ian about atrocity, sodomizes him, sucks out and eats
Ian s eyes, and then shoots himself. Cate returns with a baby who quickly
dies, and she buries it in the floor marked by a cross. After she leaves, the

newly blinded Ian eats the baby and crawls into the floorboards. At the
end, Cate returns, bleeding between her legs but carrying food. The by-

now infamous premiere of Blasted occasioned a media maelstrom and

assured a sold-out run. Engaged in the worst sort of faux-intellectual
mastication, critics bombarded the production with cranky diatribes lamenting the content of the play and the spirited audacity of its author
who quickly became a theatrical sprezzatura. While the macabre Jacobean

energy that drives Blasted largely encompasses its notoriety, critics as

strongly objected to Kanes violation of quasi- Aristotelian place as to her
strident bounds over the lines of decency. What Aleks Sierz identifies as

the plays "deliberately unusual and provocative form"4 is a function of

two elements: the rejection of a unity of space and the unflinching representation of corporeal suffering.
As Una Chaudhuri has convincingly argued, twentieth-century drama

has perpetually wrangled with reconceptualizing theatrical environments

beginning with realism and naturalism, generic modes "based on the

principle of spatial intelligibility, on the idea that where an action unfolds goes a long way towards explaining it."5 Kanes characters long for a

space that confers upon them the properties of home: security, fulfillment, privacy, and belonging. Unfortunately, they find themselves lost in

place, wandering within spaces that are transient, porous, and constantly

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Christopher Wixson 77
under siege. Kane chooses the moment when the soldier marks his territory (urinating in the hotel room in front of Ian) to reorganize the space

and the structure of her play with a "blinding light and a huge explosion" followed by a blackout when "a morter bomb" blasts apart the play s

hotel setting (39). In earlier drafts, Kane had Ian imagine the soldier until she radically decided to "plant a bomb and just blow the whole fucking

thing up.... [she] loved the idea of that ... just blowing up the set."6
Blasted's first half lures the audience into a false sense of naturalistic
security, eclipsed behind the invisible fourth wall, that anesthetic, insulat-

ing conspiracy Brecht found so dangerous to social engagement. Through

her Artaudian sleights of hand that trespass on both the characters' and
the audiences comfort zones, the play is relentless in demolishing what
Kane refers to as "the safety of familiar form."7 In her self-described quest

to "do things that hadn't been done, to invent new forms [and] find new

modes of representation,"8 Kane situates her work alongside that of

"Beckett, Barker, Pinter, [and] Bond" who "all have been criticized not so
much for the content of their work, but because they use non-naturalistic

forms that elude simplistic interpretation".9 As such, Kanes use of stage

space is far from gratuitous, especially in relation to issues of identity.

An indication of how deeply we protect ourselves through geography is the voracity of the plays reception. Just as it provides the terms in

which the characters experience angst and fragmentation, space (and

Kanes ruthless rejection of conventional stage mapping) became, for reviewers, the play s too audacious move. In the only book-length study to

date devoted solely to Kanes plays, Graham Saunders identifies Kanes

"rejection, or at least manipulation, of the conventions of realism [as]
the key distinguishing feature of the dramatic strategy employed" in her

work.10 Kane indelicately balances two ontologies of stage space; one is

grounded in the flexibility of Shakespearean and medieval drama while
the other invokes the stifling overdetermination of kitchen-sink realism.
Surprisingly, it is her defiance of the rules of realism, especially in terms

of space, that infuriated critics more than her plays shocking images.
Indeed, it is hard to find a review or critical appraisal of the play that
does not itself resort to spatial language and metaphors. Some are positive comments, as for instance Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright s claim

that Kane "rewrote the theatrical map" or James Macdonald s praise of

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how in a later play she "removes the psychological signposts and social
geography that you get in the Great British play."11 Others, however,
categorically reject Blasted for its failure to follow "traditional" patters.

If, as Chaudhuri argues, "the problem of place- and place as probleminforms realist drama deeply, appearing as a series of ruptures and dis-

placements in various orders of location, from the micro- to the

macrospatial"12 why was Kane so vilified by critics in exploiting anxieties and holes that reside within the tradition of realism anyway? The
sounds of critical fury engendered by Blasted chastised Kane for effectively deploying this inherent quality of the theater, counterbalancing

two seemingly incompatible spaces with the aim of illuminating their

compatibility. Why, especially after Beckett, are critics so resistant to break-

ing place? Or is the resistance merely to Kane doing so?

