30 July 2026

Sarah Kane’s Cleansed leaves you feeling anything but

The late playwright’s performances are always a hard watch – this one will make you sick

Midway through Sarah Kane’s Cleansed my mum whispered to me that she was about to pass out. I think it was just after someone’s feet had been cut off. She took out her hearing aid and kept her eyes closed for the rest of the play.

Later an usher at Islington’s Almeida Theatre told me people have fainted in previews. Sarah Kane’s play is always a hard watch. Kane killed herself only a year after it premiered in 1998. She wrote Cleansed, she said, in part because of an idea in Roland Barthe’s “A Lover’s Discourse” – that “the situation of a rejected lover is not unlike the situation of a prisoner in Dachau.” She gets you as close to Hell as she possibly can.

About three minutes in, a doctor injects heroin into someone’s eye. A woman is raped; a man is sodomised with a pole. Tongues are cut out and hands are cut off. There’s suicide and a bloody, amateur sex-change. The play is famously impossible to stage. What do you do with directions like “the rats carry Carl’s feet away”?

That might be why it’s so rarely been performed. In 2016 Katie Mitchell’s production at the National Theatre used masked thugs to perform the escalating atrocities; the result felt sparse and constrained. Now, Rebecca Frecknell has staged an intimate, gruesome production. The play takes place in a university campus-turned-concentration camp, and Madeleine Girling’s claustrophobic set is a dingy room leading out to a hallway. At one point the room’s edges glow and it slides backwards, revealing a field of daffodils.

The play relies on two sets of lovers: an incestuous brother and sister, and two men. They are being tortured by the Tinker (Leo Bill), a character often thought to be named after the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker, who panned Kane’s first play Blasted. Grace (Pearl Chanda) is mourning her dead brother; she wants to be with him and be him, whatever it takes. The gay couple, Carl (Luke Cinque-White) and Rod (Parth Thakerar), find their love constantly tested. Are they willing to die for each other? How easily can they betray?

Much of the brutality is depicted literally: a tongue flops into a bucket, bags of blood soak the stage. Yet some of the worst acts are only mimed. Frecknell relies on sometimes astonishing physical work from the actors, who fling their bodies around as if they are being tortured by invisible hands. Cinque-White is mesmeric. And Stuart Thompson is sweet and funny as Robin, an illiterate man who becomes devoted to Grace. His final scene is devastating.

You will not have a good time at Cleansed. It is raw horror after horror, with only tiny moments of levity in between. The play isn’t intended to be simply gratuitous cruelty. Despite the Tinker’s best efforts, twisted, bad love endures between the couples. But the unending violence loses its shock value after a while, and leaves you feeling mostly sick.