Blasted

What our readers say

What’s it like reading this play now?

To revisit this play after seeing it over a decade ago is to be reminded of the brilliance of Kane’s writing, as well as the utter horror depicted within it.

It is a masterclass of writerly stagecraft. Kane’s ear for speech patterns is stunning. Her ability to use the ‘realist’ mode to create such scarcely believable – scarcely bearable – scenarios and to make them utterly truthful is devastating. It has hardly aged at all.

What did is it tell us about the past and present?

Kane wrote Blasted while war was raging in the Balkans and horrific human rights abuses were taking place. Today Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine and news of atrocities akin to those of decades ago are reaching us. In some European countries the right is on the rise and violence against minorities is on the increase. Women continue to be subject to misogyny and verbal, physical, and sexual violence. Blasted speaks to today as much as it did to the 1990s.

What films or music does it make you think of?

The Russian film Loveless (2017). It has a very different scenario – not of war, but of a lost child in the city – but laced with similar brutality and bleakness and, as the name suggests, where compassion has been squeezed almost to extinction.