A certain critical hypocrisy exists in terms of how Kane s dramatur-

gical choice to is perceived. Like a number of critics, Michael Billington

identified Blasted's fundamental flaw as its structure: "The reason the
play falls apart is that there is no sense of external reality- who exactly is

meant to be fighting whom out on the streets".13 Curiously, Billington

does not make the same criticism of Harold Pinters Partytime (1991), a
play that also experiments in its conclusion with dramatic time and space

and offers few specific clues as to the warfare happening in the streets
below. 14 In fact, he lavishly praises the latter, saying that the playwright is

"concerned by our culpable indifference to the sins being committed in

the name of social order and good' government."15 Billington goes on to

contend that Partytime explores "bourgeois complicity in governmental

cruelty" as a "parable about a vacuum-sealed, high-bourgeois world cut

off from the surrounding harshness."16 Despite the similar thematic reso-

nance between the two, he won't forgive Kane's violation of the unity of
place even as he is seemingly untroubled by Pinter s similar ambiguity:
The location of the party that Pinter depicts is unspecified, but from all
the internal evidence it seems to be happening in London. [But] where
is the play actually happening? In one sense., it could be Paris, Berlin,
Washington, Istanbul, Buenos Aires or Santiago. . . . Pinter is not literally

suggesting that roadblocks are being set up in Holland Park or roundups are taking place in Belgravia. What he does imply is that one of the
preconditions of Fascism- a myopic and self-preoccupied wealthy elite,
totally indifferent to the decisions taken in its name- is becoming dangerously apparent in Britain. But he goes much further and suggests

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Christopher Wixson 79
that under the drawing-room elegance, private relationships echo public
brutality and that language itself is corrupted.17

Regarding Partytimes conclusion in which a bright flash brings what is

outside in (Kanes exact move), Billington blithely accepts the implication: "All, literally, becomes clear at the end when a bright light that has
burned into the room at intervals reveals the thinly dressed figure of the
brother Jimmy, a victim of the state oppression to which the partygoers
have turned the blindest of eyes."18 Thematically, Blasted makes the same

points, except that Kane abhors the vacuum and much more violently
and accusingly shatters the safe insularity of her characters and her audi-

ences. She situates "a violent dislocation at [the play s] center . . . break-

ing down the distance imposed by geography and indifference."19

Billington goes on to argue that "Pinter s views on politics ... are consistent, impassioned and well informed" and "what is dismaying, in the larger

framework, is the way Pinter is constantly patronized in the media for

expressing political opinions," precisely what he does to Kane.20 However, it is not my intention to single out one critic or to give the impres-

sion that Partytime was praised unanimously.21 I also do not want to

spend too much time railing against gender iniquities within English
dramatic criticism or the ways in which the myopia of predominantly
male reviewers mucks up the appreciation and fiscal success of plays.
However, this example makes clear that spatial transgressions are at the
heart of some of the critical resentment o Blasted. Besides the excessive
aggressive responses, Kanes more serious and respectful critics lamented
the plays obfuscated "metaphorical landscape"22 and its "unrealistic plotting [and] anti-naturalism."23 Yet, part of what makes Kane's dramaturgy
effective is the disorientating effect it creates. If Chekhov's plays are in-

habited by characters who are native outsiders, occupying an uneasy

stasis, simultaneously at home and homeless, Kane in Blasted extends
what Chaudhuri calls a "static exilic consciousness"24 to the audience
through her staging of violence that violates rules of representation and

convention within what is designated as theatrical space.

Although it concludes in a war zone, Blasted begins in an upscale

hotel room, a space that conspicuously denies what the notion of a "home"
promises to confer upon its inhabitants.25 The hotel is a space of profound

alienation, a "surrogate home, a stable container for the deterritorialized

self ...[a] nightmarish experience of spatial abstraction."26 The hotel

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simulates the comforts of home but, as evident in Ian s first line, reminds
the characters that they are not home, frustrating any sense of belonging.

