4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dark work sheds light on the human psyche, March 23, 2001
This review is from: Cleansed (Paperback)
I saw this play performed in London in 1998. It left me awe struck. Sarah Kane did things with theatre that no one else would dare. She had a bizarre and unique perspective. This work, set in a strange futuristic sanitarium/prison, is at the same time disgusting and touching. A must read for anyone who enjoys Beckett and thinks Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's greatest play.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Hold That 'Compassion!'", July 6, 2002
This review is from: Cleansed (Paperback)
In "Cleansed," somewhat in the old-fashioned manner of the imagist poets of the early 20th century, Sarah Kane chose to eliminate all back story and pare away at narrative presumably to give audiences only "pure" drama. Granting the artist her Pinterish donee, this viewer is still perplexed by the question of how successfully finished a piece for dramatic representation the resultant work is. "Cleansed," whether seen or read, seems to me to come up short on realized meaningfulness. While there's no denying the power of some of the hallucinatory, indeed nightmarishly brutal individual scenes, the absence of audience friendly connectives suggests the author was not so much writing for the stage about the nightmarish as herself caught up in the grip of it, not so much on top of her material as in fact overwhelmed by it.
Oscar Wilde once said that the flip side of brutality - surprisingly enough - is the most mawkish sentimentality. In "Cleansed," Kane oscillates between these two unfortunately reductive poles, offering a vision of the human scene in which symbolic Senecan violence is lamely conjoined with some very tired, indiscriminately "compassionate" representations of salvation through "love." Not surprisingly from this vantage point, even the worst of her characters it turns out is also just a "victim."
The incomparable Eric Bentley saw the great playwrights as thinkers. I don't think, at least in "Cleansed," that the undeniably talented Sarah Kane could justly be called a thinker. In this play, she is operating on a less demanding principle, "I feel; therefore, it is." In "Cleansed," she might best be called the playwright as "feeler."
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sunflower bursts through the stage..., April 17, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Cleansed (Paperback)
Cleansed is a truly astonishing play. I recently saw a rehearsed reading of it at the Royal Court in London and was both repulsed and moved. Horrible things happen in the so-called university - drug overdoses are administered, lovers are tortured, rats gnaw at festering wounds; and yet the most shocking thing on stage is the survival of love. As an audience member, I grew to cringe whenever a character made a declaration of love, as it was immediately tested beyond (my) endurance - one boy has his tongue, hands and feet removed in turn as he tries to find new ways to express his love for his lover - but the characters kept on reaching out to one another. Kane's compassion for her characters extends even to the torturer Tinker who is shown to want love as much as his victims.
By the way, I think the editorial review is misleading. The play is not a realistic study of social ills; the writing is poetic, the setting is no-place, and drug addiction is the least of the characters' worries.
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