Summary
Scene 1. An expensive hotel room in Leeds, "the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world." There is champagne on ice, a large bouquet of flowers, a telephone, and a large bed. Ian, a 45-year-old Welsh man who has lived in Leeds most of his life, and Cate, a 21-year-old lower-middle-class southerner with a south London accent, come in.
Cate is astounded by the room. Ian comes in, throws some newspapers on the bed, and pours himself a gin from the minibar. "I've shat in better places than this," he says, before deciding he's going to take a bath. After turning on the water in the bath, he comes into the room wearing a towel and holding a revolver, which he checks is loaded and puts under his pillow. He tells Cate to tip the boy who brings their sandwiches up, leaves 50 pence and goes into the bathroom.
Cate examines the room, smelling the flowers and marveling at the beauty of the room. When Ian comes back in, wet, he notices Cate is sucking her thumb, before going to put on his clothes in the bathroom, where he coughs "terribly." He pours himself a gin and tonic, then puts his gun in an underarm holster.
Ian pops the champagne and pours them each a glass. "What we celebrating?" Cate asks, but Ian doesn't answer, complaining about the "Wogs and Pakis taking over." Cate tells him not to use those derogatory expressions, but he belittles her for sympathizing with non-white people.
"There's Indians at the day centre where my brother goes. They're really polite," Cate says. Ian asks about Cate's brother, whether he is mentally disabled, but she clarifies that her brother has "learning difficulties." "Your mother I feel sorry for. Two of you like," Ian says, disparagingly, which makes Cate nervous. As she begins to stutter, he tells her, "You know I love you."
"I'm here for the night," she tells him, smiling. Ian tells Cate he would marry her, but she says she couldn't leave her mother. He tells her she has to one day, but when she asks why, he cannot think of a reason. Suddenly there's a knock at the door and Cate goes to answer it, but Ian tells her not to, getting the gun and going himself.
When there has been some silence, Ian tells Cate to open the door, which she does. A plate of ham sandwiches is sitting on the floor, and she brings them in. When she doesn't want one, Ian asks her why and she tells him, "Dead meat. Blood. Can't eat an animal." He offers to take her out for Indian food, when suddenly they realize there are cheese sandwiches.
As Cate eats a cheese sandwich, Ian belittles her clothes, telling her she looks like a lesbian. When she tells him she doesn't like his clothes either, he strips and stands in front of her naked, saying, "Put your mouth on me." She laughs in his face, so he gathers his clothes and goes into the bathroom to dress.
When he comes back out, dressed, he unloads and reloads the gun, before asking Cate if she has a job yet. "Still screwing the taxpayer," he says when she tells him she doesn't. "Mum gives me money," she protests, but Ian wants to know when she's going to get her own job. She tells him she applied for a job at an advertising agency, but he insists she'll never get a job. She begins to stutter as he belittles her.
As Cate trembles, Ian laughs maliciously. When Cate faints, Ian rushes to her side and dabs some gin on her face. Suddenly she "sits bolt upright, eyes open but still unconscious." Then she begins laughing, "unnaturally, hysterically, uncontrollably." She passes out again, then wakes up slowly, as if from sleep. When she's awake, Cate begins talking about the fact that someone is in danger. "She closes her eyes and slowly comes back to normal," the stage directions read.
When she is conscious again, she looks at Ian and smiles, asking if she fainted, and tells Ian that it happens all the time "since dad came back." Ian is rattled, pours himself more gin, and lights up a cigarette. "You fall asleep and then you wake up," Cate says, before telling Ian he ought not to smoke. "Imagine what your lungs must look like," she says, and he tells her that he's seen his lungs, that a surgeon brought him a "lump of rotting pork," that was his lung.
"But you'll die," Cate says, worried, and asks if he can get a transplant. When Cate seems distressed, Ian kisses her, but she tells him not to kiss her with tongue. Suddenly, the phone rings, and Ian answers.
Analysis
The play opens with a striking contrast between character and setting. Ian and Cate are two people who seem rough around the edges; Cate, we are told in the stage directions, is a southerner from a lower-middle-class background, while Ian is brandishing a gun and seems like a bit of a gangster. Meanwhile, they have found themselves in a lavish hotel room, the kind that Kane tells us is so nice it could be anywhere. This contrast, between the lower-class characters and their lavish surroundings, forms an unusual and intriguing first impression.
Not only is Ian rough around the edges, but he seems to be keeping a tremor of violence under wraps just below the surface. He drinks excessively, is constantly checking his gun, and has violently racist views. He is the image of brutishness, and his attitude creates an atmosphere of tension from the moment he enters the hotel room. Anton Chekhov wrote of playwriting, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." Sarah Kane not only puts a gun in her first scene, she puts it in the custody of an unpredictable and seemingly violent man, heightening the tension.
The relationship between Cate and Ian is, we soon learn, quite fraught and abusive. He belittles her every chance he can get, calling her and her brother mentally disabled, and saying that he feels sorry for her mother. Then, in the next moment, he tells her he loves her. Ian holds a certain power over the stuttering, vulnerable Cate, making her feel desired and protected even as he disparages her.
The violence that pulses underneath the action of the play is Ian's misogyny and masculinist brutality. Not only does he brandish a gun and take particular pleasure in belittling his date, he is also sexually forward in a coercive way. When Cate tells him she doesn't like his clothes—the reversal of an insult he has just launched at her—he strips and orders her to "put [her] mouth on [him]." When she laughs in his face, he is momentarily embarrassed, before unloading and reloading his gun. His masculinity is fragile, threatening to bite back with greater force, and is only exacerbated by the sexual tensions between them.
The play has a quality of feeling suspended in time and space. Sarah Kane drops the audience down in a scenario without providing very much exposition. We know more about the psychological relationship between the characters, their capacity for affection and brutality, than we do about who they actually are, and the fact that they are in a fancy hotel room—for some undetermined reason—only adds to the effect of heightened theatricality. Indeed, Sarah Kane was known as writer of what has come to be known as "in-yer-face theatre," theatre that immediately presents visceral and controversial subject matter, and cares more about theatrical explosiveness than it does about taking care of its audience.
