“This Disgusting Feast of Filth”: Meat Eating, Hospitality, and Violence in Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Abstract

Sarah Kane's landmark play Blasted (1995) scandalised its early audiences with its staging of serial sexual violence, war crimes, and cannibalism. The Daily Mail's reviewer of its first performance at the Royal Court famously described it as a "disgusting feast of filth" (qtd. in Urban 36), an appraisal which unwittingly captures the centrality of questions of appetite to the play's ethical and political project. Blasted is a play which troubles distinctions between purity and filth, and the edible and the inedible, with meat playing a crucial role as an object located at the borders of these distinctions.In this essay, I will argue that attention to the consumption of meatboth human and nonhuman, material and symbolic -is crucial to a fuller understanding of the play's welldocumented interest in sexual violence and militarism (van Rijswijk; Solga; Radosavljević).The question of dietary ethics, which has been largely neglected in the capacious scholarly literature on the play, is brought into dialogue with a broader critique of violence, and the principal characters' orientations towards meat eating are shown to variously resist, reflect, and reproduce the patterns of gendered and racialised violence on which the play is centred. I trace how the play brings meat into an economy of exchange, hospitality, and gift-giving which, while ostensibly driven by care, is nonetheless thoroughly structured by misogyny and racism. In doing so, I aim to situate my analysis within an ongoing conversation concerning the relationship between meat-eating (or the refusal thereof), hospitality, and violence. Recent work in the emerging field of vegan theory (Salih), as well as contentious modes of activist practice (The Liberation Pledge), demonstrate an awareness that the disruption of norms of hospitality can clear a space for critical agency. 1

A Private Honesty: Torture and Interiority in the Theatre of Sarah Kane

“…Seán McCorry writes of Cate's vegetarianism, for example, commenting on her 'visceral refusal to allow her body to incorporate the body of the other'. 54 There are many such instances of Cate's refusal to incorporate the other symbolically through consumption. At the start of the play, it is Ian and not she who goes for the mini-bar; she often cleans or wipes herself when Ian kisses her, especially early in the play; and after performing oral sex on Ian in the second scene she 'spits frantically, trying to get every trace of him out of her mouth', 55 and acts with disgust when she finds a hair in her throat.…”