We can spare ourselves too much analysis. Before you bother pondering a play's significance, it must surely provoke some reaction beyond that of grey boredom. At this minor hurdle, Thomas Ostermeier's beautiful and catatonically dull production of Sarah Kane's iconic, problematic play falls.
Blasted is, above all, a piece of shock theatre, a series of unpleasant acts linked by aggressively surreal plotting. Terminally-ill Ian and terminally-characterless, vegetarian Cate arrive in a Leeds hotel room together.
Ian bullies Cate into a succession of sexual acts. A soldier turns up and a mortar hits the building. The soldier rapes Ian and bites out his eyes. Left in the war zone, Ian sates his hunger on a dead baby. Yum.
The Berlin Schaubuhne's production renders all this beautifully. The hotel room looks expensive and revolves. The climactic explosion is done with a blaze of lights and a lovely snowfall of debris - the undoubted highlight of the evening.
But - and forgive my national stereotyping - this beauty is decidedly Teutonic: clean and utterly passionless. A rape goes by like a gentle dance. The blinding is a tepid bit of mime. Ostermeier doesn't want these actions to appal us. He wants us to contemplate them respectfully. With similar slow reverence, his actors pepper their German text with pagelong pauses that have lost all your interest well before the first unconvincing masturbatory act.
Stripped of the energy of nervous shock, Kane's play lies exposed. From a surtitle screen, her fetid language reads comically. Her supposed theatrical daring seems mere randomness, her world view tediously selfrighteous: we're all screwed and racists and men are to blame. Kane's terrible suicide in 1999 has left theatre people desperate to understand her significance. Germany, it seems, has already decided she was a genius. This production won't begin to convince her homeland.
Until 11 November. Information: 020 7638 8891. www.barbican.org.uk
Zerbombt (Blasted)
Barbican Theatre
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
