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- [01:25]
Mickey Jo
Ordinarily, I would be of the opinion that anything that can earn a one star review and a five star review from two separate major publications on its opening night is essential viewing, if only so that you can go and decide for yourself and see where your opinion falls within that very broad spectrum of responses. However, this is a play you should only really see if you feel like you can, with audience members losing consciousness as well as walking out of the auditorium during its uninterrupted one act runtime time. And we've seen a little of that recently with shocking plays including A Little Life and the Years. However, Cleansed by Sarah Kane takes that to a completely new level and is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to watch on stage, so I would advise caution before going to see it for yourself, but likewise, I will advise caution before listening to what I have to say about it. Yes, this is a content advisory for this very review. In order to tell you about this play, I am going to have to detail a handful of its shocking acts as well as its themes, the nature of which are both graphic and harrowing. If listening to me describe these is going to prove adversely affecting for you, then I would discourage you from listening any further. Come back to me when I'm talking about a Different show for now, though, for those of you who have seen it for yourself, perhaps with this or a different production, or would just like to hear me talk about it. Let's continue discussing Sarah Kane's Cleansed in a new production at the Almeida. So for everybody who's still here. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel, or hello to those of you listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo. I'm obsessed with all things theatre, theatre, including difficult watches such as these. This is a very timely reminder of the capabilities of theatre to really challenge and unsettle us. And often, when those words are said, it's not with plays like these in mind. In your face theatre, the likes of which was pioneered in the 1990s by playwrights including Sarah Kane, is one thing, but traumatic theatre, theatre of cruelty, this Artodian premise is an entirely different thing. And as it turns out, the combination of the two can prove quite disturbing. Now, I want to tell you how I responded to this play. I want to talk about its themes, its performances. I want to talk about this new production staged by Rebecca Frecknell, the associate director of the Almeida. But given the nature of this play, I'm particularly curious to hear all of your thoughts in the comments section as well. If you have seen this, if you have seen a prior production, let me know about your history with the play and what you make of it. And as always, if you enjoy listening to my thoughts and would like to hear more of my reviews, then there are many more to find wherever you're seeing my face or hearing my voice. And there are also many more coming soon. Make sure to subscribe here on YouTube, follow me on podcast platforms or sign up to my free weekly Substack newsletter at the link in the description. For now, though, let us talk about Cleansed. So really, everything ought to be reviewed in context, but particularly a play like Cleansed. And I think it is reductive to view Sarah Kane's work simply through the lens of her own mental illness, and to attribute the deconstruction of traditional playwriting structure that she engaged in as a product of depression or psychosis and, you know, the adverse mental health that ultimately ended her life. And while plays like Cleansed feel intensely personal, the way in which we tend to talk about Sarah Kane's writing, the way in which it is often discussed, has always left me a little uneasy. This because the shocking contents of plays like Cleansed or Blasted has often become the source of public debate. Weaponized in order to sell newspapers and preventing criticism and audience members alike from really engaging with the meaning behind the extraordinary acts of violence taking place on these stages. It's interesting as well how often an honest response to the work and its themes is preempted by a question of why would we even want to see this in the first place? Why would anybody even want to write this? While we're often saying something allegorically through horror, torturous cruelty such as this, and, you know, nightmarish narratives such as these also represent an element of the human experience. And we turn to so many playwrights for their perspectives on life and love. And in a truly warped way, this is Sarah Kane's. If this is the way in which somebody sees the world, then my job is to try and see it through those eyes and gain some sense of understanding. It's not my job to tell them that they're looking at it wrong. Now, in addition to all of that, Sarah Kane's legacy is that of a tradition defying playwright whose work is hugely studied and occasionally seen, produced less than perhaps it might be, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat unruly, not just in its content, but also in its structure, in this sort of abstract, poetic nature of much of the writing. In a play like 448 psychosis, what's actually on the page requires some interpretation and division between the company, because it's not particularly prescribed even between one character or the next. In a play like Cleansed, it's how you stage some of the more fantastical elements, as well as how literally and viscerally you decide to depict these torturous acts of barbarism. And the play first debuted in the late 1990s at the Royal Court Downstairs. It was subsequently revived in a major production at the National Theatre a decade ago. It is now back as the final production that Rebecca Frecknell will direct at the Young Vic as its associate director. Now, a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit at an event and listen to Rebecca Frecknell discuss her relationship with this and the work of Sarah Kane. And having read it some years, described an ongoing relationship with Cleansed in particular, and an eagerness to stage it. And the reason why it's happening at this particular moment is because outgoing artistic director Rupert Gold needed her to direct something. She thought she'd already directed her final show at the Almeida and she'd made peace with that. However, he enticed her into one final production by saying, well, if you want, you could do Cleansed, and now here we are. So Then, with one final reminder that the discussion of this play is not for the faint of heart, let me carry on and tell you about this play and this production.
