* Member of Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States
Sarah Kane on BLASTED
Theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts. No doubt that is why I keep coming back - in the hope that someone in a dark room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind, leaving a mark more permanent than the moment itself.
I knew that I wanted to write a play about a man and a woman in a hotel room, and that there was a complete power imbalance that resulted in a rape. I switched on the news one night while I was having a break from writing, and there was a very old woman's face in Srebrenica just weeping and looking into the camera and saying - "please, somebody help us, because we need the UN to come here and help us." I thought this is absolutely terrible - and I'm writing this play about two people in a room. What could possibly be the connection between a common rape in a Leeds hotel room and what's happening in Bosnia? And suddenly the penny dropped - of course it's obvious, one is the seed and the other is the tree. I do think that the seeds of full-scale war can always be found in peace-time time civilization.
All good art is subversive in form or content. And the best art is subversive in form and content. And often, the element that most outrages those who seek to impose censorship is form... I suspect that if Blasted had been a piece of social realism it wouldn't have been so harshly received.
For me the job of an artist is someone who asks questions and a politician is someone who pretends to know the answers. And a bad artist is someone who pretends to know the answers.
Art isn't about the shock of something new. It's about arranging the old in such a way that you see it afresh. The press kept asking why it was necessary to show such acts of violence on stage. I think it was necessary because we normally see war atrocities as documentary or news footage. And Blasted is no documentary. So suddenly all those familiar images were presented in an odd theatrical form which provided no framework within which to locate oneself in relationship to the material. For me, that's an amoral representation of violence - no commentary. I think that is one of the reasons people got terribly upset -- because there isn't a very defined moral framework within which to place yourself and assess your morality and therefore distance yourself from the material.
