In January 1995 Blasted catapulted Sarah Kane from being a complete unknown to national notoriety:  the Royal Court production was greeted with almost universal condemnation from the critics, while others understood that the play was 'a work of dense metaphor - but also of very concrete reality' (Mark Ravenhill). Harold Pinter said she was 'facing something actual and true and ugly and painful.'  In response to the horrors of genocide in Bosnia, Blasted 'changed reality because it changed the means we have of understanding ourselves' (Edward Bond). The play opens in an expensive hotel room in Leeds and transforms through the course of an act of rape into darker and darker realities until we see how our primal nature drives us towards atrocities on a larger scale.