The opening set description specifies a precise location ("a very expensive hotel room in Leeds" [3]) that, due to its expensiveness also defies
spatial precision ("so expensive it could be anywhere in the world" [3]).
Kane is evoking a principle of cultural McDonaldization that homogenizes space to offer consumers security and predictability. This sense of

safety in vacuum-sealed uniformity of place (also conferred upon consumers of dramatic realism hiding behind the invisible fourth wall) is
part of what Kane sets out to violate in Blasted. It is a space where convention and language itself will collapse into noniterability, to be replaced

by Kanes poetics of corporeality and populated by bodies in pain.

Each of Blasted's characters experience their alienation in spatial
terms. Finding himself between a Hard Rock Caf and a hard place, Ian
paces nervously through the first half of the play, alternating between
paranoia and aggression. Ians response to his sense of dispossession is to

revert to racist diatribes, in this case against an unseen though omnipresent Other. His bigotry comes across in spatial terms, as he fears that

the area is "turning into Wogland" (34) and laments that he "hate[s] this

city. Stinks. Wogs and Pakis taking over" (4). He explains that his shady

involvement with a right-wing political group happened because "[he]

lovefs] this land" (40). Defining himself as a "home journalist [who

doesn't] cover foreign affairs" (48), Ian sees the threat to his space and to
his identity as concurrent, and spends the entire play anxiously estranged

from security with both, responding to knocks at the door and potential

encroachment by the "Wog" bellboy delivering food with invective and

by brandishing his gun. Midway through the play, when Ian opens the

door, a soldier with a snipers rifle is there and quickly takes Ians revolver. After surveying the room, eating Ians food, and pocketing Cates

underwear, the soldier urinates on the bed, claiming "our town now"
(39).27 His temporary self-assertion is expressed by conquering the space.
When Cate enters the hotel room, she sensually explores her environment:
(Cate comes further into the room. She puts her bag down and bounces
on the bed. She goes around the room, looking in every drawer, touching

everything. She smells the fowers and smiles.)

Cate: Lovely. (44)

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Christopher Wixson 8 1
Like Ibsens Nora, Cate is aligned symbolically with the room, and both
will be violated during the play. Later, the soldier grounds his account of

wartime atrocity in geographical specifics - he always sets the scene,

whether in "a house just outside of town", a "basement" and a "ceiling,"
or "the front door" (43, 44). The victims are merged violently with their

environment- young boys are hung from the ceiling by their testicles,
and the soldier s wife is raped, butchered, and nailed to the front door. As

part of the environment, Cate too is destined for vicious authoritative

inscription, a fate Ian unknowingly shares as well.

Security and contentment belong to a fantasy space, outside the

bounds of the narrative. The soldier reveals to Ian that "at home I'm

clean. Like it never happened" (48). Home confers upon him the sense of

a purer self, infused with innocence and happiness. He begs Ian to map
his presence in that space, to "tell them you saw me. Tell them . . . you saw

me" (48).28 Ian claims that Cate "takes [him] to another place" (22), even

as his violence towards her (balanced by his more romantic language

and the obvious intimacy between them) represents his desperation to
dwell in that elusive "other place." In contrast, Cate is able to escape the
alienation of the world and travel momentarily to such a space. Early on
in the play, after she trembles and faints, Cate suddenly "bursts out laugh-

ing, unnaturally, hysterically, uncontrollably" (9). When she wakes up,

she tells a concerned Ian that it "feels like I'm away for minutes or months

sometimes, then I come back just where I was.. . . I didn t go far.. . . [If I

didn't come back,] I'd stay there" (10). Cate understands her own alterity
spatially. When Ian begins to undress her early on in the play, Cate resists

and "starts to tremble and make inarticulate crying sounds" (14), entering the first of her odd comalike trances. Cates transporting interludes, a

cipher for both Ian and the audience, are similar to Kanes explosive
moments of spatial reconfiguration and graphic violence in that all are
able momentarily to elude naturalistic currents, creating a textual hole
that disturbs the phenomenological foundation that grounds identity in

environment. Her seizures also unmoor psychological underpinnings

founded in causal motivation, Stanislavski's Rosetta Stone, disturbing
smooth causal narrative with alterity represented yet unrepresentable in
conventional terms.

