A great dish poorly served
The Almeida Theatre
Cleansed is a play containing a lot of scenes of torture. In fact, if you see it, you might feel you’ve been tortured yourself, at least mentally. The trigger warnings issued by The Almeida Theatre read like a litany of everything that could possibly cause upset: Torture, murder and violence, including sexual violence, Depictions of sex and nudity, Drug abuse, Depictions of suicide, Homophobic language, Misogynistic language, Blood.
Oh yes, there’s a lot of Kensington Gore or whoever makes stage blood these days. And no explanation of why, where or who. But this is a serious work by a talented playwright, not out to shock for the sake of it. Sarah Kane, who sadly committed suicide a few years after writing it, claimed that Cleansed could only be done in a theatre with no mediating by TV or film censors. It’s just them on stage and us in the audience. Except, thirty years on, I doubt any of the incidents that take place on this stage would be censored in an 18 certificate film. Ironically, this production’s director Rebecca Frecknall has censored it quite a bit.
Nevertheless it is still more potent as theatre than it would be on screen because we are present in the same space as the actors, who use their own voices and bodies, to communicate directly with our senses to stir our imagination. And the power of imagination is where theatre scores every time. This is especially so when stimulated by Sarah Kane’s beautifully constructed play and spare, lyrical writing.
‘Cleansing’ has a specific meaning in religions, particularly the Catholic one, where immorality needs to be cleansed. Also, we have witnessed too often in our own lifetimes attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’. Only four years prior to the premiere of Cleansed, the Rwandan Civil War had taken place, in which the Hutus in power tried to wipe out Tutsis completely, and murdered up to a million people including fellow Hutus who opposed them. The play takes to the extreme the way moral disapproval or disagreement can spiral into punishment and elimination.
She knew that the torture and, for some, the sexual relationships would be shocking. Her first play Blasted had been described by Daily Mail theatre critic Jack Tinker as a ‘disgusting feast of filth’. Perhaps to counter this way of dismissing her work, she incorporated many echoes of previous respected plays and other works, some of which I’ll mention.
In this play, we meet a number of what you might call transgressive people. There’s a homosexual male couple- and this play was written when there were still restrictions on gay relationships that didn’t apply to heterosexual ones. Even today gay people in the UK don’t feel entirely safe. Elsewhere, including that influencers’ and holidaymakers’ paradise Dubai, same sex relations are illegal. In the UK’s great ally Saudi Arabia, the death penalty still applies.
We meet a brother and sister, Grace and Graham, who are or were in an incestuous relationship, something still illegal in the UK. It didn’t end well for a similar relationship in John Ford’s 17th century play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, nor does it here. The line ‘Love me or kill me’ which Grace says to Graham is a direct lift from it.
Completing the victims, Robin is a submissive transvestite; and a character described as Woman, who performs in a peep show, would seem to be a sex worker.
The play is set in a place said in the script to be a university but it bears all the hallmarks of a secret prison or asylum. Madeleine Girling‘s set is an anonymous grey. If it is a university, this may be a humorous reference to the re-education taking place under the tutelage of a man called Tinker. (Probably not coincidentally the name of the aforementioned theatre critic.) He is played by Leo Bill as a seedy and creepily unpleasant psychopath but with hints of anxiety. He sets about punishing the inmates, for want of a better term. The gay couple promise love to each other, although the heart-on-his-sleeve naive Carl, played by a wide-eyed Luke Cinque-White, is far more certain of his commitment than Parth Thakerar’s Rod who settles for love in the here and now. Thus, it is Carl who undergoes one ‘correction’ after another, his tongue removed to stop him talking about love, his hands to stop him writing about it, and more. That’s a straight steal from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and there’s further scene that echoes the red hot poker fate of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second.
Ms Kane seems to be reminding us that there’s nothing new in the horrors of the world, nor the challenges that authors present to audiences and directors in portraying them. Carl does betray his lover, and here there are echoes of George Orwell’s 1984, another story of the intolerance of totalitarianism.But it is Rod who pays the ultimate price when he realises that his love is deeper than he realised.