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Mickey Jo
Cleansed unfolds over about 20 separated scenes, following a handful of seemingly disjointed narratives afforded a great sense of connectivity in this production, there is some initial ambiguity of both character and location in its introductory moments. After a few scenes of exposition, we eventually, at about the 20 minute mark, arrive at some, as I said, fairly harrowing scenes of violence and torture. Initially, in the absence of an understanding of exactly what it is that we're looking at, what we perceive is various acts of senseless cruelty taking place on a set designed by Madeline Girling, consisting of a long, shallow room and a similarly sized corridor behind it, allowing for the disappearance and reemergence of various characters not only through two doorways at the outer edges of the playing space, but also beneath this horizontal division. And I'm just going to jump right in here with the descriptions to give you a sense of it. If you find the notion of someone being injected in the eye with a needle to be, you know, where you draw the line, then you're going to have challenges with this very, very quickly. If you can pass that hurdle, then additional tests for the strength of your constitution are coming soon enough. With one character being forced by what initially looks like hypnosis or telekinesis. What I sort of subsequently came to understand was probably the presence of other characters in this facility that we're looking at who simply aren't represented. In Version, we are seeing one sort of barbaric, sadistic doctor, and we aren't visualizing all of the staff working alongside him. So when we see a character seemingly being thrown against a wall, it's just that we aren't seeing the people around him, but we meet a character whose head is being repeatedly smashed into a wall as we see a little amount of blood beginning to spray. That, however, is not nearly as bad as the cutting out of his tongue with a pair of scissors that follows shortly afterwards. I warned you. I warned you all. And it isn't just the acts themselves. It's the way in which they are performed and the way in which they are received. And make no mistake, this kind of torture isn't a brief, alienated moment within the duration this recurs and sort of worsens as we go through the thing, but that they are performed with such chilling, uncompromising, and unflinching everyday detachment, and that they elicit such naturalistic and believable screams of agonizing terror is the really difficult thing, as is just how much we see of it. The effects throughout this production are pretty extraordinary. And there is the occasional moment when you can infer how something is being achieved. But there are an awful lot of things that you could scrutinize should you wish to. And you have to imagine a lot of people are kind of half squinting at this or watching it through their hands, and you would still be convinced of the atrocity and realism of the them. This largely because the clever use of rigging and stage blood and a little bit of sleight of hand and presumably a lot of very careful prop work. All of this is accompanied by the stark vulnerability of full frontal nudity, as well as what I perceive to be some moments of legitimate necessary discomfort. Unclear to me whether Stuart Thompson is actually forced to eat an entire box of chocolates, which sounds not nearly as horrifying as it is. It's the pace at which it happens and the way in which he responds to this. Almost all of this is sold by the actors upon whom it is inflicted. And their reactions to it prove genuinely heartbreaking, as is the tendency of the play to afford us a handful of moments of relief. And if not the entire release of the tension that has been built and maintained, then these little pockets of slight joy, which only really serve to by their juxtaposition, make the quickly following scene of punishment all the more agonizing. And I appreciate right now I'm only really describing the violence and the trauma of it all, which is an awful lot of this play. But there is more to it as well. What we perceive here is some sort of a medical facility, perhaps connected to the treatment of mental health. It is described in the history of the play as a former university building. There