Yesterday was a spectacular day in London-town, the searing heat of last week having relented somewhat and there being enough of a breeze to make sitting in the sun just about bearable. I imagine many in my neighbourhood flocked to Hampstead Heath for a dip in the swimming ponds, a hastily prepared picnic and a game of pétanque accompanied by a chilled rose served in a plastic cup. Not me, though. Nope, not me. I chose to commit the glorious afternoon to Sarah Kane.
During her all too brief life which ended in suicide at age 28, Kane was celebrated for the five plays she wrote including Blasted (now accepted as part of the literary canon, a core text in my MA at RADA), first performed in part while she was still at Birmingham University, attracting the attention of literary agent Mel Kenyon, premiering in full at the Royal Court in 1995 and horrifying the ye-olde-traditional-theatre-luvvies and the British press while exhilarating the likes of Edward Bond (he who single-handedly provoked the Theatre Act 1968 with his play Saved in which a baby in its carriage is stoned to death, abolishing censorship in British theatre by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office…), Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, each of whom extolled the arrival on the scene of a prodigious new playwrighting talent.
Cleansed, directed by Rebecca Frecknall at the Almeida, was Kane’s third play (first performed in 1998 at the Royal Court and, incidentally, the only Kane work to be staged at the National Theatre… in 2016, some 17 years after her death), and the iconic Islington theatre has done something very 2026 and provided audiences with a “decompression space”, a “self-care guide” and a trigger-warning which reads, “This production includes prolonged nudity, torture, mutilation, murder, sex, incest, violence including sexual violence, forced eating, suicide including hanging, drug abuse and drugging, gender reassignment surgery as well as homophobic and misogynistic language, needles and blood.” Yep. Who needs ponds, parks and pétanque when you have all of that to look forward to on a sunny Saturday afternoon?! [And this list also answered my question of why the matinee had an early start time of 2 pm. Answer: they need the extra time to clean up the blood splatter….]
As is totes obvs from the extensive list of trigger-warnings, Cleansed is really about… love. Set in a rehab facility of sorts, Kane explores human beings’ capacity to torture themselves and those around them in our perpetual, addictive search for validity and value through the will-o’-the-wisp that is unconditional love: a woman seeks the love of a brother who has died, inhabiting his clothes in an effort to be reunited with him and prepared to mutilate her body to step into his skin; a man asks his relatively new lover for a “forever” commitment and is brutally rebuffed; each seeks relief from Tinker and his ever-ready needles. “Love Is The Drug” sang Bryan Ferry for Roxy Music, and, like all drugs, it can heal, hurt and harm in equal measure, it does not offer a permanent solution for our existential fears, and we are doomed to lose control of it oh-so-very-quickly. Love is torture, violence, despair, addiction and pain. There is only one way out of it, one single sunflower of hope rising above it all, and that is not Esther Perel-style self-help salves nor couples counselling, unfortunately for all of us, but death.
All of the “prolonged nudity, torture, mutilation, murder, sex, incest, violence including sexual violence, forced eating, suicide including hanging, drug abuse and drugging, gender reassignment surgery as well as homophobic and misogynistic language, needles and blood” in Cleansed plays out against the recurring riff of The Kinks’ wonderful Days, one of my favourite ever songs which I had understood to be about a very grown-up, appreciative and accepting response to the breakup of a relationship and will now understand to be about death, torture and suicide (thanks, Sarah Kane!). In choosing Ray Davies’ lovely lyrics (pasted below… and I challenge you to read them without (i) singing/humming along and (ii) weeping just a little bit….) as the accompaniment to her harrowing text, I think Kane reminds us that even when love is disguised in rhyming couplets and phrasing which trips off the tongue, it will still annihilate you. And in the entirely necessary and inescapable process of the annihilation, you (much like the OGs of love and romance, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) will finally truly know and understand the world in which we live and the nature of our shared human condition. “You took my life,” says Ray Davies, “But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me. But it’s alright. Now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me.”
Kane’s work is thrilling and frightening and yes, it is “triggering” (and there were walk-outs, but only a few… and with none of the heightened drama of the walkouts of the adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years in the same theatre a couple of years ago…), but it is also sensitive, enlightening, witty, provocative, deeply moving and very much rooted in the body (these actors are athletes, really - the movement element is remarkably well staged by Frecknall and performed by the cast), and it is an exemplar of work which could not exist anywhere other than in the theatre and only in a post-Theatre Act 1968 world which permits artists to explore and excavate the darkest parts of the human experience. Yet in amongst the blood splatter and the beatings and the mutilations, in the quiet moments, you will sense the love the playwright has for her craft, for her characters and, indeed, for her fellow human beings and the world they inhabit. Before her death by suicide (an attempted overdose followed quickly by hanging herself while still in the hospital… she was determined…), I like to think Cleansed tells us Sarah Kane must surely have experienced deep love in her life. How else could she have gained the divine knowledge required to write such a play? And how else could she have understood our world and nature and expounded upon it all via the small catalogue of powerful plays she has gifted to us (even if she knew the hefty price she would have to pay)?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Listen to The Kinks’ Days here and read below -
Thank you for the days
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days
I won’t forget a single day, believe me
I bless the light, I bless the light that lights on you, believe me
And though you’re gone, you’re with me every single day, believe me
Days I’ll remember all my life
Days when you can’t see wrong from right
You took my life
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me
But it’s alright
Now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me
I wish today could be tomorrow
The night is dark, it just brings sorrow
Let it wait
Thank you for the days
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days
I won’t forget a single day, believe me
Days I’ll remember all my life
Days when you can’t see wrong from right
You took my life
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me
But it’s alright
Now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me
Thank you for the days
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days
I won’t forget a single day, believe me
I bless the light, I bless the light that shines on you, believe me
And though you’re gone, you’re with me every single day, believe me
Days….
[Ray Davies, The Kinks]
As you might remember, Kate, I'm a big fan of Ray Davies and The Kinks and Days is also one of my favourite songs of all time. I included in my eulogy for my mother at the funeral service and I'm planning for it to be played/sung at my own funeral - when the time comes, obvs.
Judging from your review, I don't think I could stomach actually going to see the play, but it does sound really interesting. Is it really as gory as you say?