Sarah Kane was much berated for the graphic violence in her plays during her lifetime. But critics beware: if you choose to scold playwrights for too much blood-letting and grotesque acts of human cruelty, you would surely have to condemn the Greeks, the Grand Guignol and Shakespeare, too.
Perhaps it’s the in-yer-face nature of Kane’s gore that offends. Certainly in this 1998 play there is no flinching from horror, which comes through acts of sensational cruelty. “Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you,” a character reflects, and his words illustrate themselves with the rapes, mutilations and beatings that follow.
In the case of Cleansed, there are so many ways in which its revival can go wrong, not least because it is notoriously difficult to stage, with directions that require rats to walk away with amputated limbs and gigantic sunflowers to explode from the floor. It is courageous of director Rebecca Frecknall to take it on. The gamble pays off, both in its terrible resonance in our violent world and in her formidable creative accomplishment.
Kane’s first play, Blasted, was a response to the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s and this third play was part of an unrealised trilogy on war. Watching it today, in Frecknall’s potent, moving and fantastically physical production, you are reminded of all the wars before (the cutting out of a character’s tongue and his amputations are reminiscent of Titus Andronicus) and after. A scene in which the Kinks’ song Days is piped into a torture cell, though tender, holds shades of “torture lite” in Guantánamo. Again and again, you are reminded of the photos from Abu Ghraib prison, which captured the humiliation of prisoners by American guards. Israel’s brutality and violence in Gaza echoes.
Set in a university that seemed partly to evoke a concentration camp, Tinker (Leo Bill) is the sole “visible” torturer here (other violence is enacted by unseen agents of brutality). He is ostensibly unimposing, personifying Hannah Arendt’s banality, perhaps. He targets those deemed sexually aberrant, particularly two gay men, Rod (Parth Thakerar) and Carl (Luke Cinque-White), but also terrorises brother and sister Graham (Jack Riddiford) and Grace (Pearl Chanda), manipulates a peep show dancer (Lizzy Connolly) and another prisoner called Robin (Stuart Thompson).
The cast acts out the play’s many difficult scenarios with no awkwardness or melodrama. Tinker’s cruelty is still a puzzle, especially the functionality with which he tortures. Is he motivated by power, a guiding principle or sheer sadism? It is never explained. Still, the message is clear: war and its torture is senseless, cruel and in-yer-face for those close enough to it. There is the sense of an Orwellian system tyrannising those who are deemed aberrant in their gender or sexual identities (the rats, invisible here, are reminiscent of Orwell, too). Madeleine Girling’s stage design has the grimy, institutionalised feel of a hidden hallway in a psychiatric ward or prison. Again, it evokes a chilling ordinariness.
Like the rest of Kane’s oeuvre, the play interrogates the limits of theatre and representation in its extremity and breakdown of conventional form. Exposing the theatrical construction of violence, through various techniques, does little to protect us from the horror of observing it, and Frecknall oscillates masterfully between realism and a more poetic vein. When characters are in the furthest extremity of pain, their movements become a kind of expressive dance. There is lyricism in it but not so it beautifies violence. Importantly, it never seems gratuitous, either.
Sex is a kind of dance, too: bodies never make contact but intimacy and physical force are suggested through choreography. Ingrid Mackinnon’s intimacy direction brings passion and romance, never voyeurism. George Dennis’s sound design, with Angus MacRae’s compositions, combine powerfully with their blend of blazing romance and thrumming electric dread.
For such a slim play, it does feel protracted, and slows in its pace. The cruelty becomes draining to watch – but in a world in which images of violence are streamed on daily feeds, it re-sensitises us, through its dissection.
The poetry comes in other forms, too. There is sudden, immense beauty, declarations of love, romantic clinches and humour. Set alongside Kane’s brand of post-dramatic theatre, the play’s message is strangely romantic: the human need, maybe even demand, for love and for beauty persists, every bit as vital a force as violence – even, we are shown, for someone like Tinker.
• At Almeida theatre, London, until 29 August
