Blasted, first produced at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1995, was explosively controversial from its inception. With only three characters, the play portrays the unspeakable brutalities of sexual violence and war and the deep, inexorable relationships between the two. It consistently asks that acts almost impossible to portray without special effects and liable to disgust the viewer be performed onstage and asks the audience to receive them, not simply as violations of taboo, but as a compendium of the near-unimaginable horrors humans are capable of doing to each other.
Although Blasted was primarily ill-received at the time, panned by a majority of critics and causing significant...