isn't too much in the design to overtly tether it to that here. Nor is there much in the design of it, nor the costuming of Tinker, played by Leo Bill, that suggests a place of legitimate medical treatment. But patients include a young woman named Grace, who admits herself while dealing with income incapacitating grief after the death of her brother. A young man named Robin, who ends up wearing Grace's clothes after she abruptly orders him to strip off everything that he is wearing when she finds out that these are her brother's clothes that were donated to him. Newly a patient of the sadistic Tinker, Grace begins to see visions of her late brother Graham, and their emotionally intense reunion begins to suggest a pseudo incestuous relationship. There is also a Gay couple named Carl and Rob, who we first meet outside of this world, exchange changing rings with disparate levels of enthusiasm, discussing how legitimately they might be able to promise ongoing fidelity and love to one another, two concepts that will be tested deliberately, it seems, once they find themselves undergoing torturous treatments at the hands of Tinker. And the connection between these characters are the suggestions of queer identity, whether that is an overt same sex relationship, whether it is cross dressing, whether it is what you can either choose to read as the notion of forbidden love between siblings, or some kind of a deeper layered trans allegory. Mixed up in all of this as well is an unnamed woman played by Lizzie Connolly, who is encountered as a sort of red light district era sex worker, viewed predominantly by Tinker through a timed out window surrounded by neon lighting. The same neon lighting subsequently surrounds the entire stage, prompting the audience perhaps to consider whether what we're doing is also its own act of voyeurism. This is part of a blisteringly impactful lighting design by Leigh Curran, which is as convincing in its moments of overwhelming, alarming brightness as its total darkness. The shift from reluctant joy to imminent danger to bleak, pain to lust is all exemplified through these changes in colorful lighting, so much of which is realized within the space rather than externally, under the fantastic and ever thoughtful direction of Rebecca Frecknell. The other key ingredient when trying to instill tension as well as to deliver this kind of emblematic in your face theater and theater of cruelty is the use of sound design. And there are unsettling soundscapes running throughout the auditorium prior to the beginning of the play. There's also an incredibly interesting use of sort of demented recurring music, as well as these rhythmic droning bass sounds, which have a sort of a professional connotation, like a really old fashioned printer, again reinforcing the casual brutality of the whole thing. Someone isn't having their throat slit open as we listen to grand operatic music like it's the Godfather. They're having their throat slit open as we're hearing something incredib mundane, all the more sinister in theatre, which is designed and empowered to make you uncomfortable, contradicted by a series of deliberately false, almost betraying cliche Hollywood endings. The thing is, is that Rebecca Fechtel, who is best known perhaps for her work reviving the plays of Tennessee Williams, as well as having directed the ongoing Olivier Award winning West End revival of the musical Cabaret, is a really great fit for the work of Sarah Kane because there is such ambiguity in her work. It is so abstract. But there is real intentional meaning in there. And Frecknell has always been so good at sort of splaying the pages of a theatrical work and allowing you to perceive it layer by layer and not only begin to infer a sense of meaning, but also be delivered a sense of her clear point of view of a text at the same time. And there are two challenges in there, especially with a play like Cleansed, interrogating it sufficiently to decipher your own point of view. You know, having something to say about this material and having a perspective on it, but then delivering that coherently to an audience. And that's what thought this really did in terms of what Cleansed had to say about joy and about life and about love. Let's carry on talking about this production, but particularly about its theme.
