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Play by Sarah Kane. Directed by James Macdonald.
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A fable of forbidden love for the end of the 20th century from the author of Blasted - a sell-out at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1995
ROYAL COURT THEATRE DOWNSTAIRS previewed 30 April, opened 6 May 1998, closed 30 May 1998
Extracts from the reviews:
"Watching Sarah Kane's Cleansed was one of the most repellent experiences of my theatre-going life. I averted my eyes. I longed to do the indecent thing and leave. I was not prudishly objecting to being force-fed at Kane's theatrical banquet of cruelties and violence. Eyes gouged out, infants strangled, heroines suffocated, serving of dead human flesh for supper, a poker despatched up the rectum are after all familiar ingredients of Shakespearian and Jacobean drama. But in 100 minutes of suffering-time Cleansed quite indiscriminately bombards you with a gross pageant of horrors and suffering... Miss Kane's trite visions of love as suffering, exaltation and escape keep being overwhelmed by the motiveless intrusion of violence. James Macdonald's well-acted production has the sumptuous, camp chic of James Bond films. The leather costumes are pure bad taste. The stylised violence - balloons bursting with paint when bodies are shot, or red ribbons for severed limbs - makes depravity look elegant rather than wicked. Suzan Sylvester as the woman obliged to fall in love with her dead brother and to change sex keeps a grace which this rancid play does not." Nicholas de Jongh, The London Evening Standard
"Three years ago Sarah Kane upset the squeamish with Blasted, a futuristic piece set in a war-torn Leeds where gouging out eyes and devouring dead babies were the moral norms. She is not likely to convert her foes with Cleansed, which is less coherent and, despite its nice sanitary title, almost uglier. Think of the sadistic tortures of Kafka's Penal Colony and the bureaucratic cruelties of Pinter's Hothouse; stir in the surreal violence of Bond's Early Morning; and you'll have the rough idea... if Macdonald's production were more understated we might find it easier to buy Kane's conclusion, which is that a certain tenderness survives in the human jungle. But that would be to distort her vision, which is unforgiving to the point of implacability. She is not the gloating opportunist that some reviewers of Blasted thought; she has, I feel, no less integrity than Pinter or Bond; but, God knows, I would hate to live in her head." Benedict Nightingale, The Times
"You may remember the howls of critical anguish that surrounded Sarah Kane's first play, Blasted. That was a deeply serious attempt to imagine the horrors of Bosnia breaking through the television screen into your sitting room. Shock and horror tactics in theatre have an honourable tradition from the Greeks and the Jacobeans through to Edward Bond. Kane may want to be a Bad Girl, but she also shows enormous promise. In Cleansed, she imagines an almost abstract university of life where love has been expunged from the curriculum. We hear a child singing The Beetles' Things We Said Today as the mutilated boy tries to dance his love. The bully cuts off his feet. The girl disco-dances into her dead brother and becomes her love. There is blood, nudity and despair. There is also beauty, tenderness and stoicism. Suzan Sylvester and Martin Marquez are exceptionally fine as the Viola and Sebastian of the asylum. And James Macdonald's eloquent production has some of the most extraordinary hydraulic designs (by Jemmy Herbert) on the London stage." Michael Coveney, The Daily Mail
"Sarah Kane made the splashiest dramatic debut in recent memory with her play Blasted at the Royal Court in 1995... Now comes Cleansed which the Court believes is important enough to receive its premiere on the main stage. Indeed lan Rickson, the theatre's usually discerning new artistic director, insists that Kane is "a true poet of the theatre". She strikes me, though, as being a writer arrested in a permanent state of doomy adolescence. She was once a born-again Christian and subsequently lost her faith, which is perhaps all the explanation one needs for her obsessively apocalyptic view of the world. You feel her work owes much more to clinical depression than it does to real artistic vision... A story of love surviving terrible cruelty ought to be moving, but Kane entirely fails to touch the heart. Though the cast do their best, her one-dimensional characters seem like little more than shadows in an' unhealthy imagination, while the writing has a dreary, linguistically impoverished flatness. The whole play is also up to its ears in debt to Edward Bond and, especially, Howard Barker. Having been lumbered with a hummer, James Macdonald does at least direct with panache, helped by Jeremy Herbert's ingenious designs. There are some fine stage effects and Macdonald handles the violence with stylised tact. The cast miraculously contrive to retain their dignity, with particularly heroic work from Suzan Sylvester, recipient of the startlingly realistic genital transplant, and poor James Cunningham, who has lost every extremity by the end. Sarah Kane clearly believes that she is a serious writer with important things to say. What saddens me is that the Royal Court encourages her in this delusion, in what looks like a cynical attempt to retain its reputation for controversial, cutting-edge theatre. In fact, the play is a deadly, entirely predictable bore." Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph |
