Cleansed is still the most harrowing play you’ll ever see
Cleansed | Almeida | ★★★★☆
There’s a hint at what you’re in for with Cleansed when the Almeida staff tape over everyone’s phone on the way in to prevent any photography; there is a lot of nudity in this play, and none of it is the good kind.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Sarah Kane’s play, first performed in 1998, a year before her suicide, is how little its venom has dissipated over the years. It takes place in a peeling psychiatric ward lifted directly from the darkest corners of your subconscious, a place familiar from countless horror movies and video games. It’s a horrible, claustrophobic little place where people are sent to be “cleansed” of their so-called sins. There’s a woman who checks in after collecting the clothes of her heroin-addict brother – with whom she’s in love – who overdosed there some time earlier.
She joins a gay couple undergoing some kind of homosexuality deprogramming, forced to betray one another over and over again, and a man called Robin, whose crime appears to be his childlike innocence.
They are presided over by a man called Tinker, a “doctor” whose methods include rape, forced eating, injections into the eye, dismemberment, elinguation (the cutting out of one’s tongue), home-brew medical procedures and extremely graphic beatings. It is… a lot. I’m not sure there’s a mainstream play that matches Cleansed for pure shock value, for its unflinching, almost gleeful depiction of violence and torture and humiliation.
Cleansed: Brutal but not hopeless
It is not a hopeless play, however: indeed, it’s intensely interested in the slivers of beauty that can be found amid the unimaginable horrors of the world, whether it’s a flower growing through the tiles of a psych ward or the kind words of a fellow survivor.
This version is more stylised than the production I saw a decade ago at the National Theatre (back then five people fainted and 40 walked out during the preview shows alone). Director Rebecca Frecknall injects some real visual flair: characters dance in slow motion during scene changes; stark red and orange lights cut through the drab green and beige of the institute; there’s brilliant use of The Kinks’ Days, which I fear may have forever tainted that song for me. It also feels less literal than other productions, less like the characters are inmates in this sick prison than they are captives in their own minds.
This is helped by some brilliant acting. I hate it when actors are described as “brave” but my god these actors are brave, chasing Kane’s text into the gutter and beyond. When they emerged to take a bow, there were no smiles – it’s harrowing enough to watch; I dread to think what it’s like to inhabit.
You could argue that Cleansed isn’t doing anything the Greeks weren’t doing almost 3,000 years ago (indeed, Kane actively riffs on Greek theatre’s maximalist violence throughout her work) – but seeing it unfurl in such a recognisable space to such recognisable people makes it a very different proposition.
In no possible world could this be thought of as a fun night at the theatre. But not everything is supposed to be fun, and Kane’s work certainly provokes a response – there were times I felt physically sick. At others, I felt a wave of relief (mostly when it was over). You wouldn’t want to do it every night but once a decade or so… there’s nothing quite like it.
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