Customer Reviews

Cleansed

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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."

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.

After I read this play, I was moved to sickness and hope. Here the characters are trying to do the only thing that keeps us all human ie. loving. It is a comment on the power of love.

Although many may be shocked by the violence in this work--and I don't think I've ever read as violent a play--(critics frequently tore her work to pieces), Sarah Kane was not out to shock for shock's sake--she was interested in pushing her characters (and audiences) to their limits.
In "Cleansed" they desperately try to cling some semblance of love. Characters merge, blur, and combine. Many die. All suffer.
Her work is visionary in the best sense of the word--The nightmarish university sticks in my mind in the way most horror films don't.
I don't consider this her best play--Phaedra's Love had more of an emotional impact on me--but it provides a dazzling, maybe blinding introduction to one of the most important British playwrights of the 90s.

Cleansed is like a nightmare to the reader. The scene is between the perimeter fence of the university. It is not a concentration camp as it seems to the reader. It may be a lunatic asylum. Tinker is a doctor, who wants to destroy the emotional feelings between the inmates and he punishes the inmates for having love to each other. Tinker makes love when he masturbates in front of a booth where a prostitute dances for him. The actors are Rod and Carl two homosexuals, Grace is looking for his dead brother Graham and Robin who loves Grace.
The horrific scenes are very physical to the reader. It seems like a never ending slaughter. The play is enlightened by the love making scenes between the actors. Love is stronger than pain. This is the central aspect of the play for me. If somebody is not loved, than the lack of love would be as horrify as the pain they suffer. Cleansed is a beautiful drama. It combines the tragedy and the love story in a beautiful way. Kane was the Shakespearean of our time. After all she was very romantic and she missed the love of her life.

This is my favorite play of sarah kane, an incredible playwright who i think would have grown to be an incredible force in theatre. her work is a revolution. this play is beautiful yet tradegic and sickening. Imagine seeing it. it is a visual marvel.