The morning after he rapes her, Cate attacks Ian, getting his gun and

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pointing it at his crotch. At that moment, another fit happens, and she
faints. Like the Soldier who ritually re-enacts his wifes brutalization, Ian

holds his gun to Cates head and simulates sex while she is unconscious.29

Any analgesic effect from his Freudian repetition compulsion is offset

when, as he achieves orgasm, she "sits bolt upright with a shout . . . laughs

hysterically, as before, but doesn't stop. She laughs and laughs and laughs
until she isn't laughing any more, she s crying her heart out. She collapses

again and lies still" (27).30 Cates flights to a better place, expressed but
unexplained in the text, necessitate leaving her body, a space ruthlessly

marked by Ian. The soldier also seems to choose death as a way out of
the space, leaving the sullied flesh behind. The body comes to stand for a

world of chronic pain, vulnerability, and ritualized imperialist demarca-

tion, only mildly (and perhaps tentatively) remedied by corporeal autonomy. By the end, Cate learns to adapt without escape, facing the raw
and relentless ache of the world of the play by gaining symbolic control
over her body. In the plays closing moments, she returns with food but

at a cost, as "there is blood seeping from between her legs" (60). Kanes
play represents a sterile and self-destructive world that understands bodies

only as space for territorial aggression and defense, what Ian describes as
"soldiers screwing each other for a patch of land" (48). 31 Identity is staked

out on bodies and spaces. Generally, then, Kanes work is characterized

by complex figurations of theatrical space navigated by increasingly dis-

possessed and disembodied characters.

The second major technique used by Kane is her graphic depiction
of the violated body, and again critics had a field day. When the initial

production hit the media fan, its director James Macdonald defended
Kanes "bold but assured treatment of time and place," missed by the
critics who only saw "a catalogue of unmentionable acts."32 Variously
characterized as part of the "New Brutalism ," "Neo-Jacobeanism," and
"In-Yer-Face Theater," Kanes dramaturgy has brought a degree of controversy to the English stage as intense as that which surrounded the
work of Edward Bond and Howard Brenton, again centered around issues of corporeal display. Thirty years ago, scholar John Russell Taylor
characterized various contemporary playwrights by isolating their milieu: "child murder, sex murder, rape, homosexuality, transvestism, religious mania, power mania, sadism, masochism."33 In the mid- 1 990s, little

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Christopher Wixson 83
seems to have changed. Jack Tinker s Daily Mail headline referred to
Blasted as a "disgusting feast of filth."34 Michael Billington in the Guard-

ian attacked Kanes Blasted (1995) by cataloging the acts of atrocity that

occur in the play with a kind of macabre tabloid fascination typical in

Ians reporting.35 As Peter Buse argues, Blasters "events [are] in excess
of our frames of reference [and] trauma is not just a crisis in the memory

of the traumatized subject but a crisis in representation and narration."36

Clearly interested in representing pain as part of her larger mission to

interrogate convention, Kane, like Howard Brenton in The Romans in

Britain (1981) before her, uses staged sodomy (among other acts) as both
a metaphor for imperial conquest and as an attack on spectatorial sensibility.37

Attempting to resist essentialist notions of identity, Kane s primary

thematic focus is cultural violence, as she wants to avoid
an over-emphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) [because
they are] a diversion from our main problem [as] class, race, and gender
divisions are symptomatic of societies based on violence or the threat of
violence, not the cause.38

Blasted depicts the violence that underlies all symbolic mapping (Cates
and Ians rape) as well as focusing upon the ways in which the corporeal
eludes orientational inscription. Elaine Scarry, in her introduction to The

Body in Pain, writes that "physical pain does not simply resist language

but actively destroys it."39 The body is a source of agony but also becomes the foundation for resistance. Jeanie Forte argues that the theater s

primary canvas is the body for articulating and crossing the limits of
discourse:
In my initial interest in the apparent limits of theory (which I now perceive also as the limits of language), the inability of theory to manifest the
material, or useful body, I searched for those circumstances in which the

body is undeniable, when the body's material presence is a condition of

the circumstance. Interestingly, one is that of pain, and another is that of

live performance: two cases when the body must be acknowledged.40

Kane deploys such materiality in the form of bodies in pain and pleasure
to disrupt conventional theater language, but, in so doing, gives rise to a

new mode of representation. If staged bodies in agony foreground

theaters shortfall of iterability, they also work in accord with Kanes spa-

tial disruptions. Scarry suggests that apprehension of another s pain is in

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part the awakening to the existence of ulterior place, in that the verbal or

visual expression of pain "[belongs] to an invisible geography."41 This

effect is what unites Kanes poles of space and the abject body, awakening

her audience to a new understanding of space and identity, one perhaps

alive with political potential in eradicating aggression and brutality.

