Seldom has a play that has been seen by so few been talked and written about by so many as Sarah Kane's Blasted. While her later work is regularly revived, Blasted has barely been staged in Britain since its notorious 1995 premiere. This new production from disabled-led theatre company Graeae not only offers the opportunity to reassess it without all the hysteria that accompanied its first Royal Court staging, but also offers new ways of looking at it.
Jenny Sealey's production strips the play back to its barest bones, but also layers it: here, the emotionally disabled and damaged characters are played by actors with physical disability. The result is sometimes electrifying and frequently uncomfortable, making seedy hack Ian's emotional and physical abuses of the fragile and naive Cate seem even more appalling. Jennifer-Jay Ellison's terrific Cate is like an unstable building in danger of tottering and collapsing at any minute into the rose petals that bleed across the stage.
Beautifully designed so that the action is played out as if on a paper curl of wood, the production embraces the structure of a play that explodes itself to smithereens midway through, as the horrors of the outside world crash into the hotel bedroom in the form of David Toole's soldier. But the use of video as a means of written and spoken description can mask it too, creating a kind of dislocation that lets the audience off the hook because it turns the play into a fascinating object rather than something experienced in the guts.
Since Kane's untimely death, Blasted has gone from dismissed as being one of the worst plays ever written to being hailed as one of the greatest. The truth lies somewhere in between. But as long as we remain in thrall to violence both as individuals and as a nation, it demands to be seen.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0121-236 4455
