Pearl Chandra and Leo Bill. Photo by Marc Brenner.

Cleansed by Sarah Kane – Almeida Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Director Rebecca Frecknall signs off her highly successful time as Associate at the Almeida Theatre with a statement production of perhaps the most feared play of modern times. This is true of both the events in Cleansed, which are unremittingly brutal, and of the challenges it presents to anyone attemping a production. Frecknall has said that every page of the play contains something that seems unstageable, and Sarah Kane uses the play to push the boundaries of theatre in many different ways. It’s not a surprise then that Cleansed is seen only sporadically, with the last major production ten years ago at the National Theatre. But the challenges it presents – to production team, cast and audience – are what make it such a remarkable work, which grows in stature as the furore around Kane fades, and we can see it with the perspective granted by a different era.

Kane sets the play in a future university which has become some kind of re-education facility, but Frecknall places it in an institution that looks more like a hospital. This makes sense, as the re-education techniques applied by overseer Tinker (Leo Bill) are violently medical in nature. We meet some of the male inmates. Robin (Stuart Thompson) and Rod (Parth Thakerar) begin a relationship, although Rod is cynical about anything except the ‘now’. Graham (Jack Riddiford) begs drugs from Tinker, who injects him in the eyeball with an overdose which kills him. It is clear from the opening moments what Kane will be giving us.

Later, Grace (Pearl Chandra) arrives, looking for her dead brother’s clothes. They appear to have had an incestous relationship, and the resurrected Graham remains on stage with her throughout. She swaps clothes with vulnerable loner Carl (Luke Cinque-White), who is happier in her dress. The relationships Kane writes about are all unconventional – queer and trans – and this is what Tinker punishes again and again, with increasingly Gothic acts of abuse and violence. These acts of mutilation are part of what makes Cleansed so difficult to stage. Frecknall addresses this neatly with the brutal binding of hands and feet, which then are dipped in a bucket of blood, and the inventive use of blood bags and bloodied rags. They also make it difficult to watch, but Kane is simply reflecting back to the audience the violence that takes place daily across the world against queer people. She does so in an established theatrical language which clearly references Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Acts reflecting Edward II and Titus Andronicus, for example, make the brutality familiar, if no less awful.

However, despite its intentionally relentless assault on the audience’s senses Cleansed is, oddly, a funny play too and most importantly a play about love. Kane’s writing is honed to the absolute minimum, saying exactly what she needs to and no more. A line such as Tinker’s “I may be a cunt, but I’m not a twat” lands with the absolute clarity of classic writing. Similarly, when Rod says “There’s only now. There’s never been anything else”, we hear someone cutting clean through the muddiness of existence.

Frecknall works with set designer Madeleine Girling and costume designer Debbie Duru to create an institution with all the dinginess of the worst hospital, and clothing that is familiar yet odd. Girling then pulls off a reveal that makes the audience gasp when it rolls back to reveal a vast field of daffodils. The use of music in the production is also very distinctive. Composer Angus MacRae’s repetitive industrial rumbles and cello notes set a tone of constant unease. Two further pieces – ‘Days’ by The Kinks and the ‘Allegro Maestoso’ from Handel’s ‘Water Music’ are brilliantly used as a backdrop for both joy and violence. Frecknall uses dance to express what cannot be put into words, often as transition between scenes, and the cast’s movement is very effective.

The cast approach their challenging roles with full commitment. Luke Cinque-White is edgy but likeable which makes the play’s grimmest scene, which I will not describe, all the more terrible to watch as it involves him. Pearl Chandra drives the play as the central female character, targeted and exposed but changing the men around her. Leo Bill tortures his charges like a bored plumber, in work jacket and glasses. Stuart Thompson and Parth Thakerar play out a heartbreaking real relationship amid the gore. Jack Riddiford is the spectre at the bloody banquet. The play ends with a strange, almost happy ending as Bill is emotionally disarmed by Lizzy Connolly’s erotic dancer who he has been manipulating. Cleansed remains a revelatory work. Nearly 30 years after its première there is still nothing like it, and is now, surely, recognised as a European classic.

Stanley Morgan, Marc Wootton, Chris Walley. Photo by Helen Murray.

Archduke by Rajiv Joseph – Royal Court Theatre, London

Rajiv Joseph’s new play takes a moment that everyone knows, or thinks they do, and uses absurdist comedy to tease it apart. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip is widely understood as the trigger for the First World War. But the reasons it happened are obscured by subsequent events, and the actual events not particularly well know. In fact, they lend themselves to farce, which Joseph uses as an entry point into the minds of three young, desperate men. As well as Princip (Stanley Morgan), there is Nedeljko (Chris Walley) – both starving, tubercular, naïve and open to pretty much anything. Their meeting in a cave, where they have been summoned by a recruiter called Trifco (Abraham Popoola, although he was sick the night I saw the play and his part was impressively read by a member of the backstage team) is highly Beckettian – two men adrift in the world, with little understanding of what they are doing there. Joseph’s writing is funny and sharp, mixing surreal comedy with dark realism. Princip and Nedeljko are horrified to find they are ‘lungers’ – i.e. that they have TB – and still more so to discover that it kills you. Morgan and Walley put in excellent, wired performances.

