Funny things are happening behind Cardiff station. In a former office building, now a bar specialising in craft beer and cabaret, the city’s first pub theatre has just opened its doors. Set up by the young director-producing team of Kate Wasserberg and Bizzy Day and billed as a “small place for big ideas”, The Other Room provides fresh evidence that the theatre scene in the Welsh capital is on the up.
Even so, choosing to christen a theatre with Sarah Kane takes nerve: despite being 20 years old, Blasted has lost none of its explosive charge. With its brutalising depictions of sexual violence, suicide and cannibalism, the play is a discomfiting experience at the best of times. In a venue as intimate as this, it’s sometimes as much as you can do to look at the stage.
In Wasserberg’s production, it is contemporaneity you notice. The hotel suite we’re marooned in might be the glossy new Radisson down the street, and Simon Nehan’s Soldier, who bursts in like an avenging angel, could be a Welsh squaddie traumatised by Afghanistan. In 1995, these scenes of a city abruptly transformed into a warzone evoked the Bosnian conflict; here, it’s impossible not to think of Syria (or Paris, or Ukraine).
On opening night, the show hadn’t quite found its rhythm, but when it settles, it will be agonisingly powerful. Christian Patterson brings a twitchy fragility to the role of Ian, the tabloid journalist with a murky past, while Louise Collins shows disarming courage as Cate – not a passive victim of events, but someone who turns her face towards them. Against the odds, she proves to be the only person on stage who can cope with the multiplying horrors outside.
• Until 7 March. Box office: 02921 280189. Venue: The Other Room at Porter’s, Cardiff.
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