Despair at its core

Two years.  Rehearsals took two years.  An unheard of luxury that the director and actors gave themselves in order to portray the damaged characters of Sarah Kane, the British playwright who wrote tough, magnificent, tormented, terrifying texts before committing suicide at the age of 28.  In 1995 her first play, Blasted, staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London, horrified the critics and created a downright scandal in the British press.  What about today?

Even before opening night, the play hit the headlines.  Roy Dupuis was returning to the stage after a fourteen year absence.  He was going to take his clothes off.  He was going to rape Céline Bonnier (his real-life partner) and be raped himself.  Ticket sales soared. But Sarah Kane’s relentless script, Brigitte Haentjens’ production and the authenticity of the acting carried us well beyond ordinary voyeurism.  The performance didn’t cause a scandal.  But it was shocking.  Why show a rape – no, two rapes – eyeballs being gouged out, and a scene involving cannibalism?  Yes, why?  Perhaps just to make this violence visible, to show the lengths that human beings can go to in their misery, but also in suffering, in vulnerability and in madness.

 Sarah Kane wrote Blasted as a reaction to the apathy and indifference of her fellow citizens to the war in Bosnia which unfolded live on TV every evening.  “I've only ever written to escape from hell - and it's never worked,” she declares.  As Blandine Longre says, “it seems almost impossible to fail to take into account the personal despair that pours from this work […], her dark vision of the world, her status as a ‘tortured’ writer, the great psychical or external chaos in which we live and which she recreates in her plays.”  History repeats itself, wars go on interminably abroad and on our TV screens, but the Blasté crew has risen up and made the words of despair their own.

In the first part of the play, director and actors gamble with silences and slow delivery.  They decided to follow all of the author’s stage directions to the letter: enter room, go to the bathroom, take a shower, have a cigarette, eat, drink, dress, undress.  All these actions happen in real time, with a sort of weighty lassitude that will annoy a certain section of the public who have come to see their idols act.  Unlike 4.48 Psychosis, where the language is brilliantly poetic, the dialogue here is, in the beginning, naturalistic, almost dull.  The stage itself is filled with silence.  In the centre, a hotel wall covered in conventional wallpaper, a bed in the middle, flowers on a bedside table.  It would have been a natural setting were it not for the oppressive presence of the huge spaces on either side of the wall, creating a hanging room which makes the set less realistic.

In this impersonal place Ian, a 47-year-old journalist who is violent, racist and embittered, has met up with Cate, a naive young girl whom he has mistreated since she was a child or adolescent.  He wants to make love to her – or he wants to possess her again.  But this time Cate turns him down.  Whether it’s her relationship with her parents or with Ian that has left its mark on her, Cate is frail, vulnerable, dispossessed of her own body which gives her epileptic fits when Ian humiliates her verbally or physically.

Ian is an alcoholic, smokes too much, and knows his death is near.  His miserable life is behind him.  Cate dreams of a better future, of a job, but her extreme fragility, Ian’s repeated humiliations (and her life away from him no doubt) makes us doubt that she will succeed.  Why does Cate remain with Ian?  Some critics have talked about a sadomasochistic relationship; I see it rather as a desire to show this man what she has become, what she wants to become.  She goes looking for Ian again in order to refuse to let him mistreat her.

Roy Dupuis and Céline Bonnier succeeded in playing these two characters with sincerity and lack of inhibition; one is desolate, but it’s an almost prosaic desolation, the other naive, infantile.  Céline Bonnier in particular is deeply moving in the role of Cate, this young girl who wavers between self-affirmation and submission.  Sexuality is at the heart of their relationship and, when Ian asks Cate to take it in her mouth he’s talking about his genitals which he says ache.  Even though the girl spurns his advances, he manages to rape her during the night when she is unconscious.

In the morning Cate leaves the room, and very soon a crazy soldier suddenly appears.  Then the set explodes, literally.  Broken bits of wall now fill the whole stage, the incursion of the war ploughing a gaping hole in its centre.  The gashed stage is an echo of female genitalia, the place of birth and death, a ravaged, derisory orifice.

We find out that the fiancée of the crazy soldier, played by Paul Ahmarani, has also been raped, tortured and killed.  He in turn, caught up in the grip of war, kills and rapes, to the point of driving himself insane, to the point of raping Ian to whom he tells his story in a trance, like a madman, while he’s assaulting him. The mad soldier can only escape the violence by raping another man – his double? – by tearing out his eyes and eating them.  Neither his act of rape nor his sputtered speech set him free – he suffers as much as, if not more, than Ian.  The soldier can only recover his humanity by killing himself in a moment of extreme clarity.

Nowadays, how do you show, Kate’s, Ian’s or the soldier’s tragedy?  Nowadays, how do you speak about wars that rage abroad?  How do you expose the links that unite personal and social violence, as Sarah Kane wanted to demonstrate?  An approach that accentuates the destitution, a cohesion of acting, set, lighting and music that draws some people (of which I am one) into the torment that the characters are caught up in.

It needed a lot of courage on the part of the three actors to agree to venture so far into dejection, insanity, horror. A lot of confidence in the director, a lot of intimacy between the actors to agree to make this journey into death and degeneration.  All the characters in the play are damaged, sexual aggression is at the centre of their lives, whether as rapist or victim, personal frontiers are smashed as are national frontiers in times of war.

After Ian’s rape, a dishevelled Cate returns with a baby she has found.  She rocks it (not so believable – it’s so risky to stage a crying dummy baby) and, after it dies, buries it in the gaping hole in the stage.  She goes out again to look for food, returning with some [sausage] which she has traded for sexual favours, as can be seen by the blood on her clothes, but this time she knows the score.  She has consented to the act.  While before the war she could not touch meat, now she gnaws her [sausage] with indifference.  Cate is no longer frail, no longer humiliated.  But to have found this strength, unsurprisingly, she has had to lose part of her vulnerability, if not her humanity.  She will live, she has found survival.  But at what cost?  For Ian, on the other hand, it’s through the acceptance of dependency that he achieves a sort of redemption.  Blind, alone in the hole, driven to eating a dead child, he emerges from his misery. His voice, so monotone, so suppressed in the first scene, is now alive, quivering, fluctuating – and yet he dies.

With this extremely harrowing journey into the heart of death and rape, Sarah Kane, Brigitte Haentjens and the actors have roused us from apathy and indifference.  But, might we say despairingly, for how long?