Near the plays conclusion, alienated space and alienated identity

become one as Ian, like Cate at the beginning of the play, merges with his

environment, helpless and victimized. Like the sufferers in the soldier s

stories, Ian and the dead child become part of the fragmented stage space,

their bodies telling the tale of their suffering. The baby Cate buries under the stage floorboards becomes spatial, part of the contemporary landscape that destroys innocence and vitality.42 After the baby s death, Cate

prays that it will not "go bad places" (58), wishing the baby to a better
place. Jealous of the child's fatal escape from the world or perhaps its lack

of ongoing suffering, Ian attempts to take the deceased baby's place in

the space by eating the child, an ironic act of bodily preservation as he

climbs in the grave and Kanes sly and decidedly immodest allusion to
Jonathan Swifts modest proposal. Ripping the burial cross from the
ground, Ian climbs into the child's grave in the floorboards, and the stage

directions say he "dies with relief" (60). However, after it begins to rain,

he says "Shit," echoing his opening line about the hotel room. Death and
its promise of a better place becomes another space that eludes and betrays him, and Ian must accept himself as part of the landscape, as space

to be conquered, as entirely and miserably vulnerable.

Alone onstage, Ian faces the grim reality of the human condition, as

Kane uses pain to reduce "its subject to a state anterior to language."43

She alternates pulses of darkness and light with images of a pathetic Ian
trying to kill himself, "laughing hysterically," masturbating, having a
nightmare, crying, and "hugging the Soldier's body for comfort" (59-60).

One of Kane's collage of images of Ian has him "shitting" and "then trying to clean it up with a newspaper" (59). Ian's tidying of the space, using

one of his own tabloid newspapers, is another desperate attempt at control over a body and a space from which he is dispossessed thoroughly.
Kane's evocation of Ian's opening line at this point may suggest that Ian is

in a new existential place than he was at the play's beginning, a better

place perhaps for "shitting." The biological process which in the plays

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Christopher Wixson 85
opening line stood for the contemptuous, unstable authority of a temporary tenant becomes the emblem of social and existential impotency Fittingly, when he finds at the end of the play that he cannot die and cannot
find relief, Ians frustration and wretchedness find expression in the same

word. As Beckett does with Godot's Pozzo, Kane strips away Ians delusions of dignity, superiority, and willful blindness to present the audience with a more honest if shameful self-image, brightened only by the
presence of Cate, the only character who is mobile at the end. After eating her fill, Cate eventually shares her food with Ian, who is uncharacter-

istically thankful. Our last image of Cate is of her sucking her thumb.

Although ambiguous, the conclusion seems guardedly hopeful, as Ian

(clearly at rock bottom) matures and a stronger Cate, who retains virtues
of innocence and kindness lacking in this world, is born. Provocatively,
Kane pointed out that "the play collapses into one of Cates fits,"44 suggesting that the play itself moves to a better place with at least the potential for security and fulfillment.45

Scarry understands "verbally expressing pain [as] a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain."46 As such, she envisions
images of pain inducing sympathy from the viewer, inspiring them to
end the suffering as if they themselves were the victim. Kane takes this

analogical identification a step further, collectively brutalizing audience

and character, blurring the lines between victim and victimizer, allowing
no space for mere witnesses and bystanders. Kane s narrative hemorrhages

and hyper- realistic presentation of trauma make Blasted, in her words,

"experiential rather than speculative":
The title refers not only to the content but also the impact it seems to
have had on audiences. What makes the play experiential is its form [which

puts] the audience through the experience they have previously only
witnessed.... The form and content attempt to be one. The form is the
meaning.47

By creating the same alienated sensibility in her audience from which

her characters suffer, by disorienting conventional interpretive cognition and engendering audience discomfort with representations of violence, Kane is able to formulate a more powerful examination of identity

and politics, launching a severe indictment of ethical apathy. Far from

mere shock tactics, Kanes dramaturgical maneuvers are calculated to
provoke a complex response.

