Cleansed at the Almeida Theatre – review

If I hadn’t been reviewing the show, there’s a strong chance I would have left halfway through. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed is not just a violent expression of a grim worldview, but a challenge to the audience: How much can you take? As proven by my completed attendance for the full 100 minutes, I can take it, but I’m not sure that I want to.

An assortment of young adults, their morale at various stages of broken, live under the tyrannous rule of the Tinker, a man who sniffs out any sign of hope, any moment of wholesomeness, and destroys it with violence.

In the opening scene, a young man is injected, by choice, directly in the eyeball, and I later come back to this moment, feeling ridiculous that I thought this would be the worst of it. Limbs chopped, tongues cut, raped with metal poles. Kane also points out that the more seemingly banal acts can be as damaging to the spirit: cruel words, psychological games, forced eating, and prohibited education.

But it’s not as simple as inflicted cruelty. Kane seems to be saying that nothing is good; no thought is pure. Post incestuous coitus, for example, the related couple watch dreamily as a flower grows. This is perhaps the hardest to stomach: the twisting of conventional ethics, of something beautiful finding root in something so distastefully transgressive.

Madeleine Girling’s design is deceptively sophisticated: a room in what appears to be an abandoned hospital is backed by a corridor, which serves as a kind of blood-stained magician’s cape. Together with Sam Lyon-Behan’s slick fight direction and some incredible choreography, the corridor works as a kind of conveyor belt of violence and action.

Given the staging remains the same for much of the play – and when it does finally change, it’s only to add rather than swap – lighting designer Lee Curran and George Dennis work together to create various new spaces, sometimes terrifying, occasionally warm and comforting, in contrast to whatever heinous thing is about to happen.

Performances are faultless; deeply unsettling and heartrending in equal measure, except Leo Bill’s Tinker, who is only the former.

It brings to mind William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, except Burroughs’ was an experiment: What would the world be if you took away all love? Whereas Kane seems to suggest that while love might exist in the world, it fails.

After poor attendance of the play’s premiere run in 1998, Kane commented, “Most good plays are only really liked in retrospect”. I’m not sure anyone could say they “liked” Cleansed, but it is unarguably powerful, an embittered, howling manifesto of a world unsalvageable.