The Barbican was last night bursting with writers, film-makers and actors (such as the couple Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal) drawn to the intriguing spectacle that is Blasted, as interpreted by Germany's most infamous, if not preeminent, theatre company Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, under the direction of wunderkind Thomas Ostermeier.Eyewear was not hugely impressed by one of Ostermeier's productions shown in Budapest several years ago - a typical instance of Ordeal Theatre - blaring industrial noise, a shaven-headed man in a wheelchair shoving rotting sausage into the faces of the bourgeois audience, and a real writhing snake, all set in a pit; sometimes it seems that in Europe to be a respected auteur one just has to do angry, sexual, loud and nihilistic.
Which leads to Sarah Kane.
Kane is the Cobain Slash Plath of contemporary British Slash European drama. Famous by 23 for Blasted, which was pilloried in the philistine UK press as being essentially the most vile piece of work ever performed live outside of Soho, she was tragically dead before 30, in 1999, victim of suicide and dark thoughts that were never, let us be honest, short of self-regard or Storm and Stress.
Lighten Up was not in the Kane lexicon. Kane's small oeuvre(basically five plays) is now part of 90s Kulchur - but better loved outside of Blighty, where David Hume's brand of empiricist scepticism consigns such moody metaphysical intensity to the fringes of acceptable British discourse, if not the flames. Once again, the curse of UK Decorum (so little in evidence in music or conceptual art) seems to want a lid on theatre, on written language - likely because, since Shakespeare at least, it has always threatened to upset the apple cart. Britain is not particularly drawn to Expressionism or OTT expressions of feeling in its art. And Blasted is surely OTT - one part "Bring Out The Gimp" S&M from Pulp Fiction (of Kane's era, did she see it?) and two parts Ratko: the play, as written, includes (all this in full view, so to speak) masturbation, anal rape at gun point, sexual blinding, and the eating of a dead, rotting baby - as well as the graphic verbal description of many war crimes against women, men and children.
One thinks of Frank Wedekind's work here as a sort of precursor, or, of course, King Lear. The audience going to Zerbombt (Blasted translated into German) observes a rich irony, then - the most famous, gifted, savage, strange and disturbed (perhaps we need to bring back the word genius for such an assembly of qualities in one person) English-language playwright of the contemporary world, somewhat neglected in her homeland, is revisited and returned to the English by, of all people, The Germans. It is an irony redoubled when one considers the play's central themes - war, sexual perversity, love and football - are ones that the English feel they do much better than their brethren on the Continent.
The Berlin company acts as if they don't know this, or don't care. What is thus presented is a chilling recreation of a 5-star Leeds hotel room in the mid-00s (Iraq is on the flat screen telly), and three characters (Ian, Cate and Soldier) who, despite the fact they should have strong UK accents, look and feel basically British. Kane was uncanny in anticipating the obsessions of her age - like Kafka one third of her fame rests on her foresight, one third on her relevance, and the last third on her writing. - after all, Blasted is about extreme war and terrorism barging in to the everyday sphere of sexual politics (sordid little rapes in hotels, the average English sex crime that Orwell would no doubt have mourned the decline of) - and it is also very much about the media. The Soldier asks Ian if he is a journalist before raping him, of course.
The play can't help but suffer in comparison with the world that has caught up, slightly, with Kane's brand of Uber-Angst. Death and sexual torture are now featured in mainstream cinema hits, like Saw the vile trilogy. And Abu Ghraib , etc. - that loathsome litany of Rumsfeldian crimes (so faintly punished recently) - have upped the ante. Genocide and sexual perversity in Leeds is still an astonishing vision of a collapsed world - both in terms of reportage and complicity, but just. Nonetheless, the company has managed to put on a visually and aurally spell-binding show, that uses the full advantages of live theatre production (which Welles, the arch-Expressionist knew so well in New York 70 years ago) such as light, sound, and elaborate stage design.
The two best and most effective moments are when Ian and Cate sport and lurch on the slowly rotating bedroom set, as increasingly ominous shadows and positions emerge, suggesting a kind of sad and local evil lurks in Ian's pornographic heart; the intensity was reminiscent of the ritualistic choreography of the cage-release-twirling-baton-Bach-and-cop-murder scene in Silence of the Lambs. The second highlight was the exploded view of the hotel room, which was rather too Iraq perhaps, but certainly powerful. Perhaps because Germans are thought to shout so much in real life, it was something of a shock to have the Soldier's weird and psychotic soliloquy faintly whispered. It might suggest menace in Berlin, but at the Barbican, it seemed merely low-key.
The final image, of post-human reconciliation between the surviving girl and the semi-dead man, is, in its dignity among indignities, memorable, moving, if not, intentionally, redemptive. But the last two words are so English and so apt as to be marks of genius - after all the death and humiliation - a simple, a profound, a polite - Thank You.
Four specs out of Five.
http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=4277&pg=207
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wedekind
Comments