- [16:15]
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- [16:52]
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- [17:30]
Mickey Jo
Now, when we are met with a sketchy, seemingly disreputable hospital environment and a clearly sadistic doctor, our natural inclination as an audience is to ask questions and to try and figure out exactly what's going on. And we might expect some kind of a Stranger Things esque exploration of what exactly is happening here. But that is altogether not the purpose of this play. Likewise, every time I see a Sarah Kane play, I am quickly met with a sensation that I sort of wish that I was reading it instead, because I want the time to be able to go over it and decipher it and interrogate it really for myself. But I also don't know if it's because it's an uncomfortable watch. And a part of me wants to kind of subconsciously spare myself from having to actually experience it in such a visceral, exposing way. So while watching this play and engaging with it as fully as I could, eyes wide open, I made about six pages of slightly incoherent notes. My earliest read on what this was meant to be representing was some kind of skewering of mental health treatment and mental health professionals. A little later on, when we saw the gay couple being tortured after that exchange that they'd had prior to this, I wondered whether this was representative of torture and pain as a test of life. Loves, platitudes, and that's really what they go through by the end of it. You know, they say to each other at the beginning, or at least one says to the other, I will never betray you. I will always love you. And the other discourages him from saying this, saying, you know, don't say things that you can't mean. I love you now. I will do my best not to betray you now. They find themselves in this facility together where they are not only tortured, but they are consistently asked, ought I apply this torture to you, you or to your partner? And the extent to which they are able to not betray one another, the strength that they have to spare each other pain by enduring it personally, is cruelly tested. This in an environment which, like I said, seems to be specifically enacting queerphobic punishment. And not that I think that there is one right answer, but this perhaps is beginning to circle the truth of the thing, because it is allegorical. And I was wondering whether this was, like I mentioned before, the way in which Sarah Kane sees the world and her perspective on love. Is this what she thinks love can feel like or has the capacity to feel like? With this provocative piece of theatre provoking the question, does love necessitate a certain quantity of suffering? Does love oblige you to absorb all of this pain on behalf of the person that you care for? Or even bigger and sort of sadder than that, that is love itself in some figurative sense, its own damaging and mutilating act of violence. The answer that we'd like to give to that question is, no, of course not. But the world is difficult and complicated and can be seen in many different ways. Because while love and longing is the pockets of happiness glimpsed within the play, it can also be unrequited. It can also be experienced through a filter of grief. It can also be torturous, it can be toxic, it can make you feel perceived and sexualized, like the sex worker dancing inside of the window. It can be codependent, it can be messy. It can be all of these things. Though we see it realized literally in this play. There is more than one sense in which you can draw blood from somebody. And as we grow more and more accustomed to this. And we sort of redefine our baseline understanding of pain and damage, we also wonder, is this how she saw the world as well, with people crawling around in uncontrollable pain and suffering. At which point it feels pertinent to share with you. The play is said to have been inspired by a quote from a philosopher who said that being in love is like being in Auschwitz. In other words, affirming all of those ideas about this being an investigation into the challenging nature of love. But also there is some deliberate comparison with. With that kind of a facility, with the queerphobic torture that I described. The rejection of identities and individuals and relationships perceived as other. There are also some other nods to it as well. There are moments when books have to be burned with fire on stage in a bucket. So there is some clue there as to what we're talking about. And she was in multiple plays, really writing about war and human atrocities. And true enough, the words I love you whenever we encounter them in this play. Play are rarely met without complication. They never come cleanly. As the set on which they are spoken grows more and more damaged and bloodied and littered by the impact of these traumatizing circumstances. The damage done, the mess left behind, the blood stained on the walls, all is left. All sort of begins to adorn the playing space. And grow cumulatively like open wounds on the stage. And having sat there and tried to figure this out. And some decades later, place myself within the mind of Sarah Kane. I don't necessarily know if trying to get it is the most productive use of one's time. I also think a lot about what the real intention was here. What the impact of this play was supposed to be. And the notion of artaud and theatre of cruelty is to bypass an intellectual response by way of. Of shock value. And to really elicit an immediate emotional, knee jerk reaction from an often unprepared audience. And shocked I certainly was. I was also struck by its cruelty, by its pain, by its visceral depictions of torture. But as well as all of that about what it has to say about human resilience, about yearning, about the sort of haphazard, fleeting, desperate joy that it depicted in between moments of utter temporal terror.
