An extraordinarily insightful review Alison. A breathtakingly complex analysis of the play and this production. Every time I read your reviews you help to deepen my own understanding of the work that I have witnessed. We are so lucky to have you here in Melbourne. Thanks as ever for you razor sharp ability to analyse theatre. Xxx

Wow. I’m going.

OK. It’s a week since I saw Blasted, and I think I am now sufficiently recovered to make sentient comment. First I must explain something – some months ago my neck was injured in an accident. I have two displaced cervical discs, and somehow I seem unwittingly to have trained my neck-muscles to respond to any semblance of stress with an agonising cast-iron clench.
Within twenty minutes I was excruciated.
Here’s the thing – such a sensation seems actually to heighten the senses and to detach the most barbaric motivations from their learned expressions. I was completely convinced that if either of the male characters and I were locked in a room, only one would emerge alive. The alarming realisation is that I did not find the prospect repelling. Kane was a brilliant writer, able to turn the viewer’s sensations and emotions into active participants in the drama. She made me feel responsible, guilty, culpable and involved.
On the tram going home, I had a damned good hard look at myself.

Hi David – thanks for your comment! I’m all for variousness in performance and theatrical form: there are many ways of making meaning. And “action” too is many things – it’s not merely event. For my part, I want plays, however they play with form, to be doing something more with language than mere explanation, which I can get in any mediocre op ed. I expect writing to be conscious, although of course I know the subconscious is a huge part of creative work. But that’s complicated! Eg, I think this is a conscious text, however disingenuous I found it. And of course all these questions become more complex in a collaborative artform like theatre.

Coincidentally, I saw two dance pieces last week, and maybe said it better in that review: “One of the tasks of the playwright (or, indeed, any kind of creative writer) is to reinvest language with its density, to give meaning and vitality to the words that we casually use and abuse every day. The knockabout usages of language often work subliminally, so language becomes a miasma of ghostly resonances that channel meaning below conscious thought. A lot of political speech, for example, relies on language being half-dead.”

Always happy to be of service 🙂

Thank you Alison, I’ve just been watching the division in the house on the current Medivac legislation that will allow refugees on Nauru evacuation to Australia on medical grounds. It was when our pentecostal leader Scott Morrison started to use his excellent speaking skills, that I had to switch off. And then I read this essay. It strikes me that I’ve just witnessed (!) a kind of proof of this thesis. Because Morrison used the rhetorical rule of three, and built the dynamic of his delivery through the three-list as perfectly as Martin Luther King or John Bell. We need to understand more the lengths to which our politicians go to enthral us, and we need a media with critical skills on par with theatre practitioners. There is a conflation in our media this days of celebrity and art that is most unhelpful in this, which means that serious discussion of art is reduced to a few hundred words, and that supposedly critical publications like the Guardian do not value the role of art in discourse and so their readership believes it is of no value. For this reason I go to Witness, Overland, The Conversation and the library to find my reality.

My background takes me to the theatre with a very different perspective, but I arrived at conclusions almost identical. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has set a monstrous challenge by constructing a play with lots and lots of words, culminating in (but, outwardly, not leading to) a devastatingly shocking act one dénouement, followed by lots and lots more words. Christina Smith added a degree of difficulty by giving the cast a set with far too much space in it. They were just too far apart too often to develop the sense of office-oppression that the script (and the programme-notes) seem to suggest. I also felt for the crew, with two massive interval scene-changes in a theatre where neither wing-space nor staff is abundant. The crew met the challenge; the cast smashed it. Lisa McCune has developed into a really sensitive and mature actor, with perfect poise and impeccable timing. All three males are a tribute to the excellent grounding that the ‘independent’ companies can provide, Callan Colley, fresh out of NIDA, has a big future, but for me, Jane Harber, whose biog suggests she has played to cameras a great deal more than to an audience, delivers three distinct and detailed characters, each with a full set of distinct and decisive accents, intonations, expressions and postures. We’ll see her again, I’m sure.
The big difference, of course, is that when Alison saw the show, an American newspaper office hadn’t just been the scene of a mass shooting, and I can’t pretend the fact didn’t affect my approach to the performance, or stop me wondering how the thought of it must have affected the cast. When the curtain finally fell, it was cynically symbolic of the U.S. gun problem – there’s a lot of hand-wringing and tear-jerking but no resolution in sight.

All stories on men as central characters need to be banned. Enough!

Very interesting and thought-provoking, Alison. I agree with most of your critique of the book but I did feel that there was a reason to do this adaptation now. I was struck by the apocalyptic sense of ‘end of days’ – the trope of an impending pandemic of cancer and environmental disaster, and the escape to a kind of survivalist utopia – and thought that it spoke maybe even more strongly to today than it did when Carey wrote it. And I get a sense that Matt L is engaged in a kind of investigation of Australian cultural myths (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Away and Bliss) that is intriguing. Having said that, there is no escaping the fact that the story – and the production – invest pretty much everything in the central male character. It literally revolved around him a lot of the time!

Saw it today -you’re right on most part about the play -could have been interesting if 45m were cut. The Krishna references are tounge in cheek commentary on Sidhartha leaving the palace, no. And the best part Miles Davis’ Bitches’ Brew when the nasty cruel wife bonks Harry’s business partner.