I read it on the bus one day when I was rehearsing Nick Grosso’s Peaches, directed by James Macdonald upstairs at the Royal Court. James was also doing Blasted and he gave me the part of Cate. I hadn’t done very much theatre at all. Sarah’s writing was really shocking and surprising. The first scene is quite naturalistic – you don’t expect it to become as extreme as it does. Some of the stage directions are so striking: there are lines like “He eats the baby.” I was a bit worried about the blowjob scene. I didn’t know how we’d do some of the scenes in such a small, intimate space. But I was young and excited by it all.
Cate is a great character – the audience go into the play through her, experiencing the hotel room, her relationship with Ian and then the war through her eyes. I was fascinated by how Sarah had come to it all. I had no idea, when I first read it, what is was about and why she had written it.
At the read-through, some people at the Court were saying that it would be so dark and hard to do. But it was the opposite in rehearsals: we were all laughing all the time. The way I remember it, Sarah was there every day during rehearsals. She was really confident about her writing and had thought long and hard about the play. She was very pedantic about the grammar – what was a comma and what was a full stop. She was very bright and very funny; we were about the same age and got on really well. After Blasted I was in a production of Woyzeck that she directed.
The whole run of Blasted seemed to be charged with energy. I was shocked by the response from the critics – we weren’t expecting it at all. There was a real level of curiosity about the play. A friend of mine told me that she was in Manchester and a cab driver was talking about Blasted because Stephen Daldry, the Court’s artistic director at the time, had been talking to Jack Tinker, one of its harshest critics, on Newsnight. It was incredible that such a small play had that sort of reach.
We sold out and there were queues around the block for returns. It felt like everyone was sitting up in their seats – although people would faint sometimes. On the last night, Pip Donaghy, who played Ian, cut his thumb badly while opening a bottle of champagne. He turned to the audience and said, “This is a dark play but not that dark – I’m going to get a plaster.” So I turned my back to the audience and waited for him to return. Then I had to redo the line after which my character is supposed to laugh and then cry hysterically. So I had to do it all over again!
There was talk of Blasted transferring to the West End. If we’d all been free I think it would have gone directly into a theatre. But I had another commitment so it didn’t happen. I do remember feeling quite relieved because it really is a dark play. It was only on at the Court for three or four weeks – I couldn’t have stomached a long run.
Lyn Gardner: Blasted was dismissed by a handful of critics but the conversation has changed
A blast at our smug theatre: Edward Bond on Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane: Why can’t theatre be as gripping as footie?
- Blasted is revived next month at the Other Room in Cardiff and as part of Sheffield Theatres’ Sarah Kane season
