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We meet up with the three performers at Momentum’s rehearsal rooms.  The lively atmosphere contrasts strongly with what floods the mind on finishing a reading of Blasté, a play of incredible violence and supersensitive realism. Cate, an innocent young girl from a modest background meets Ian, a middle-aged journalist, in a luxurious hotel room in Leeds, England.  Everything changes with Cate disappearing into the toilet and a soldier entering a room which seems to have been hit by a sizeable explosion.  This incursion, real or imaginary, blows apart the personal confines of the drama and transports it to the level of a country at war.

“It’s a play that deals with relationships at both a personal and an international level,” says Roy Dupuis.  “Both man/woman and between two countries.  That’s what it expresses.  Our way of negotiating with others, be it on a personal or international scale, amounts to the same thing.  Wars arise from the same problem.”

“It’s a very metaphorical picture of human existence in general, in its dealings with male-female domination,” continues Paul Ahmarani, who plays the soldier.  “Also with regard to war, and to strangers.  To their future, to indifference, to individuality.  The frustrations of people who aren’t able to get on with their lives and come to terms with it, and who pass the blame onto somebody else, whether it’s their partner or the outside world in general.  In spite of everything, even if we waste our own future there’s still hope, like a sort of pardon.  But nobody comes out of it spotless.  Even the innocent Cate ends up raped, destroyed, corrupted … but she retains an element of mercy.  She feeds Ian, her aggressor.  That’s the last thing she does in the play.”

“It’s also enlightening to show the violence that is inscribed on human nature, and how far it can go,” says Céline Bonnier.  “This isn’t a condemnation, or a Manichean vision of things.  It’s very mature and clear.  Especially for a girl writing this at the age of 24.  It’s a clear demonstration of what human beings are afraid of, from intimacy to their dealings with the world in general.  We are too.  We are also [afraid of] violence, horror, thirst, hunger.  It’s just that we don’t need to do anything about it like people do in wartime.”

An Eye for an Eye

“There are two plays,” explains Paul Ahmarani. “It begins like a psychological drama, in a theatre, with a fourth wall, referencing the likes of Chekhov or Ibsen.  And suddenly war invades the stage.  Like there had been an explosion in his own war, the war that Ian is waging.  It comes back to confront him.  The soldier arrives like a metaphor for Ian’s darker, more violent side.  You could think of Cate as being in a way his good side.  The war comes into the hotel room.  It’s a conjunction of space and time.  Realities are blown apart, like in civil wars where suddenly your neighbour becomes your enemy.  And I want the journalist to write about the horrors of war, that’s my main aim.  I try to wake him up to the horror.  And my acts of rape and eating his eyes are a re-creation of what has been done to my wife.  So that he can feel it in his flesh.” 

“The dominator is dominated, and the person who was dominated becomes the dominator,” continues Céline Bonnier.  “Because that’s what the game of relationships is about.  It goes from one to the other.  There are no rules.  We are all in the same mix, the same mould.  But we control it more or less, and circumstances alter the result.  Cate is a bit of an innocent, but she gets wiser along the way.  At the end of the play she’s not in the same state.  She swallows a piece of information that she has always refused to accept.  She has a naivety that gets lost when it’s sieved through the horror.  In the beginning she is a simple, honest, helpless soul.  Her body takes all the violence without answering back.  And you realise that such purity can’t exist amidst this violence.  She’s contaminated by it.”

“That’s what was inspired in Sarah Kane by the war in Bosnia,” says Roy Dupuis.  “These events really affected her.  She asked herself questions.  Why do we always repeat our errors?  This arises from the same set of problems.  The desire to conquer, to dominate, because of a fear of death.  Because of not being able to understand something.  The moment you don’t understand something, you’re scared of it.  I think that’s what she was trying to do; to show how things are, not even trying to be provocative.”

Stage Comeback

It’s been 14 years since Roy Dupuis was last on stage.  And the last time was also under the direction of Brigitte Haentjens.   

“I’ve always said that the aspect of theatre that I miss the most is the rehearsals,” he says. “The cocoon that is formed.  You explore and sculpt the text, and go into it in detail.  You try things out.  And that’s what I’m doing again.  In the cinema you shoot the rehearsals.  At the same time you know that it’s not a rehearsal, because every half hour you’ve made the finished product.  You have less time to explore.  You have to do your exploration while being efficient.”

And how does he feel faced with this masochistic, homophobic, racist character?

“The role is the exact opposite of me!” he exclaims.  “At the beginning you laugh about it.  You can’t help it.  But the time comes when you get into it.  Now, I understand the mentality of this guy.   That’s not what attracted me to this part though.  I look for scripts, for stories that speak to me.  It’s the whole thing that interested me.  The message that it carries.  After I’d agreed to do the play, I found myself in Africa a little later playing General Dallaire.  I was steeped in the world of genocide for a time.  Coming back, I’ve found the play even more relevant today than at the time it was written.  The location of the topic has just shifted.

Reality TV

As opposed to reality TV which shows everyday life, Kane’s play isn’t meant to be an imitation of violence, but its actual realisation without any tricks.

“It was Sarah Kane’s express will,” says Roy Dupuis, “to put this war live on stage, for people to feel what they should be feeling when they see these images on television.  The filter of TV softens the violence enormously.  Going this far is a good way to make them feel what they ought to be feeling.  Without a filter.  And this is not a judgement that she’s making on violence.  Just a statement.  She shows human nature as it is.  Personally, I think there is only one way of conducting your life, and that’s to confront reality with honesty.  And this play is built like that.  Not just in its structure, but also in its message.  There’s no escape.  The first part of the play is almost reality TV, in the sense that you put a camera in a hotel room without the occupants knowing about it.  It’s graphic.”

“The acting has to be realistic for the play to work,” he continues.  “It’s one thing you realise.  At the beginning there was perhaps a question of stylising some of the action in one way or another.  But you quickly realise that if you wanted to stylise a play you’d be better taking another one.  Because the power of this one comes from its structure.  The fact that there is no escape.  You can’t run away.  Even the spectator.  There’s only one door, and it’s at the back.