To recommend Sarah Kane’s horrifically violent play would be like recommending a public execution. Set notionally – laughably, even – in a university, the place could be any institution populated by people who have broken no law yet are compelled to live under tyranny.
One victim, the delicate Carl (Luke Cinque-White) is punished more brutally than any other. His crime is his capacity to feel and offer love to a fellow inmate. Each transgression results in an excruciating amputation by the university’s enforcer Tinker, played by a Leo Bill, like a caretaker looking forward to retirement.
There is incest too, though it is imagined. Grace (Pearl Chanda) has voluntarily entered the building to look for her brother Graham (Jack Riddiford), who Tinker murdered with his usual glum resolve.
There will be those who see the play as torture porn. I don’t blame them. The barbarity is relentless. Yet I defended the work, the third of Kane’s five plays – while not opposing those who are against it, a body of opinion that includes many theatre critics – when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1995.
Few critics were more damning than The Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker, who described Kane’s play as “this disgusting feast of filth”. And yes, it is thought that is it is no coincidence that Kane chose the name for her torturer. Four years later Kane killed herself at the age of 28, hours after finishing her final work 4:48 Psychosis.
Yet within Cleansed there exists tenderness. It reveals how the human spirit can survive merciless and seemingly endless torment. I’d also argue that knowledge of this phenomenon is embedded in Jewish experience and offers a kind refuge from the shock of Kane’s unflinching vision. If I have a gripe about Rebecca Frecknall’s production, it is that it flinches where Kane doesn’t.
Katie Mitchell’s 2016 production at the National Theatre heralded each amputation with an industrial klaxon after a which a great, bone-macerating machine was wheeled onto the stage. Frecknall does it with plastic bags bound tightly around Carl’s hands and feet. I’m not arguing for it to be more graphic, but Kane’s stage direction is for literal violence. Using theatrical devices seems pointless.
You will still want to look away. However, a little of that inherited Jewish knowledge, handed down like a compulsory heirloom, might help some to cope. “Ah yes,” it whispers as love survives the Gestapo levels of barbarity, “we know there is truth here.” But even that is not a recommendation.
Cleansed
AlmeidaTheatre
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