The play becomes steadily stranger and, at times, hilarious, as the two would-be assassins meet their recruiter, a Slav nationalist called Dragutin, played in a entertainingly over-the-top manner by Marc Wootton. Dragutin is a a deranged fantasist, and a real-life Serb paramilitary who had previously massacred the Serb royal family before commissioned the murders and triggered global disaster. His housekeeper, Sladjana is played by Janice Connolly, who is both very funny in her obsession with food, shared by the starving young men, and her unexpected tenderness as she attempts to save them from their fates. Es Devlin’s dramatic set features a train carriage and a giant cake, as well as the final open-topped car in which the characters play out the killings, forseeing what will happen.

Lyndsey Turner’s direction balances the play’s tone very well, bringing the absurdity of world-shaping events to life. The assassination was almost accidental. The planned attempt had wounded those in the car behind, but Franz Joseph’s car happened to stop outside the car where Princip was consoling himself, on its way to visit the injured. Joseph (Rajiv, rather than Franz) emphasises the unlikely nature of the events that led a group of inconsequential nobodies to have such a terrible effect on so many, while also suggesting it would probably have happened anyway sooner or later. The idea that the First World War was caused indirectly by poverty and disease as much as anything else, is a valuable historical perspective, and Archduke is a smart, thoroughly enjoyable piece of theatre.

The Oresteia by Aeschylus, adapted by Simon Stone – Bridge Theatre, London

Simon Stone’s version of The Oresteia, transposed to commuter belt Kent, is a cousin to his National Theatre production of Phaedra – or, in the context of this particular drama, perhaps a sibling. Working with set designer Lizzie Clachan, he directs his own loose adaptation of Aeschylus, similarly staged inside a house with glass walls, among the wealthy upper classes. As with Phaedra, he delivers a production defined by complete, unapologetic confidence that the three part unravelling of Agamemon and his family can stripped of all the trapping that we think identify the story and still communicate essential human truth.

Stone dismantles the three parts of the Oresteia to tell much of the story in sequences of flashbacks, the timelines projected above his revolving set. We shamelessly spy on the activities, contained for the most part in the various rooms of an immaculate, expensive house somewhere outside Sevenoaks. A family – parents Christopher (David Morrissey) and Montie (Mary-Louise Parker), children Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Alice (Rosie Sheehy), friends Jerome (John Macmillan) and his son Lorenzo (Archie Madueke) prepare for a birthday party. It’s Alice and her absent twin Isabel’s 21st, but family dynamics are extremely tense. Isabel isn’t coming because she’s fallen out with her father over his firm’s role in supplying military equipment, intentionally or otherwise, to Russia. Christopher’s older brother Melville (Lloyd Hutchinson) arrives, Mafia-don style, to lay down the way he wants it to play out. We know it isn’t going to end well

Stone plays an entertaining game with Aeschylus’ original, tackling story elements that don’t concern his version with insousiance. Melville, a Menelaus-figure, has a wife who had an affair which caused him to ram the gates of her lover’s house with his Range Rover and take a shit on his front steps – the Trojan War, in other words. However, his real focus is on Christopher’s betrayal of Isabel, exposing her mental health problems on national television, leading to her subsequent death by her own hand. The family relationships are thoroughly absorbing, delivered through a series of high quality performances by a fine cast. Rosie Sheehy as Alice, with an overwhelming inferiority complex, and Tom Glynn-Carney as her casual brother ignited to mete out brutal, self-righteous, have a fully believable sibling relationship which establishes a real domestic setting for the staggering violence which defines the play. David Morrissey is anguished and contrite in way that makes you want to… well… murder him. Mary-Louise Parker, in a rare appearance on the British stage, is a woman under impossible family pressure who is capable of being many different things, from loving mother to angel of death. Lloyd Hutchinson is thoroughly nasty, and father-son pair of John Macmillan and Archie Madueke have a deeply uncomfortable relationship based on neediness and rejection.

A long play feels short as the action unspools with a stomach-lurching relentlessness. The scene in which Christopher visits his now-ex wife Montie for dinner with her new partner Jerome, in the company of his new girlfriend Chandra (Rakhee Thakar) is horribly tense. Their housekeeper Jenny – Alyth Ross, channelling a cameo that reveals worlds about working for the super-rich – is drawn into the slaughter that approaches slowly and relentlessly. The transposition isn’t perfect – occasionally there are plot devices that might be more at home in a mid-range tv thriller – but it’s a thrilling and enthralling ride. No-one quite tackles the classics like Stone, and his productions make a significant amount of contemporary British theatre seems clumsy and mired in the past. A little bit of the Berlin Schaubühne does wonders in helping us look beyond our narrow shores.