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Fulfilling Kanes vision that "the best art is subversive in form and

content,"48 the play s form deteriorates into a snapshot series of Ian's

frustrated existence, within which he is completely stripped of his in-

dividuality and becomes a Beckettian vision of the human condition,

the culmination of the play s multiple disruptions of space and concern
with alienated identity. For Kane, the "painful" experience of Blasted is
precisely that it forces us to confront, in her words, "[our] own fragility,"49

epitomized by the sequence of images of Ian. Its effect unites the play s

strands of spatial, temporal, and ontological disturbances and becomes

in a way schizophrenic:50
Schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up in a coherent sequence.

The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense,
since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of

the "I" and the "me" over time.51

In a larger sense, all of the plays material signifiers, ranging from bodily

display to shattered walls, sexual brutality to cannibalism, refute the old

boundaries. Privacy in identity and property and the ethical euthanasia

it performs are destroyed, and Kane brings the audience to what she calls
"a crisis of living,"52 the end of insulated interiority. In doing so, her work
aligns itself with that of other contemporary female English playwrights,

like Caryl Churchill and Tunberlake Wertenbaker, who articulate the

politics of a global community in their work and explore issues of communal responsibility and identity in the face of crumbling colonial, capi-

talist, and patriarchal systems. Fantasized and fetishized barriers that

enable analgesic disavowal in the face of political art as well as the evening

news are blasted in Kanes play along with other kinds of politicized hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and First World/Third World. From the
devastation comes a more inclusive, collective vision of humanity.
Kanes reimagined community destroys any notion of private space
(private property) just as she illustrates a vision of communal, not individual identity. She does so by making happen what we feel should not

happen in this space. She brings foreign wars and global politics, not
meant to belong in a Leeds hotel room, to the personal interaction of
Cate and Ian. She stages the unthinkable in hideous acts of cruelty and
human degradation not meant to be shown on a stage. She evokes and

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Christopher Wixson 87
effaces actual and conceptual divisions, from the fourth wall to Ians eu-

phemistic tabloid language to totalizing national boundaries, between

personal and public space, to destroy the notion that atrocity occurs "over

there" and confront the audience with our ethical culpability and responsibility as part of a global community. Ultimately, then, Blasted is an

experiment in euthenics that, in the words of one critic, "blasts its own
structure apart"53 and, through these environmental ruptures, transforms

viewers into alienated exiles within a remapped theatrical space. Such

disorientating moments of pain provide a glimpse of radical narrative
alterity and act as ontological bombshells for characters and audiences
alike. These recent plays insistently raise the question of representation

with their space-shifting, alienating spectacles of sex and violence,

recasting their structure as fragmentary, evasive, and vigorously abstract,

in order to explore new ways of conceptualizing subjectivity and theatri-

cal representation among the ruins.

Eastern Illinois University

NOTES
1 For instance, the murder of the white patriarch at the end of act 1 of Caryl Churchill's
influential play Cloud 9 (1979) does not lead the surviving characters to a state of relief and
freedom but increased disorientation, self-recrimination, and bitter nostalgia. More recently, Patrick

Marber's Closer (1997) stages an entire scene in cyberspace, a site seemingly infused with the
liberating potential of democratic negotiation of identities and erotic practices. Yet, besides trading
in the usual misogyny and patriarchal contradiction, their interaction in a chatroom confers no

lasting satisfaction or coherence. Rather, it becomes another emblem of alienation, no help in

suturing the fractured subject, anathema to an antioppressive politic. While it promises identity
and desire as fluid, mobile, and irreducible to binary categories, this new world disorder cannot
evade the logic of Otherness that governs how space is organized and how the self is understood.

2 Sarah Kane, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), 3. All subsequent

quotations are from this edition.

3 In his essay "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16, no. 1 (spring 1986):
22-27, Michel Foucault chooses the theater as his primary example to illustrate the heterotopia's
spatial juxtaposition of irreconcilable places.
99.

4 Aleks Sierz, In- Yer-Face Theater: British Theater Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001 ),

5 Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 6.
6 Sierz, 102.

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7 Ibid., 102.
8 Ibid., 102.

9 Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, eds., Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on
Playwriting (London: Methuen, 1997), 130.

