The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday November 9 2006
In the article below the umlaut wandered. We should have referred to the Berlin Schaubühne production, not the Schaübuhne production - umlaut on the second u not the first.
Eleven years ago we all made fools of ourselves over Sarah Kane's debut work. But I don't think anyone seeing Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin Schaubühne production could doubt, even if they didn't like the play, that it was the work of a serious artist with a moral vision.
The perennial danger with Blasted is that it seems like a play of two distinct halves: one in which an edgy encounter between a middle-aged journalist, Ian, and a young girl, Cate, leads to the precipitate eruption of civil war into a Leeds hotel-room.
But, in Ostermeier's superb production (in German, but with English surtitles), there is a sense of unease from the start. Ian reacts nervously to a ringing phone. Every knock at the door is a potential threat. There are even echoes of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter in the way food and drink suddenly appear from noiselessly unseen sources.
The transition from domestic to public violence, when it does come, is truly shocking. Jan Pappelbaum's hotel-room set is blown to smithereens, plaster cascades from the ceiling, everything is a sea of rubble.
But, far from seeming gratuitous, it is a reminder that we live in a world where everything may suddenly be ripped apart. And the violence, largely perpetrated by an invading soldier on Ian, feels less like the sensational catalogue it once did, than a kaleidoscope image of the horrors of our own times.
I still feel this is a young play: one in which Kane piles everything in to prove her point that the seeds of war can always be found in peacetime civilisation.
But what comes across, unexpectedly in Ostermeier's strangely quiet production, is Kane's compassion for these lost souls. Thomas Thieme's soldier is big and burly - but also desperate for his first-hand stories of torture to be told. Ulrich Muhe's Ian is racist, homophobic, sexist and just about everything nasty you can think of - but also yearning for love. And Katharina Schüttler's Cate is a sad, exploited waif in desperate need of protection.
There is even, within the play, an underlying lyricism. After all the horrors we have witnessed Cate returns from the warzone with gin and sausage for the entombed Ian. His simple response of "Thank you" implies, like the mending of the chair in the final scene of Bond's Saved, that there is some residual decency left in mankind.
It may not be much but, Kane implies, it is all we have to cling onto.
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