Theatre review: Cleansed

A pair of fraternal twins are separated; the female twin, believing her brother to be dead, goes to a strange and possibly dangerous place where she takes on his identity, only to reconnect with him in an unexpected way. It's one of the main plots of Twelfth Night, which Sarah Kane cited as an inspiration for Cleansed, but it's fair to say that she interpreted it in a slightly different way than Shakespeare did. A lot more incestuously, for one thing. Grace (Pearl Chanda) tracks down the hospital-like place where her brother Graham (Jack Riddiford) died of a heroin overdose. The body's long since been cremated so she isn't able to say goodbye to him in that way, instead wearing his clothes and starting to take on his mannerisms. She willingly puts herself under the control of Tinker, the violent and twisted man everyone calls a doctor, but who seems to be anything but a healer.

As played by Leo Bill Tinker is a dead-eyed, lumbering psychopath, but I still interpreted him in the same way as I did when I saw the play before: He's a man fascinated with love but unable to understand it on a fundamental level, so he treats both the emotion and the people who feel it as things to be ripped apart, dissected and put under extreme pressure.

With Grace this culminates in an extreme body-horror interpretation of the way she wants to become one with her brother, whose ghost she interacts with throughout the play. With another couple he's even more relentlessly violent: The young and starry-eyed Carl (Luke Cinque-White) swears he would die for his boyfriend Rod, and has this put to the test in slow and grisly fashion. The older and more world-weary Rod (Parth Thakerar) doesn't believe in making promises he can't keep, but having to sit back and watch the degradations his lover is put through is a different kind of torture that has a profound effect on the way he expresses love.

Tinker is much more hands-off, although still abusive in different ways, with the childlike, illiterate Robin (Stuart Thompson,) who's just looking for someone to love and has landed on Grace; for the most part he's allowed to let his emotions destroy him from the inside. And Tinker himself becomes fascinated with Grace, pouring his confused emotions into a vicarious relationship with an unnamed woman (Lizzy Connolly) in a stripper booth. In a way, maybe love will destroy him in the end as well.

Which is all to say that while Cleansed may have a reputation as a gratuitous nihilistic bloodbath there is a throughline to be found in it, and even a twisted kind of tenderness and beauty. Rebecca Frecknall's production particularly seemed to clarify for me the Carl/Rod storyline - if Grace/Graham is Twelfth Night, there's clear Titus Andronicus in the way Carl gets Lavinia'd, and particularly the reason: Every time Carl finds a way to express himself, Tinker brutally gets rid of it, but he always seems to find another way. It's a strange kind of celebration of resilience, even if the play keeps knocking it down.

The references to rats and the way declarations of love are pushed to the limit also have nods to 1984, and the way the story inverts that book's final twist of despair could also be seen as a kind of hope. In some ways Frecknall's production is almost restrained - there's numerous instances of nudity but the men at least avoid the usual full-frontals, and while some of the violence is bluntly literal some of it is more stylised, while I wasn't sure at first if everyone would have clocked quite what happened to Carl and Grace at the end.

The use of dance, Lee Curran's lighting and Angus MacRae's music all also lend a dreamlike, more metaphorical edge that stops the violence from being entirely harsh and clinical all the time; the way George Dennis' sound combines with the incongruous flower meadow in Madeleine Girling's set to give the impression of rats without us ever actually seeing one, is one of the most memorably nightmarish effects of the evening, more so than any literal gore.

It's odd to see so much of the production's marketing being about how a leading female director tackling this play is a "once in a lifetime" event, given Katie Mitchell did it at the National a decade ago: Whose life expectancy are they going by, a Victorian chimney sweep's boy? That production was hugely memorable so this one didn't have quite the same effect on me, but one thing it did have in common with it is that even if the precise meaning isn't always clear it's obvious that there is one, and it makes it hard to dismiss the play as a simple collection of attention-grabbing shocks. And maybe the reason I keep seeing something beautiful in the play is that it's so ugly, that every tiny glimmer of hope feels like a triumph.

Cleansed by Sarah Kane is booking until the 29th of August at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.