Sarah Kane's Blasted by Iball Helen;

Author:Iball, Helen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3 Production History

This chapter is a brief history of the productions of Blasted. It considers the original Royal Court production in 1995 and looks at important revivals, focusing on the British stage. The chapter is arranged thematically in order to identify the key challenges the play poses for directors and designers, and to draw their approaches into comparison.

Play-scripts compel performances that are, effectively, larger than their own constituent parts yet, paradoxically, each performance is a limitation. There can be no ideal performance that captures all possible meanings and yet, to quote Jonathan Miller, by ‘submitting itself to the possibility of successive recreation’, ‘the play passes through the development that is its birthright’. Miller describes these subsequent performances as ‘afterlife’, which he defines as a time when ‘meanings that were not evident in the original production’ are discovered. ‘Afterlife’ is a label that he finds useful because ‘it draws attention to the peculiar transformation undergone by works of art that outlive the time in which they were made’ (Miller, 1986: 23). A very particular combination of personal and political circumstances accelerated Blasted into its ‘afterlife’ at unprecedented speed.

At the time it was first performed, Blasted was held hostage by circumstances. The play became obscured by its realization, and opinion about Blasted was coloured by the accusations of gratuitous violence levelled by some of the theatre critics who attended the press night. As its perceived radicalism became assimilated, subsequent performances of Blasted began to produce not only meanings that were not evident in the original production, but also meanings that were overshadowed by the press. Furthermore, observation of recent productions, such as this study describes, suggests that the explosion of English realism might no longer be regarded as such an important aspect of the play, partly in response to shifts in the international political climate.

Thomas Ostermeier, director of the Berlin Schaubühne theatre, asserts that ‘the startling thing about Blasted is that it makes more sense now than when it was first staged ten years ago’ because ‘it is about something we currently understand: the fear that, at any moment, our whole society may be ripped apart’ (Billington, 2005). This perception is, according to the British theatre critic, Michael Billington, typical of the ‘specific European worship of Kane’ (2005). Blasted has become a landmark of both British and European theatre, having made a particular impact in Germany. In terms that make it clear that perceptions of a text’s importance are culturally contingent, it is worth noting that German theatre was interested in Blasted as narrative antidote to the over-abstraction favoured by German playwrights. It was, however, uncomfortable with the realist first half of the play – Germany having long abandoned that form. Conversely, British producers tired of realism were attracted by its disruption of those conventions, while UK theatre critics struggled with the stylized abstraction of the second half. So while in Germany Blasted has become recognized as a ‘modern classic’ (Ostermeier, 2006a) and the debate is whether Kane is ‘a good or

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