Few plays unite cast and audience in mutual struggle like Sarah Kane's Cleansed. Many consider it unstageable: stage directions demand a tongue be cut out, rats carry off severed limbs, and a lot of blood. The last London production in 2016 saw audience members throwing up and fainting in the stalls.
Rebecca Frecknell's new production dials back the gore. Rather than staging the violence outright, she translates it into expressionism-tinged movement: sadomasochism is rendered through blunt choreography rather than blood-drenched spectacle. Bodies slump and roll as if marionettes as they are beaten up and lumbered away by invisible goons. Movement as a means of storytelling is Frecknell’s calling card, and the blend of beauty and violence feels seamlessly true to Kane.
Born from the in-yer-face movement of the nineties, Cleansed shares its DNA with the confrontational, boundary-shoving nastiness of the YBAs. But Frecknall’s flourishes alter its distinctly nineties DNA into something reflecting our world. The prominence of movement modifies the emotional fulcrum from grotesque body horror deeper toward the ephemeral and fleeting love and longing underneath. This Cleansed speaks to an audience fluent in the language of mental health, rather than one accustomed to art that prides itself on shock value.
But Cleansed’s problems remain unconquerable.
At an unnamed facility, Leo Bill’s Tinker tortures victims whose crime, it seems, is sexual deviance: gay lovers Carl and Rod, and Grace, who harboured an incestuous love for her dead twin, Graham, and eventually has a sex change so that she can become him. Bill’s Tinker lumbers, lurks, and barks like an animal, all coiled menace. George Dennis’ sound design, rumbling static snarls, dials up the sense of terror. There are hints of a larger dystopia beyond the facilities’ liminal beige walls, but it is for us to work to fill in the narrative gaps. Difficult whilst trying to keep our dinners down. The cast work overtime writing on the floor like fish choking out of water. Stuart Thompson's Robin is the standout: his naïve openness, in a character implied to possibly have a learning disability, stands in stark contrast to the surrounding sadism.
Moments of relief shine through the cracks: the more the characters suffer, the more tender their expression of love becomes. When Rod's hands are cut off, he dances instead, a field of daffodils rising from the stage to let him frolic in. But the play's ambiguity blocks it from developing. Images are tacked onto stage and left to linger. Tinker develops strained feelings for a woman in a Peep Show booth, also named Grace. Without context to ground it, the violence will always feel overcooked, and the beauty on the other side of it unanchored and uneasy.
Cleansed plays at The Almeida until 29 August
Photo Credits: Marc Brenner
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