Graham, the brother in the incestuous couple, played by Jack Riddiford, dies at the very beginning of the play in a scene that sets the tone for the evening. He begs to end it all and is injected by Tinker with a drug in the eyeball. But he remains on stage as someone in the imagination of his sister, Grace. This is a clue for some that the play is a dream, or series of dreams. It’s a possible interpretation and one that was leaned on in the National Theatre production of 2015, but I don’t think we should give in to our need to understand and explain. There’s no plot in Cleansed, and no need to try to find one. Rather than a dream, Cleansed seems to offer a metaphor, floating outside the confines of narrative or plot, for the price of love, the pain it causes in a loveless world.
The Kinks’ Days is played at one point which I assume is significant for its lyric: ‘though you’re gone, you’re with me every single day, believe me’. We also hear Handel’s Water Music throughout, as if art is neutral in the battle between love and hate. Only Angus MacRae’s repetitive background sound picks up the menace.
Grace, who is played with passion by Pearl Chanda, arrives asking for her dead brother’s clothes. She is introduced to Robin, who is wearing Graham’s clothes. Both are made to strip off and put on each other’s clothes. I think the nudity here is meant to prove she is a woman, since she subsequently identifies with her brother, first seeing her and him as one, and ultimately seeing herself as him. Shades here of Viola’s adoption of her brother Sebastian’s persona in Twelfth Night,, and of Cathy’s exclamation ‘I am Heathcliff’ in Wuthering Heights. Grace is submitted to a number of horrible humiliations, including rape, and eventually a possibly logical but not necessarily welcome surgery.
Robin, played with sensitivity by the Stuart Thompson, falls in love with Grace, and is punished for that. Grace tries to teach him to read. Tinker burns the books. Book burning has gone on through the centuries when authorities have wanted to eliminate opposition, immorality or whole cultures. In the 20th century, the Nazis burned books by Jews and left wing writers.
Love is tested, and characters are punished for their love, but it survives until they die. Flowers, first a sunflower, then a field of daffodils represent a world of beauty.
Tinker himself is susceptible to feeling love, although in his case it manifests as lust which he cannot satisfy. Every so often he makes a peep-show dancer called Woman, played by Lizzie Connolly, perform for him while he masturbates unsuccessfully. She says her name is Grace and eventually takes advantage of his lust by showing him her breasts, saying she loves him, and having sex with him, even though she is probably exploiting his weakness in order to escape.
So, how does Rebecca Frecknall handle the violence? She starts with two explicit events- the injection in the eyeball, and the cutting off of a tongue. This serves to put us on edge as to what might happen next. What does happen is that she moves much more towards suggestion. I do see the difficulty of making torture on stage convincing, without distracting us into thinking ‘how did they do that?’ or ‘that wasn’t very realistic’. What Ms Frecknall does is go all symbolic. So hands and feet are not prosthetics that are actually cut off. Instead, these bodily extremities remain attached and are simply soaked in blood. A castration is so symbolic, you might not even realise what was happening.
The characters are beaten up, hurled against walls, or sexually assaulted. Their attackers are invisible and the actors mime their reactions. Ms Frecknall makes this beautiful and balletic but not particularly upsetting. Rats, a prominent feature in the script, don’t make an appearance although we do hear them.
Maybe Sarah Kane would have approved of the violence becoming beautiful. After all, she went on to say after writing, and even performing in it: ‘I’m past violence – I’m really sick of it.’ She did go on to write less violent plays but my impression is, she intended this play to make us confront the violence in ourselves, not skirt around it. To look squarely at what we as humans are capable of. And what we as individuals fear: the point at which we might cause violence to others, even someone we love, to save ourselves. For me, Rebecca Frecknall’s interpretation toned it down too much.
Cleansed’s representation of evil and the fight for love does lack subtlety. Personally I find the less explicit plays of Harold Pinter more menacing and more effective in their explorations of intolerance and domination. Even so, Cleansed is a well constructed piece of theatre from a playwright who had much insight into our world of hate and love.
Cleansed can be seen at The Almeida Theatre, London, until 29 August 2026. Tickets from https://almeida.co.uk
Paul paid for his ticket.
Read the roundup of other critics’ reviews here
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