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d you have a slightly m mixed audience. for both nights. Because..everyone........ - Sarah Kane: interviewed by Dan Rebellato {Royal Holloway, University of London) 3 November 1998. (8,600 words} Dan: | can’t think of a playwright that has got quite such vitriolic or personal reviews from critics as you have. Why? SK: | honestly think it’s because they don’t know what else to say. If they don’t know what to say about the work, they go for the writer. Or the director, or the actors. What happened with Blasted... (The press response to my other plays is inevitably so clouded by what happened to Blasted so that everyone is constantly re-reviewing Blasted. Michael Billington must have reviewed Blasted more than any other ply he’s dver seen. I'm permanently reading about Blasted even now.) What happened on that particular press night? \t was a bit strange; the Court had programmed the play into a dead spot; they didn’t really know what to do with it. A lot of people in the building didn’t want to do it. They were a bit embarrassed about it, so they put it into a spot just after Christmas when tic one was going to the theatre anyway and hopefully no one would notice. It was in the Theatre Upstairs and what usually happens in the theatre upstairs is that they have two press nights because if you have one then ony seat is full of press and it’s completely unbearable. So yeu have two was a bit haphazard at the Court at that time, they. failed to-natice ‘there was a major press night at another theatre, the Almeida in London, on one of those press nights so they were all coming on the same night anyway. . So] was sitting at the back and | looked around and realised that the retainers director was somewhere near the front and everyone else was a critic. | think there were about three other women in the audience. Everyone else was a middle aged, white, middie ‘class _man_-- and most of them had plaid jackets on, (Laughter) And jit was literally only at that point t that | realised that the main character of ry play was a middle-aged male journalist. (More laughter) Whe nat only raped his young girlfriend but that is then raped and mutilated himself. And it suddenly occurred to me that they wouldn’t like ~eeivitane Rin esl nodes, 
