Feasts of Filth

Sarah Kane’s Blasted is one of the most controversial plays written and produced by a British playwright over the last quarter century. A defining contribution to a genre of plays which emerged during the 1990s, and which are variously termed ‘in-yer-face’ and ‘new brutalist’. The principle strategy of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre was to shock its audience. Intimating a shared complacency between comfortable middle-class Britain and its comfortable middle-class theatre. A number of ‘in-yer-face’ plays were distinguished by their graphic presentation of extreme violence, commonly sexual. And nowhere was this presentation more explicit than in Kane’s Blasted, with successive scenes of rape and sexual abuse. This chapter re-reads Kane’s play in the closer context of familiar, and ongoing, debates regarding the relation of law and gender, and more particularly still the limitations of modern rape ‘law’. It is argued that these limitations are rooted in a series of particular rape ‘myths’. Many of which can be located in Kane’s writing, but which are also challenged by it.