Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Sarah Kane, directed by Brendan Healy
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
September 28-October 17, 2010
David Ferry gives the most compelling, utterly fearless performance of the year as the central character Ian in Blasted. The role is so emotionally raw it requires the actor to sacrifice all ego and inhibition to depict the descent of a dying tabloid journalist from his racist and sexist certainties into a living hell of degradation. Ferry’s total commitment the part is key to making Blasted such a shattering experience.
The original audience for Kane’s play in 1995 could not get past her onstage depictions of masturbation, rape, sodomy, mutilation and cannibalism and proclaimed the play a “disgusting feast of filth.” Now that we know more about the Rwandan genocide and the horrific war crimes in Bosnia, it is clear that Kane was exploring just how thin human beings’ veneer of civilization is that lies over the beast within. Director Brendan Healy’s production, the first English-language production in Canada, takes place in Julie Fox elegant, international-style hotel room, so antiseptic that could be a laboratory, which indeed it is. Here Ian takes the barely adult epileptic Cate (Michelle Monteith) to continue an affair that must have begun when she was a child. Ian uses ploy after ploy to convince her to have sex until he resorts to violence. Meanwhile, a civil rages outside and when a soldier (Dylan Smith) invades the room he brings the war with him. The male versus female violence now becomes male-versus-male, domestic aggression clearly carrying the seeds of political aggression. When the room is hit by a bomb, very effectively staged, we lose track of time and Ian, who once feared death now longs for it as a release from suffering.
While Ferry is central, Monteith and Smith frightening. Monteith’s maniacal laughter during her fits seems like she channeling demonic forces. Smith shows us a man whose mind the horrors of war have warped into replicating precisely what most disturbs him. Kane and Healy have managed to make us understand men who commit the vilest actions imaginable. The fact that we cannot distance ourselves is what is so unsettling. A play with such a devastating effect should leave the audience in silence to cope with its experience. But no, Healy, who otherwise has been so insightful, leaves us with an upbeat song whose cheap irony is completely unsuitable what we have witnessed and cuts painfully across the mood he has so carefully constructed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-09-29.
Photo: Dylan Smith and David Ferry. ©Omer Yukseker.
2010-09-29
Blasted