Let's Talk About Sets: Alex Eales on Cleansed

One of the challenges of designing Cleansed is people’s preconceived idea of what the play is about. Cleansed is comprised of twenty short scenes and, famously, it has a series of almost impossible stage directions: Tinker produces a large pair of scissors and cuts off Carl’s tongue or A sunflower bursts through the floor and grows above their heads or There are two rats, one chewing at Grace’s wounds… and other more or less extreme events.

One of the earliest things Katie Mitchell (the director) and I spoke about was how we could cohere the fragmented structure into one continuous performance. We wanted to avoid the play becoming a series of stage directions with scene changes between each moment, which might end up rather repetitive. In addition to this, we had to make some decisions about the meaning behind each stage direction, whether it was appropriate in our budget and if we could stage it properly without compromise. Why is it raining in one scene? Why is there automatic gunfire in another? What is the significance of the rats? The writing does not imply a naturalistic reason but rather a symbolic or emotional one. As much as we could, we tried to deliver what Sarah Kane had written, and only adjusted moments if we could not deliver the stage direction clearly or it felt incongruous to the meaning of the scene.

Designing Cleansed started with the world within which the action of the play can exist. The script describes each scene happening in different rooms at an unnamed university, however the rooms have been re-appropriated into something more like a psychiatric hospital or concentration camp. I started researching lunatic asylums and abandoned educational institutions from the last century. The events that happen within these rooms also lead us away from the sense that this is normality. The reality of the piece functions more like a dream than real life. As in dreams, the place where these things happen seems real but maybe people are glued to the spot and can’t move, or all of their teeth fall out. Katie and I agreed that a dream-like environment would best support the text and allow us to deliver the tricky requirements in the writing. The dream world also allow us to thread each scene through to the next, eliminating the need to stop at the end of each scene and re-start at the beginning of the next.

The physical architecture was based on classical rules of composition and the play can be seen as a series of painterly images. Decisions were made compositionally, so that the atrocities that happen in each scene have the quality of paintings of biblical violence and the space reflects that. The architecture and details of my designs cumulatively inform the audience of the time and place the play happens. I hope that the design of Cleansed reflects that ethos and delivers a clear and concise environment.

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By Alex Eales

Cleansed runs at the National Theatre until 5 May.

More information about Alex Eales’s designs can be found at www.alexeales.co.uk