Sarah Kane Performance - Blasted Monologue

For the performance of this piece I have formed a monologue from the graphic, horrendous yet tender speeches of the Soldier:

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I have. Col. Fucking beautiful.

Close my eyes and think about her.

She’s – 

She’s – 

She’s –

She’s –

She’s dead, see. Fucking bastard soldier, he –

They buggered her. Cut her throat. Hacked her ears and nose off, nailed them to the front door.

You don't know fuck all about me.

I went to school.

I made love with Col.

Bastards killed her, now I’m here.

Now I’m here.

You never fucked by a man before?

Didn't think so. It’s nothing. Saw thousands of people packing into trucks like pigs trying to leave town. Women threw their babies on board hoping someone would look after them. Crushing each other to death. Insides of people’s heads came out of their eyes. Saw a child most of his face blown off, young girl I fucked hand up inside her trying to claw my liquid out, starving man eating his dead wife’s leg. Gun was born here and won’t die. Can’t get tragic about your arse. Don’t think your welsh arse is different to any other arse I’ve fucked. Sure you haven’t got any more food, I’m fucking starving.

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I wanted to show both the peculiar tenderness and naturalism of the Soldier's tone as he talks about his life before it was ruled by war and corruption and the transition from this sincerity to the sinister, horrifying, almost unbelievable descriptions of the things he has seen and done. The last paragraph is taken from when the Soldier has just raped Ian and is about to suck out his eyes. It is a very interesting technique by Kane to put such an outburst of almost poetic language in between two of the biggest acts of violence in the play with the general point that 'It's nothing'. It brings us back to this idea that for Kane hell is 'hyper real, reality magnified' as the Soldier is completely normalising his behaviour, showing how war can affect you so deeply. The shocking acts we see in Kane's work aren't necessarily unnaturalistic as these things do happen in the real world and they are far from impossible, they are just magnified and brought to the eyes of the public - which is very rarely done.

Although the monologue is quite fragmented and I have chosen sections from different areas of the script, I think it still works cohesively due to Sarah Kane's style and the character of the Soldier as someone defined by his role in the war and his seemingly contrasting views. He despises the 'bastard soldiers' that killed his girlfriend yet he is one of those 'bastard soldiers' and has committed numerous murders, tortures and rapes.

Here is the video of the performance of the monologue:

Because it is revealed in the next scene that the soldier kills himself after raping and torturing Ian, I wanted to present an underlying tone of despair. However before he kills himself, he sucks Ian's eyes out - a psychotic and completely unnecessary act that could only occur in an environment in which order is utterly destroyed, which is shown physically through the explosion in the hotel room. Because of this, it is also important that we see the psychotic and sinister element to his personality. I tried to show this in the last line of the monologue: 'Sure you haven’t got any more food, I’m fucking starving.' which seems at first as an oddly normal thing to say until it is apparent that this line precedes the Soldier eating Ian's eyes. 

What I thought was most important when delivering this monologue was understanding the atmosphere and the situation, the war has turned this person into a monster. His acts are driven by a desperation, a vulnerability that he struggles to face. As he lists the horrors that he has been witness to, it is clear that he has been destroyed by this war and almost numb to pain and empathy.