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.

Theatre review: Venice Preserved

I've seen Venice Preserved once before, but as that particular production was an incoherent car crash that was 50% sales presentation for a property development and 50% people desperately shouting "immersive!" at you while asking for money for four hours, it's probably easiest all round to just treat Thomas Otway's Restoration thriller as completely new to me. Prasanna Puwanarajah directs a mercifully coherent production, although how much sense the plot itself makes remains up for debate. Jaffeir (Michael Grady-Hall) is recruited by his best friend Pierre (Stephen Fewell) to join a bloody rebellion against the corrupt ruling class of Venice; both swear loyalty to the cause, but each also has a personal vendetta against some member of the senate which is the real clincher in wanting to bring them down. In Jaffeir's case, it's his senator father-in-law Priuli (Les Dennis,) who disapproved of the marriage and went out of his way to punish him for it.

Theatre review: Killer

In the second of two Philip Ridley plays running in rep underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, Jamie Lloyd returns as director and Soutra Gilmour as designer, but the creatives who have the most obvious impact are sound designers Ben & Max Ringham and George Dennis. Killer is a collection of three monologues, each with a grisly theme as the title (and the fact that it's Ridley) suggests, performed by John MacMillan in the dingy basement rooms. It's a promenade piece that opens with the audience sitting in a circle, facing away from MacMillan in the middle; the lights go out and he narrates a young teenager's fascination with a new gang who - reminding me of the far-right party in Moonfleece - embrace a fascist style and a philosophy based around preparing for an inevitable apocalypse. When the narrator tries to join the gang they have a brutal way of initiating him.