I was working as a barman in the mid-90s
when blasted was first produced her
first play I was aware of the storm the
media storm that that players created
because it was all over the place it was
on the news reading those reviews and
look at those headlines I was expecting
to see a disgusting feast of filth as as
it was famously described but in fact my
my actual response when I would see it
was was being blown away by the
stagecraft of it
she wrote that play at 23 years old and
had an incredible instinct to want to
take a theater and turn it inside out we
were both very interested in the war in
Bosnia that was going on at a time a
major European war and and and then
attempted genocide our response to it
was completely unique and personal to
her she started off with a walked love
story and and and and being interested
in sexuality and violence and that took
her into this bigger landscape the first
critics were used to a generation of
plays which were making much more
explicit authorial commentary but at the
time I think all they thought was that
she was a young woman sort of having fun
putting revolting things on stage and
had no other desire than to shock what's
truly original about her work and you
see this in every single play is a
determination to challenge theatrical
form the form of a play in order to
express something about love or
something about our capacity for
violence while other writers had written
with such violence and such clarity and
other writers had written with feeling
and tenderness I think the combination
of the feeling and the tenderness and
the audacity of the state imagery in the
violence I'd never come across
in feeders love she was maybe trying to
free herself from from the way TIFF
blasted and the expectations that blast
it caused and I think it really helps
that at that point the people were
running the gate theater counter and
said that we're doing the season of work
influenced by it
these old Greek plays and perhaps you'd
like to write something for us and she
drew on the field of story Hippolytus is
a young prince he's a rather disgusting
human being he sleeps with everyone he
masturbates and watches trash TV all day
and nonetheless despite this his
stepmother
Phaedra falls in love with him whereas
blasted I suppose has us as a deeply
serious drive right through it Phaedra's
love does seem to me about sort of
enjoying actually the the pleasure of of
excess and extremity on one hand it has
all of the horrific violence and
explicit sexuality of blasted but it's
also sort of its kind of disgustingly
funny she's a very very sweet person
with a intensely McCobb sense of humor
and and again it's not really a
contradiction it's part the same thing
in a way
cleanse is a very very difficult play on
the page it's full of what appear to be
almost impossible stage directions
including things like cuts off hands
cuts off legs cuts out tongues ease
things are very very difficult to do on
stage but there are more things there's
a point when a field full of daffodils
suddenly blooms and I think what the
original production did rather
beautifully was to recognize that this
is a challenge to move beyond a sort of
ordinary types of British stage craft
she asked the states to be it suddenly
be covered in daffodils it's not about
what they are it's about how you make
them appear in this contest and so we've
got loads of plastic daffodils very
obviously once put wiring through them
light so they made them into darts and
about four or five hundred of these
these things in a like a bomb box above
the stage so at one point they just
tilted this trough and in all these
daffodils tumble down and went bump into
the stage and so suddenly you just got
dozens and dozens and dozens daffodils
it would completely clear breathtaking
and there's just took a nice flash of
yellow as all these darts fall through
the side light and then they land on the
stage but the point about it was
interesting about is this you've
determined the flower into our interim
into a weapon which has all the themes
of the play between beauty and pain
violence and destructive means it's sort
of the most optimistic of the plays it's
optimistic because even though it has
these in barbarities running right the
way through it that central question
will love so I've could love survive he
is actually for once in her work
answered affirmatively if the impact of
her work was created by its images of
shock and awe which at the end of the
last century felt prescient
I think it's timelessness comes out of
the depth of it's love it's love being
tested in the most extreme environment
you can almost wipe out love that
somehow it still leaves a stain on the
concrete where the dreadful tortures
it's undergone have happened there's
still something that remains that you
cannot quite eviscerate