Summary
"I love you," Ian says to Cate, and she responds, "I don't love you." He looks over and sees the bouquet of flowers and hands them to Cate, saying, "These are for you." The sound of spring rain closes out the scene.
Scene 2. The same room, the next morning, bright and sunny. "The bouquet is now ripped apart and scattered around the room." Ian is awake looking at the newspaper, then pulls a bottle of gin out from under the bed and pours himself a glass. When he drinks, he feels intense pain and begins coughing, which wakes Cate up.
She watches Ian, and "it looks very much as if he is dying...His heart, lung, liver and kidneys are all under attack, and he is making involuntary crying sounds." The pain eventually subsides, and he looks over at Cate, who simply says, "Cunt." He lights a cigarette and tells her he's going to shower, but she notes that it's only 6. He undresses and gets the gun. Cate "is staring at him with hate," and he tells her, "Don't worry, I'll be dead soon." He throws the gun on the bed and goes to take a shower.
While Ian showers, Cate packs a bag, smells his leather jacket, rips the arms off at the seams, and examines the gun. Ian comes in, unloads and reloads the gun, and asks Cate if she's coming to breakfast. As he puts on the jacket, he notices the arms are ripped off, when Cate suddenly begins attacking him, biting, kicking, and punching. He throws her on the bed and she picks up the gun, pointing it at his groin.
Ian gets nervous and pleads with her not to shoot. "You don't want an accident. Think about your mum. And your brother. What would they think?" he says. She gasps for air and faints. When she is unconscious, "he puts the gun to her head, lies between her legs, and simulates sex." When he comes, Cate sits up and shouts. She laughs hysterically, until she cries, then passes out.
Ian kisses her and she wakes up. "Want to go home now," she says, but he wants her to stay until after breakfast. He locks the door and pockets the key. "Why can't I go home?" she asks, as he lights another cigarette and tells her, "It's too dangerous." Outside there is a bang of a car malfunctioning, and Ian throws himself on the floor, fearfully. Cate laughs at him and kisses him. She asks him why he's afraid and who would have a gun. "Me," he says, before clarifying: "Someone like me."
Cate undresses Ian and asks him why this hypothetical person would shoot at him, and he tells her, "Revenge." He imagines a world in which someone has been tapping his phone and apologizes to Cate for not calling her back, telling her that he got paranoid that someone would hear him "talking soft on the phone."
He then tells her that he "signed the Official Secrets Act," and thinks they are trying to kill him. "Done the jobs they asked. Because I love this land," he says, as Cate begins to suck his nipples. As she undoes his pants, he reveals more, saying, "Driving jobs. Picking people up, disposing of bodies, the lot."
Cate performs oral sex on him as he tells her he stopped calling her in order not to put her life in danger. "I am the killer..." he says, coming. She bites his penis and he cries in pain, hitting her. She runs to the bathroom and cleans her teeth. When she comes back, she says, "You should resign," and asks if the people after him will come there. They argue about their sex life, with Cate attesting that he forced her to have sex, and him maintaining his entitled attitude about sex. She tells him she wouldn't shoot someone, and he defends his ownership of a gun, saying, "It's my job. I love this country. I won't see it destroyed by slag."
"I don't believe in killing" Cate says, and Ian says, "You'll learn." She shakes, and Ian hugs her. Then he has a coughing fit and spits into a handkerchief. Cate then coughs and retches, pulling a hair out of her throat and looking disgustedly at Ian. Ian draws a bath.
Ian calls down for two English breakfasts, then drinks the rest of the gin. Cate comes out of the bathroom and tells Ian that she is peeing blood. "It'll heal," he insists. When there is a knock on the door, they both jump. Cate tells him not to answer it, but he puts the gun to her head. He tells her to open the door, and throws the key at her. When she opens it, there are two English breakfasts on the floor and she brings them in. She is disturbed to see meat on the plate and tells Ian that she's going to take a bath and go home.
Someone knocks at the door, then tries to open it, finding it locked. Ian asks who's there, but no one answers, they just knock again.
Analysis
The relationship between Ian and Cate is a fundamentally manipulative one, in which he tells her that he loves her and plies her with gifts, but does not care what she wants and needs, and exploits her for his own desires. He is emotionally and sexually coercive, and try though she might try to resist him, Cate is often unable to fight back against his manipulations. He is a kind of tyrannical master, and she is his vulnerable and unprotected subject, in thrall to his whims and needs instead of her own.
Sarah Kane's "in-yer-face theatre" does everything it can to shock the viewer, presenting visceral and intense scenarios and language. Scene 2 opens with a violent episode in which Ian almost dies. When he revives himself, Cate simply saying "Cunt." Then, she almost shoots him in the groin, before fainting; while she is unconscious, Ian puts the gun to her head and simulates intercourse. These are violent and visceral images that are meant to disturb and rattle the viewer. By creating such shocking images, Kane seeks to represent the darker side of human nature, and the violence that some people do to others.
The unhealthy codependent relationship between them is mutually created, even if Ian is the perpetrator, the aggressor and villain in the dynamic. In moments when Ian is vulnerable, Cate demonstrates an uncharacteristic tenderness towards him, such as in the moment when he throws himself on the ground after hearing the car malfunction outside the hotel room. She kisses him and asks him why he is afraid, taking on a maternal role with the man who has so mistreated her. The fact that both characters are trapped in the cycle of mutual violence makes the dynamic all the more disturbing and confusing to the viewer.
At the center of Ian's personal crisis is a crisis of masculinity, as gets revealed in his discussion with Cate about why he stopped returning her calls. He tells her that his paranoia has to do with the fear that someone has been listening to his phone calls. He says to Cate, "Got angry when you said you loved me, talking soft on the phone, people listening to that." Here he reveals that the reason he stopped calling was that he was paranoid someone could hear him being "soft" on the phone. His fear has to do with his perceived masculinity getting compromised. In this way, we can see that Ian's violence, his horrific treatment of Cate, and his deeply held paranoia, has to do with his fear that his masculinity is in peril somehow.
The personal and the political are blurred in Blasted, and it is unclear at certain moments whether Cate and Ian are discussing politics or their sex life. In this way, Kane merges the theme of sex and conquest with the theme of political unrest. This has the effect of seeing the sex and violence exchanged between Cate and Ian as somehow allegorical of a broader political conflict. Rape and violence become studies of the violence of nations, microcosmic representations of the political climate in 1995, when Kane wrote the play. In an article for The Conversation, Jana Perkovic analyzes the play thus: "In 1995, Blasted was a play that connected the ordinary, everyday life in the UK, marked by hooliganism, lad culture and post-Thatcherism, to the atrocities of war in former Yugoslavia, a war which was schizophrenically experienced in Western Europe as both geographically close and unfathomably distant."
