“This disgusting feast of filth”: meat eating, hospitality, and violence in Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) scandalised its early audiences with its staging of sexual violence, war crimes, and cannibalism. One reviewer famously described it as a ‘disgusting feast of filth’, an appraisal which unwittingly captures the centrality of questions of appetite to the play’s ethical project. In this essay, I argue that attention to the consumption of meat is crucial to a fuller understanding of the play’s well-documented interest in sexual violence and militarism. I trace how Kane brings meat into an economy of exchange, hospitality, and gift-giving which, while ostensibly driven by care, is nonetheless thoroughly structured by violence.