Cleanse Me

It must be time for me to start dating again. Andrew Campbell and Warcry productions are putting on Cleansed by Sarah Kane. Since Kane is my favourite dramatist, and Cleansed is possibly her most outrageous script, the choice of Sloans bar for venue fills me with a sense of dramatic irony and burgeoning romance. Cleansed, like much of Kane, abstracts the raw brutality into a vague environment – it could be a university, a clinic, a concentration camp. The students, the patients, the inmates rape, kill and love each other, become each other. And even though Kane commands language with supernatural skill, the nature of her scripts – terse, suggestive – allow directors to find their own path through the production, lending the experience a harsh, experimental edge.

It’s a bastard hour: her only script that I can’t read for pleasure. She goes further in her depiction of cruelty, picking up on Edward Bond’s viciousness and excising the failing hope that glimmers in Crave or 4.48. While love is projected as the only hope, it can barely face down the repeated acts of violence that dominate the opening scenes. Even Blasted, her first work that was roundly condemned, has an erotic itch – corrupted and sick, but alive. The desire in Cleansed is for the dead, for death, a ghastly vision of passion as dislocated body parts and tormented lust.

By setting the action in an institution, Kane’s savagery goes beyond personal and political intent, imagining human culture and civilisation as a mere machine for enforcing submission and stripping us of our agency, our hopes, our desires. She is relentlessly anti-humanist, diving into a metaphysical world where the fundamental nature of the human is examined and found bitter. It is intensely spiritual – not in the twee new age euphemism for optimistic and lacking rigour, but in the dark longing of God’s absence.

When a production is successful, as in Edinburgh University’s 4.48, the audience can leave the theatre uplifted with the thrill of having survived extremity. It’s a cliché that a play can force discussion and so intimacy and connection. Yet in Kane’s intensity, talking is the only solution. Her language is an infection, an inoculation. This, of course, makes it perfect for a first date. A ticket is available for anyone glamorous and brave enough to join me for an unflinching gawk at the horror and, even worse, a post-play discussion with the Performance Editor.