Referencing and transformation in Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Abstract

Sarah Kane’s Blasted, published in 1995, starts as a conventional familiar piece but progresses to dreadful cruelty and violence. This play was considered by most critics as an attention-pursuing adolescent play whose plot does not substantiate the extent and grade of violence the viewer/reader is required to sustain. The play was only taken seriously after the Royal Court Theatre did a premiere of it and it aggravated a serious explosion of hatred. The harsh critical responses of this play and two others published after it pushed Kane to publish her fourth play, Crave under a pseudonym, hoping to get a fair judgment and analysis. Sarah Kane’s body of work connects extensively to what Aleks Sierz calls in-yer-face theatre. Her use of referencing, transformational and experimental devices is an indicator that age is not, and shouldn’t be a barrier for literary creativity. As such, Kane’s plays should be taken seriously irrespective of the age at which they were written. The purpose of this article is to do an intertextual reading of Sarah Kane’s Blasted to assess how texts can be interrelated with one another. Incorporating the ideas, styles, texts, theories, and history of writers from Britain and other parts of the world to build up her ideas and style is one of the factors that make her plays interesting and worth reading. In its conclusion, the paper demonstrates that Kane’s first play, Blasted, was seriously influenced by history and the writings of Beckett, Artaud, and Baker.