I complained in March that Sarah Kane was performed everywhere except Britain. Now, Oxford Stage Company comes up with the first London showing of Kane's Cleansed since its 1998 premiere. But, while it's absolutely right audiences should judge for themselves, I still find this a difficult play to love; it's a series of nightmarish tableaux that brooks no moral argument.
In Sean Holmes's viscerally powerful production strange images of violence loom out of the Arcola's pillared darkness. Tinker, the Torquemada-like figure who runs a nameless institution for social dissidents, injects heroin into an addict's eye, lops off the limbs of a recalcitrant homosexual, force-feeds a confused self-improver with chocolates. But Kane suggests that, even in a world of state-sanctioned cruelty, love can still flourish. Grace, the incarcerated heroine, not only dreams of incest with her dead brother but shares a final moment of epiphany with a dismembered fellow victim.
As an admirer of Buchner, Kane adopts his expressionist vision without his accompanying naturalism. There is a vagueness about Tinker's chamber of horrors. If the state is a mechanism of licensed cruelty, it seems almost recklessly optimistic to imply that its dictatorial power can be countered by redemptive love. Kane accepts state violence as a given without showing how we can change it.
Holmes's production, atmospherically lit by Charles Balfour, yields strong images and performances. Paul Brennen's sadistic Tinker seems both perpetrator of violence and its victim. Polly Frame's cross-dressing, ultimately sex-mutating Grace remarkably suggests the fusion of female and male in one body. And Craig Gazey is extremely touching as a young boy whose aspirations to literacy and numeracy are viciously thwarted. Holmes makes a stunning physical impact without reconciling me to Kane's vision.
· Until December 3. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
