Blasted was dismissed by a handful of critics but the conversation has changed

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/jan/12/sarah-kane-blasted-was-dismissed-by-critics

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“A disgusting feast of filth” was the Daily Mail’s infamous headline about Sarah Kane’s debut play, Blasted, when it opened at the Royal Court 20 years ago. Like Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court 30 years previously, Blasted became notorious overnight. Young, female and attempting to write a play that wasn’t just adventurous in content but in form too, Kane found herself isolated in the face of largely critical incomprehension from what the Royal Court’s Carl Miller, pre-echoing the “dead white males” debate raised by Nicholas Hytner more than 10 years later, described as “a group of men in comfortable shoes”.

Gender and age may very well have played a part in the response, but as Aleks Sierz and others have pointed out, not all the reviews were hostile – some alluded to Kane’s promise. What’s notable about the reviews, as Kane herself said in a rare interview with Dan Rebellato, is how many of them either just told readers what happened during the play or catalogued the more grisly moments (often not entirely incorrectly).

But then that’s what tends to happen when critics faced with new work –particularly new work trying to do something different and find new forms – are writing in the heat of the moment and with an imminent deadline. It’s perhaps not surprising that in the past many of the most famous examples of critics championing new work in the face of their colleagues’ critical perplexity, including Tynan’s advocacy for Look Back in Anger and Harold Hobson’s support of Pinter’s The Birthday Party, came from those writing on Sunday papers. They had had time to digest, reflect and, possibly even read, some of their colleagues’ reviews. After all critical writing is not an exam in which there is a right or wrong answer and no peeping is allowed. As we all know from some of the best bloggers writing today, writing not just in response to the show itself but to what others have already penned can lead to acute and insightful writing and spawn fascinating dialogues around the work.

Increasingly theatres have been recognising this, although in fact it has been the West End rather than new writing theatres that have led the way in allowing critics to see shows over a series of evenings with an embargo. It offers the best of both worlds: time for those writing to reflect more deeply, and yet still the excitement of a flurry of reviews that create a bit of a buzz around a show and make it news-worthy.

But the entire critical climate is very different from what it was 20 years ago and that can only be a good thing. Yes, the Mail’s Quentin Letts still dubs shows a disgrace, demanding that that no more public money should be spent on the theatre concerned, and all critics – whether online or in print – will misjudge particular pieces of work, myself included. But what has changed is the sheer number of people who now have a platform to write about theatre in many different ways, often with passion, love, eloquence and insight.

Back in 1995 what a small group of 20 or so people wrote about Blasted was – very largely – the conversation. Alternative points of view, such as the urgent response by the director James Macdonald published in the Observer, were few and far between. That’s because those who didn’t think Blasted was “a feast of filth” but a crucial and important new play weren’t invited on to a platform to express another view, or couldn’t find one willing to host them. There wasn’t an arena like Twitter where other playwrights and directors could respond directly and very publicly to the play and so creating a different dialogue and narrative around it, encouraging another audience to take a look.

Nobody has to wait to be invited now. And while that means that along with the best and most acute observations there is often a lot of noise, not all of it useful with some merely replicating what the mainstream press is doing anyway, it does mean that the views of print critics such as myself are not the final word. They are instead part of a much wider conversation and a continuous ongoing dialogue between critics (of all kinds, and whatever their platform), playwrights and theatre-makers.

As responses to recent work including Three Kingdoms, Mr Burns and Pomona have proved, it is often not the first critical dispatches from the front line that have proved most interesting but those that have followed in response. It means that the kind of overheated response and whipped up frenzy that the young Sarah Kane encountered 20 years ago is less likely to happen now, and that can only be welcome for individual playwrights, theatres and companies doing difficult, risky work. And for critics too.

Kate Ashfield on Blasted: ‘the whole run was charged with energy’

A blast at our smug theatre: Edward Bond on Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane: Why can’t theatre be as gripping as footie?