10 Graham Saunders, "Love Me or Kill Me": Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 9. Since Saunders does such a fine job analyzing Kane's "non-realism" as well as Blasted's explicit allusions to the work of playwrights like
Ibsen and Chekhov (8-12; 41-45), I will not spend time in my argument doing so.
11 Ibid., 8. Saunders even speaks of David Greig's fear of Kane's work undergoing a "colonizing critical process" (xi) as scholars compete to map the symbolic significance of the plays.
12 Chaudhuri, 55.
13 Sierz, 96.

14 Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

Billington also extols Pinter's Ashes to Ashes (1996), praising the setting of a country house
outside of London against a "background of barbarism and cruelty" (375). The similarities between Ashes and Blasted are too numerous to list but include a flexibility of setting (what Billington

praises as "the play [existing] in several dimensions at once" [382]) and the symbolic deployment of a baby in their closing moments. Again, Billington's comments about Pinter's play could

apply equally to the much maligned Blasted: Ashes to Ashes "gets under one's skin precisely
because it is not dealing with some alien or distant world: it acknowledges the potential for
oppression and resistance that lies, within all of us" (382). In a play "which forces men to examine their own sexual coerciveness and women their own guilty compliance," Billington sees Pinter
pointing out what Kane does, that "there is no 'them* and 'us', and that the Fascist instinct is
universal and compatible with a regard with the external forms of civilization" (382-83).
15 Ibid., 330.

16 Ibid., 289, 330.

17 Ibid., 331.
18 Ibid., 331.

19 Sierz, 107. As a side note, Billington mentions Sarah Kane only once in his biography in
the context of Pinter's views on political drama, stating that Pinter "lamented the marginalisation
of Bond and Brenton, and became a keen admirer o Sarah Kane's explosive Blasted" ( 1 32; italics
mine). The word makes Pinter's support of the play seem patronizing and more akin to a suitor
than a fellow playwright. To be fair, though, Billington was obviously not alone in his dismissal

of Kane's work as puerile. Later, in a review of James Macdonald's 2001 revival of Blasted after
Kane's suicide, Billington admits that his previous review was "rudely dismissive" (42 1 ) and
goes on to extol the virtues of the play, making connections to Ashes to Ashes among other texts.
Although he still finds Blasted overly simplistic and polemical at times, he grudgingly admitted
its poeticism and underlying unity.
20 Billington, 334.
21 In fact, the charges Billington levels against Blasted were similarly levied against Partytime

by other playwrights: "Edward Bond complained about the lack of explicit identifiable commitment, and John McGrath talked of the play being 'unconcretised' and the action 'taken out of
context'.. . . [John] Arden s point was that he wanted to know who was conducting the revolution

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Christopher Wixson 89
in the streets: if, for example, it was a socialist overthrow of a corrupt, Fascist regime, then it
would alter his judgment of the play" (Billington, 333-34).
22 Saunders, 9.

23 Sierz, 95-6.

24 Chaudhuri.il.
25 Especially in American drama, such spaces proliferate. Temporary spaces frequently embody
the social marginalization and/or alienation of characters, from hotels in Barry's Hotel Universe
and Williams's Night of the Iguana, to boarding houses in Luce's The Women and Ferber's Stage
Door, to bars in Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children, William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life,
and O'Neill's Anna Christie and The Iceman Cometh.

26 Chaudhuri, 244.

27 The soldier's choice of words can be read as a cheeky allusion to Thornton Wilder's Our
Town, a play that in its distinctive style deconstructs the organization of theatrical space in realism and thematically responds to anxieties engendered by Hitler's ruthless territorial expansion
through Europe in the 1930s.
28 While the soldier's plea to remember him seems quite Chekhovian in nature, Kane clearly
is alluding to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Boy: What am I to tell Mr. Godot, sir?

Vladimir: Tell him ... Tell him you saw me and that ... that you saw me. (106)

Both Vladimir and the Soldier are asserting their presence in an imagined space as a way to
alleviate their suffering.
29 Oddly enough, the soldier's ritualistic description and re-enactment of his trauma as well
as Ian's restaging of Cate's rape are quite similar to the ways in which the critics' reviews with
perverse pleasure catalogued for their readers the graphic stage acts and, in reviews of subsequent Kane plays, returned to the language and experience of Blasted. The media was desperate
too to print solicited quotations from "average" audience members after seeing a performance,
allowing readers to experience vicariously the trauma again and again.
30 Kane maybe alluding to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus who, after discovering the depth
of his family's victimization, responds inexplicably by laughing, a fiercely antisentimental response that lays the groundwork for revenge served cool.

