There are few bands out there who could disappear for nearly a decade and then fill a venue with the blink of an eye. Indeed, it is some achievement that Stereo MCs pulled any punters at all. There are few bands out there who could disappear for the best part of a decade and then, in the blink of an eye, pack a place to the rafters. Indeed, it is some achievement that Stereo MCs have pulled any punters at all. It is nine years since the south London outfit released Connected, their much-acclaimed third album that helped to ease hip hop’s passage into the mainstream.
This band makes the Stone Roses look prolific; even those well-heeled layabouts in Elastica seem like workaholics next to this bunch. Sure, they’ve done a few remixes, among them Madonna’s Frozen, though it hardly adds up to nine years’ work Their excuse? Recharging their batteries, apparently. Rob Birch, rapper and driving force of the Stereo MCs, has been dogged by false rumours of heroin addiction, though that has more to do with his appearance ­ a string bean with bags under his eyes to rival those of an elderly basset hound ­ than with any actual evidence.Birch is now 39 and, though he looks no healthier than he did at the beginning of the Nineties, he seems to be enjoying a new lease of life.

Dressed like a teenager, in gold chains and impossibly baggy trousers, he gives a characteristically ferocious performance. Even with his wild eyes and relentless twitching, he is a strangely charismatic presence. The force of Birch’s rap hasn’t diminished either: he spits the words out as if he has a mouthful of grit.Such feral intensity is more than matched by the music; from the forbidding bass line of “Deep Down and Dirty”, the title track of the new album, and the demented “Traffic” to the laid-back groove of “Breeze”, it’s darkly infectious stuff.Yet there is a party atmosphere, and this owes much to the triumvirate of backing singers, shock-headed divas armed with a set of moves that sends electric currents through the room. Never mind Birch; each of these women could have made a formidable front person by herself.Thankfully, Birch and co are not above playing their old hits ­ “Ground Level” and “Step It Up” sound as fresh as ever. Even “Connected”, the classic track that was so rudely transformed into a mobile phone marketing jingle, manages to set the house on fire.

Judging by this performance, Stereo MCs are back with all guns blazing. I would even go as far to say ­ whisper it ­ that it was worth waiting for.. Sarah Kane is best known for the way her career began, in the extraordinary public controversy over Blasted, and the way it ended: in her suicide and the posthumous production of her last play, 4.48 Psychosis. Sarah Kane is best known for the way her career began, in the extraordinary public controversy over Blasted, and the way it ended: in her suicide and the posthumous production of her last play, 4.48 Psychosis. Both were shocking and defining moments in recent British theatre. But it would be a pity if they distracted us from the qualities of the work she left behind; a pity if, in attending to the mythology of the author, we missed their explosive theatricality, their lyricism, their emotional power and bleak humour.Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Clean- sed, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis add up to a body of work which pushed recklessly at British theatre’s naturalistic boundaries.

Each was a new step on a journey in which Kane mapped the darkest and most unforgiving internal landscapes: of violation, loneliness, power, mental collapse and, most consistently, love.Blasted begins with a middle-aged man, Ian, and a young woman, Cate, entering an expensive hotel room in Leeds. The stage immediately suggests the kind of chamber piece about relationships with which theatre-goers are so familiar. And yet, almost from its first words, “I’ve shat in better places than this”, there is an uneasy awareness that this play is not behaving itself. Ian’s behaviour and language are unpleasant, repulsive even, yet nothing condemns him No authorial voice is leading us to safety. The moral unease grows until the scene finally changes and we learn that, during the night, Ian has raped Cate. Shortly afterwards, there is a knock on the door and, in the play’s most daring moment, a soldier enters, apparently from nowhere, bringing with him the terrifying fragments of a world blown apart by violence.It is as though the act of rape, which blasts the inner world of both victim and perpetrator, has also destroyed the world outside the room.

The play’s structure seems to buckle under the weight of the violence unleashed. The time-frame condenses; a scene that begins in spring ends in summer The dialogue erodes, becoming sparse. Scenes are presented in smaller and smaller fragments until they are a series of snapshots: images of Ian, all structures of his life destroyed, reduced to his base essence ­ a human being, weeping, shitting, lonely, broken, dying and, in the play’s final moments, comforted.The final images are not unlike moments in Beckett where the human impulse to connect is found surviving in the bleakest places. The critics who drew attention to Blasted’s broken taboos missed the fact that its roots were not in the bloodbaths of post-modern cinema but in the Shakespearean anatomies of reduced men: Lear on the heath and Timon in his cave.The first production of Blasted in 1995 placed Kane on the news pages of tabloids as well as the arts pages of broadsheets.