Cleansed Review: A Bold Take On Sarah Kane’s Iconic Play

Mark Holland reviews the recent production of Cleansed at the Fitzpatrick Hall which delivers on a powerful and visually striking vision for the play.

Tel Chiuri (Grace) and Eirlys Lovell-Jones (Tinker), photo by Leah Mclaine

Eoin McCaul’s production of Cleansed was great. It’s the sort of show I’d hoped would exist in Cambridge when I arrived here a year ago. It was so thoughtful, so full of visual and narrative flair that it represented a model for student theatre which is constantly raising the bar, pushing other productions in terms of formal invention. Some might call McCaul’s hardcore ‘regietheater’ derivative, using every tool in the box while perhaps not doing anything explicitly ‘new’. Yet this would be unfair and, certainly in Cambridge terms, it was a properly thrilling and inspiring production. 

In some ways, it’s a massive shame it was put on so late in term and so might not have received the audience it deserved, as a production of an iconic play which brought something new to the table. It isn’t just that the production was so theatrically involving; it provided a solid new reading of the text. Cleansed depicts the goings-on in a some kind of institution, perhaps an abandoned university, where inmates, subjected to extreme acts of violence and cruelty, attempt to overcome their situation through audacious acts of love. 

Neatly partnering form and content, McCaul’s staging and the ominous presence of Emma Dawes’ ‘Voices’, reframed the play as not just characters trapped in the institution, but also actors trapped within a play, and one where the characterless ‘Voices’ was perhaps the most threatening figure present. This Pirandellian element was further developed by the sympathetic portrayal of Tinker (Eirlys Lovell-Jones), who was depicted as being as much of a victim as the other characters, powerlessly watching from the sides, on the brink of tears. At times it felt as if this play was a cruel ritual this cast had been forced to perform. This lack of obvious visual distinction rendered certain characters similar; lines blurred about who is who in a way which was, yes, packed with meaning, but which also perhaps made the characters harder to individually get a grip of, harder to engage with emotionally. This made the production feel at times more like performance art than a play, as something to be admired rather than deeply felt. However, the production’s swagger was undeniable.

McCaul’s take rejected the play’s interest in visually shocking moments and literal environments, instead leaning towards feeling. As a production, this uninterest in literal physical depictions seemed to stem from its discussion of gender. People aren’t defined by their bodies. As such, the use of a camera on stage, which generally designated the watching ‘eye’ of Tinker, became an attempt to capture a reality which doesn’t quite exist. Perhaps this could have been more clearly signposted to make it more haunting, but it was nonetheless a properly effective element in the production. 

Likewise, the representative visual landscape of the play wasn’t relevant. Instead, the production entirely existed somewhere between thought and metatheatre, heightened by expressive lighting and sound work by Finlay Wyer and Finlay Waugh. And this metatheatre repeatedly implicated the audience in the act of watching, questioning our specific role in the room. This was theatre which spilled off the stage and encompassed the entire room. By implicating the audience, our identities as spectators were repeatedly asserted, defining us in much clearer terms than those of the play’s individual characters. By putting this metaphorical spotlight upon us, it placed a pressure on us to engage with the play’s moral seriousness, rather than allowing us to passively watch acts of cruelty.

This focus on the audience’s place was most explicit when the actors interacted with the audience as themselves prior to the ‘start’ of the show. This compensated for the lack of literal environments, instead offering us real people, and the effect was just as heartbreaking. But it also complicated our relationship with what was real and what was poetic. When Robin (Marta Zalicka) was forced to eat paper, rather than a box of chocolates, this metaphor about text versus reality was rewound. In this way the ‘reality’ of the play became inaccessible, as if the characters are trapped somewhere out of reach. But this also stemmed from the production’s awareness of its circumstances. Being staged at a university created a useful degree of artifice; the stripped-back staging also helps to solve the problem of Cleansed’s famously impossible stage directions; any attempt to suddenly reach for a literal depiction of sunflowers growing from the stage would be out of place. It used the physical identity of its environment and its cast, fire escape signs and all, to carry the aesthetic idea of the play’s location, and it worked.

For me, this production managed to execute on a very strong vision which internally justified  its occasional shortcomings in clarity and coherence. If the purpose of certain theatrical devices was unclear, this messiness read as totally appropriate for the production’s intentional artifice and focus on a broken world. Yes, this is the production drawing attention to itself, but why not? It’s rare to see a show in Cambridge this polished, and, as a result, where everything felt intentional. For this reason it is difficult to pull out individual performances because it really was an ensemble production, more so than you’d expect from the text, but, as a cast, they uniformly excelled.

Moreover, its aesthetics, particularly at its rawest and most exposed, grabbed an audience by the neck. The opening sequence, where the cast milled around with the audience before the industrial jaws of the stage opened to reveal a brightly-lit theatrical studio, designed by Tungsten Tang, with cameras, lights, cages, and microphones, was properly thrilling, an expensive rejection of Cambridge’s general prioritisation of naturalism, and yet one which still hinted at the text’s industrial energy.

What everything means is a game you could play all day with this production and, being this particular play, so fragmented in structure and wild in subject, I think it got away with the lack of any obvious answers. The evasion of the obvious invited discussion. I’d go so far as to say it was a production which wanted you to dislike parts of it. The whole thing met the play at the level of a ‘throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks’ quality, constructed of deeply-considered individual parts. There was an irony in how the production had a level of detail and thought which would likely reward repeat viewings and yet the play itself was pretty gruelling even once. But boy was it exciting. Perhaps I found it too fun, so thrilling in its presentation I never properly got to grips with the story. But as I’ve said, the play allows for this and the production implicated the audience so intensely, literally putting the camera on us at one point, that this felt like it could be the point. Perhaps I’m being forgiving, but I can’t overstate how pleased I am that this production existed.