Above: Marin Ireland and Reed Birney in Soho Rep’s 2008 production of Blasted. (Photo: Simon Kane)

Spoilers for Blasted ahead, as well as mentions of rape, sexual assault, cannibalism, and suicide.

20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s 2023 documentary about the early days of the Russian occupation of Ukraine, is a tough but important statement, with searing images of the war and its impact. Incredulous civilians evacuate from crumbling buildings, bloody, in shock, thousand-yard staring at soldiers and rescue workers. Doctors struggle to work without antibiotics or painkillers. Hundreds huddle in improvised shelters. Pregnant women and babies die on operating tables. The legs of a boy, playing soccer when the shelling begins, are blown off.

20 Days won the Oscar for Best Documentary, and while it’s not the most artfully constructed film, its power is immense. The fact that these things are happening right now, at this moment, lends the film an immediacy you don’t normally see in documentaries. Watching the citizens of Mariupol weep over the bodies of loved ones, forage for food, pour bodies into mass graves, gather in packs to charge cell phones, and scream as neighbors loot their businesses — it’s striking, because this is not grainy stock footage. These people look like us, dress like us, go to places we go.

And it’s not just bombs. According to Human Rights First, “Russia has used conflict-related sexual violence as a weapon of war since its invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Women, girls, and others face violence on account of their gender. The scale of war-related sexual violence in Ukraine increased dramatically after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.”

For Chernov, a Pulitzer Prize-winning videographer and photojournalist, it’s about bearing witness. “If the world saw everything that happened in Mariupol,” he says, “it would give at least some meaning to this horror.”

War has been represented in film since the medium was invented. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket gave us the many shades of Vietnam. The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot presented different aspects of World War II. All are harrowing in their own way. But for my money, the most realistic gut-punch of a war story comes from the late British playwright Sarah Kane, a play that I saw sixteen years ago at New York’s Soho Rep: Blasted.

For those (blissfully?) unaware, Blasted is not an easy watch. The play’s 1995 world premiere, at London’s Royal Court Theatre, was met with outright derision. The Daily Mail called it “a disgusting feast of filth.” The Independent likened the experience of watching the play to “having your face rammed in an overflowing ashtray for starters, then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.”

By the time Blasted arrived in New York, the play had been reappraised as the work of a troubled genius. Local critics agreed. In the New York Times, Ben Brantley found the production to be “impeccably staged [by director Sarah Benson] and acted by a three-member ensemble with the bravery of hang gliders in a storm. Ms. Kane’s fierce study in the human instinct for inhumanity still registers off the Richter scale.” Frank Scheck of the New York Post called it “a brilliantly hellish production.”

It was these reviews, and my own curiosity, that drew me to Soho Rep. The play had been running for a while and tickets were costly, but I didn’t care and I wasn’t wrong. The performances by Reed Birney, Marin Ireland, and Louis Cancelmi were as good as any I’d seen. Sarah Benson’s production was vicious and visceral, the design work (by Louisa Thompson, Tyler Micoleau, Matt Tierney, and Theresa Squire) impeccable. It was nothing short of an affirmation of the power of live theater to provoke and disturb.

Louis Cancelmi as the Soldier in Soho Rep‘s 2008 production of BLASTED. (Photo: Simon Kane)

So — is Blasted horror?

As any theater major will tell you, reading a play can’t replicate the live experience, but it gives you a pretty good idea. Surprisingly, Blasted is almost as disarming on the page as it is onstage. It reads like the work of someone who’s just begun writing for theater, who’s seemingly unaware of what you can and can’t do. The stage directions are almost poetry, describing things you don’t normally see in the theater, challenging directors and designers to dream up ways to execute them. Instead of telling you what happens, I’ll let those directions spell it out. You can decide, along the way, if what you’re reading is horror.

Blasted is about wars, those we wage between ourselves and those fought between countries. The entire first half of the play takes place in a posh hotel room in Leeds, England. Ian, a racist tabloid journalist, has arranged a rendezvous with Cate, the childlike woman Ian’s been sleeping with (i.e., raping) for years. Cate, who suffers from something akin to epilepsy, blacks out several times during the scene, while Ian, who’s smoking and drinking himself to death, has developed a paroxysmal cough. Ian attempts to coerce Cate into sex, but she demurs. The two menace one another, sexually and otherwise, at gunpoint. The next morning, a soldier bursts into the room, ravenous, carrying a sniper rifle, and urinates on the bed. Then:

There is a blinding light, then a huge explosion.
Blackout.
The hotel has been blasted by a mortar bomb.
There is a large hole in one of the walls, and everything is covered in dust which is still falling.

Ian and the Soldier survive the blast, but are injured. They talk about Cate (who has disappeared), Ian’s work, and various atrocities the Soldier has witnessed and committed. Then:

The SOLDIER turns IAN over with one hand.
He holds the revolver to IAN’s head with the other.
He pulls down IAN’s trousers, undoes his own, and rapes him — eyes closed and smelling IAN’s hair.
The SOLDIER is crying his heart out.

In shock, Ian asks if the soldier is going to kill him. Then:

The SOLDIER grips IAN’s head in his hands.
He puts his mouth over one of IAN’s eyes, sucks it out, bites it off, and eats it.
He does the same to the other eye.

The soldier kills himself. Cate enters with a dead baby, buries it under the floorboards (the ground), marks the spot with a cross, and leaves. Seasons pass. Then:

IAN tears the cross out of the ground, rips up the floor, and lifts the baby’s body out.
He eats the baby.
He puts the remains back in the baby’s blanket and puts the bundle back in the hole.

Cate returns with food and drink and feeds Ian. He thanks her. The end.

You can understand why the London critics found the play over the top. But consider that Blasted was written during the Bosnian War (1992-95), in which Serb forces and paramilitary units used rape as an instrument of terror and ethnic cleansing. The estimated number of women and girls raped in that war ranges from 20,000 to 50,000. The number of men and boys raped is around 3,000. This in addition to the beatings, torture, starvation, forced labor, and harsh conditions to which Bosnians and Serbs were subjected in concentration camps.

Blasted takes advantage of cinematic tropes like body horror, dread, disorientation, and violence to get its point across, just as the Elizabethans and Jacobeans tweaked the revulsion reflex in plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy, and Titus Andronicus. They dared audiences to watch unspeakable acts and ask, How can we do such things to each other?— knowing full well that, under the right circumstances, we’d do the same. Like Middleton, Kyd, and Shakespeare, Kane knew, whether it was happening in a hotel room or on the streets of Sarajevo, we don’t know what we’re capable of until we’ve reached our lowest, most desperate point.

Towards the end of 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov quotes a doctor who told him, “War is like an x-ray. All human insides become visible.”

That’s the journalist’s job, isn’t it? To hold up a mirror, make us confront the things we’d rather not see. To help us understand what happens when we allow atrocities like the ones in Bosnia. In Ukraine. Israel and Gaza. I won’t say I enjoyed the acts depicted in Blasted, but I understood what Kane was going for. And I appreciated the artistry with which it was presented. I think that’s the greatest compliment you can bestow on art. No matter how sad or upsetting it is, if the work itself is smart and intentional, you can’t help but be uplifted by it.

In 1999, after writing five plays and one short film, Sarah Kane took her own life. Having showed us her insides, she succumbed to depression. It’s almost a cliché: the artist for whom the pain of creation is so great, their spirit gives out, exhausted. And yet that spirit survives: productions of her work are mounted worldwide. Kane continues to inspire, puzzle, and shock, daring us to look, and look away. Fearless, she gives meaning to the horror.

Eric Winick