The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [358]
`sickening acts of sexual and physical violence, obscene langage and a despairing view of contemporary society that seemed entirely nihilistic ... anal rape, eyeball gouging, on-stage defecation, drug-addicted rentboys, cannibalism and torture became stock ingredients in the dramatic stew.'
Can we not hear a yawn stretching back at least a generation, if not further? After all, had not even Shakespeare included cannibalism in Titus Andronicus and eyeball gouging in King Lear? Although in his case, of course, these images had merely been incidental to the unfolding of larger and more complete stories, in which the perpetrators of the original shocking acts of violence eventually pay the penalty, according to the pattern of the archetype.
The central figure in this new vogue was a young female playwright, Sarah Kane, whose Blasted, written when she was 23, was first staged at London's Royal Court in 1995. Ian, a hardbitten, foul-mouthed tabloid journalist with a liver problem, and Cate, a simple-minded 21-year old who lives with her mum, are in a hotel room. He carries a gun, constantly uses four-letter words and makes racist comments about the hotel's non-white staff. He starts to masturbate in front of Cate, tries to undress her, then forces her to hold his penis while he concludes his masturbation. She says she will not have sex with him because she is not his girlfriend any more and has promised herself to Shaun. They talk inconsequentially about football, her chances of getting a job and whether he has ever killed anyone.
When they wake early next morning, Cate is angry and prepares to leave. He holds his gun at her head, lies between her legs and simulates sex until he ejaculates. He tells her that people are trying to kill him. Cate performs oral sex on him, and ends by biting his penis. They order breakfast. When it arrives, Cate disappears into the bathroom because she feels sick after her sex act. A soldier enters with a rifle. He takes Ian's gun, eats both breakfasts, looks into the bathroom and finds Cate has disappeared. There is a loud explosion. The hotel has been blasted by a mortar bomb, knocking the soldier unconscious. When he comes round, he tells Ian how he and other soldiers had been inspecting a house, where they had only found a small boy. One had shot him through the legs. Then they found three men and four women hiding in the basement. He himself had raped the women, the youngest a girl of twelve:
`then she cried. Made her lick me clean ... shot her father in the mouth. Brothers shouted. Hung them from the ceiling by their testicles.'
After more conversation, in which the soldier recalls how his own girlfriend had been buggered, had her throat cut and her ears and nose hacked off and nailed to the front door, he holds the revolver to Ian's head and rapes him, while `crying his heart out. The scene ends with the soldier sucking out each of Ian's eyes in turn, and eating it. The final scene opens with the soldier having blown his brains out. Cate enters, soaking wet, carrying a baby a woman has given her to look after. `Everyone in town is crying ... soldiers have taken over.' The baby is crying for food. Ian wants to kill himself. Cate says this would be wrong, `God wouldn't like it'. Ian replies:
`there isn't one ... no God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No fucking nothing.'
Ian tries to shoot himself, but the gun doesn't work. Cate discovers the baby is dead. She buries it beneath the floorboards, under a cross made from two pieces of wood, and leaves to find some food. Ian masturbates