31 Ian's careless phrase is connected profoundly to Kanes central concerns of spatial and
bodily violation committed in the name of imperialist and consumerist agendas, extending to
England itself with the sardonic image of patriotism to complement the initial production's
programme illustration of a "grinning British Tommy, of the Second World War . . . giving a Vsign" (Sierz, 93).
32 Sierz, 97.

33 John Russell Taylor, "British Dramatists: The New Arrivals: The Dark Fantastic, Plays
and Players 18, no. 5 (1970-71): 24-27.
34 Sierz, 94-95.

35 Absent from the list of atrocities though is Iaris rape of Cate, which happens during a
blackout. Kane's decision not to represent such an act onstage, particularly within a play designed to shock its audiences, points perhaps to the culture's inured numbness (or even potential

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titillated arousal) with such scenes. Perhaps more alarmingly, in her aestheticization of bodies in

pain and violence, Kane chooses to omit Cate's rape because the act has been accommodated in
the economy of male heterosexual desire. Like Brecht, she may also want to avoid sentimentalizing the relationship, especially considering the emotional investment the audience already has
in Cate. The choice may further echo what feminist dramatic scholars have argued for decades
about the ways in which violence against women is inherent to such theatrical styles.

36 Peter Buse, "Trauma and Testimony in Blasted- Kane with Felman," in Drama + Theory:
Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 ),

182.

37 Kane and Brenton's thematic use of sodomitical images echoes the term's polysemantic
properties in the early modern period. Before the emergence of the modern construct of the
male "homosexual," the significant gap between personal feelings of homosexual desire and
social sanctions and moral imperatives against sodomy created a definitional incoherence, a
semantic ambiguity, in the ideological discourse of sexuality. Gregory Bredback, in Sodomy and
Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), argues the terms
elasticity in seventeenth-century religious and legal discourse. The multiplicity of meanings did
not disrupt the demonizing social force of the term and underscores its oppositional relationship to regulatory structures, then or now. In a more material sense, however, many have seen
homophobic backlash in the proliferation of representations of anal sex as violent and humiliating in plays of the 1990s.
38 Stephenson and Langridge, 134.
39 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
40 Jeanie Forte, "Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance," in
Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 251.
41 Scarry, 3.

42 This choice sets Blasted's dead baby in contrast to those in Edward Albee's A Delicate
Balance and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the baby stoned to death in Edward Bond's
Saved, aligning itself rather with Sam Shepard's symbolic deployment of the buried child in his
play of the same name.
43 Forte, 251.

44 Stephenson and Langridge, 134.

45 Her comment also works against Peter Buse's psychoanalytic analysis of the fits as part of
Cate's psychological mechanics of repression and disavowal. While these fits are consistent with
Cate's ongoing resistance to and evasion of Ian's advances, it is important not to see them as
empty signifiers in the text. Rather, Cate describes a journey to an ulterior, potentially redemptive space. Buse understands the work and the dynamics of the play within a limiting Freudian
context that envisions their goal as working through the trauma. Part of Buse's difficulty with his
reading is how slippery Blasted is when one looks for the overdetermined psychology of realism.
Kane eschews such patterns of psychology and the concept of trauma as a treatable condition
even as she rejects in Blasted not only artistic and media modes of disavowal but also an Aristotelian dramatic structure that locates a definitive telos in catharsis.
46 Scarry, 9.

4/ Sierz, 98.

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Christopher Wixson 9 1
48 Stephenson and Langridge, 130.
49 Sierz, 94.

50 Kane herself used the term to describe Blasters "imaginative response to [actual atrocities] in an odd theatrical form, apparently broken-backed and schizophrenic" (Stephenson and
Langridge, 131).

51 Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti- Aesthetic:

Essayson Postmodern Culture, ed. Hai Foster (Seattle: Bay, 1983), 119.
52 Sierz, 106.

53 Charles Spencer, review of Blasted, as performed by the Royal Court Theatre, the Jerwood

Theatre Downstairs, London, Daily Telegraph, Theatre Record, 4 May 2001, 419.

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