- [23:36]
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- [24:06]
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- [24:42]
Mickey Jo
I have a few more final thoughts I'd like to share with you that I haven't been able to structure particularly neatly, so I will share them here. I thought the performances were brilliantly well directed, thoroughly cohesive. Leo Bill as Tinker began to elicit this sort of Pavlovian response from us every time he would casually enter and close a door behind himself. Never like a menacing villain, always like someone at a regular pace going about their daily work. Only his work happened to be barbarism. Pearl Chander as Grace managed this brilliant connection with Jack Riddiford as Graham, and she in particular was giving an incredibly strong performance, one that effortlessly seems to understand Sarah Kane's work, the vulnerability that she achieved and the way that she could be so invested and so present and then utterly detached moments later. Stuart Thomps was hugely affecting in his wide eyed naivety and innocence as Robin and Luke Sink White, incredibly impressive in his physicality as he bore the brunt of the play's acts of torture. There's something of a coup de theatre set reveal that shifts the whole thing during the play and thereafter contrasts this cold and clinical environment with one of utter vivid and vibrant warmth which simultaneously manages to be a recognizable metaphor for death. Listen, I told you Rebecca Frecknell layers. She's giving you layers. The transitions are utterly blood pumping. The shape that it begins to find, the sense of these strands coming together in order to articulate something. It's still ambiguous. It's still abstract, but as it nears the end, there is this real sense of meaningful culmination that it finds. And between the post coital conversation that the unnamed woman has with Tinker when she grants his sexual desires and the non consensual surgery that Tinker performs on Grace remedy her emotional dysphoria, there is even the possibility that this whole thing amounts to some kind of a 1990s trans allegory. I don't know if the world is ready to have that conversation. I'm also not suggesting that that is the secret right answer behind all of this, but there is certainly a viable school of thought. It is certainly, I think, a way of interpreting this. And there are a lot of different parts of it that begin to fall into place. Meanwhile, as soon as I stop having nightmares about some of the more explicit visuals from the play, the thing that's going to stay with me enduring fascination about what it is that it is designed to achieve from Sarah Kane's perspective, as well as from Rebecca Frecknells, what is it that we are meant to take away from this? What is the experience meant to look like? So many people define their evening at the theater by whether or not they enjoyed themselves. And this is not a piece of art that is created in order that one might enjoy oneself. And you know, just when you think you've got it all figured out, something contradicts that. Because for all of its horrifying naturally, there are moments that remind us that what we're looking at is theatrical. As with a previous revival of this, the actors, though fully nude, are still wearing mic belts. And in addition to its senseless graphic violence, this balance of the real and the artificial, the visceral and the fantastical, is also very interesting. Provocatively interesting. Needless to say, I'm going to be thinking about cleansed for some time. I do think, think for a full and complete theatrical education, particularly if you are a playwright, this is very important viewing. But I would caution you hugely, there are precious few people in my life who I necessarily think ought to see this play or who I think would be able to withstand this play. So I think it's important to investigate it a little and be very honest with yourself about whether or not seeing this is a good idea for you and whether you're going to be able to endure it. Perhaps you've been able to gain some kind of a helpful insight from my muddled thoughts. I hope that they have been interesting to you. I am going to continue to process this in the days to come. I dare say I will have more realizations about it, but I also wanted to share with you this very candid, immediate reaction to something that gives you an awful lot to think about. If you have seen Cleansed already at the Almeida or elsewhere, please let me know what you thought in the comments section down below. And as always, thank you for listening to my review. If you'd like to hear more of them, you can find them on YouTube, on podcast platform platforms, or via my weekly substack email newsletter. I will be back reviewing another piece of theatre very soon, but until I do, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe At Edward Jones we believe Rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your Rich Edward Jones member
- [29:38]
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