The Stage

Blasted

Published Friday 29 October 2010 at 12:38 by Aleks Sierz

Sean Holmes, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, has long been a fan of the iconic nineties playwright, Sarah Kane. He directed a memorable production of Cleansed at the Arcola in 2005, and now turns his attentions to her 1995 debut, a play famously described by the Daily Mail as “This disgusting feast of filth”.

Danny Webb (Ian) and Aidan Kelly (Soldier) in Blasted at the Lyric Hammersmith Photo: Simon Kane

Set in a posh hotel room in Leeds, the story examines the fraught relationship between an older man, the self-destructive journalist Ian, and a younger woman, the naive Cate, until, unexpectedly, a Soldier arrives and a mortar bomb blasts open the hotel, and the structure of the play, thus plunging its characters into a horrific nightmare of wartime atrocities.

Holmes’s version, well designed by Paul Wills, is determinedly naturalistic and meticulous, but ponderously slow (adding some 20 minutes to the original running time). On a large stage, Kane’s bleak humour comes across effectively and the piece’s large themes of masculinity, violence and human endurance are clearer, and more relevant, than ever.

An excellent cast come up with committed performances, which enliven the evening. Danny Webb’s wheezy, hard-drinking Ian is allowed plenty of room to explore the contradictions between his neediness and his monstrosity, while Lydia Wilson’s Cate convincingly makes the journey from guileless girlie to powerful angel of mercy. Aidan Kelly’s dangerous, Irish-accented Soldier is a strong stage presence, and underlines the sense that we are watching a civil war.

Although Holmes’s directing is psychologically convincing, his sombre pacing gives the audience plenty of time to ponder the paradox that Kane, surely the most modernistic of 1990s playwrights, is perhaps not best served by such a thoroughly literal and naturalistic production.