Yesterday I saw Sarah Kane's Cleansed, directed by Rebecca Frecknell for the Almeida Theatre (full spoilers ahead for the play and for this specific production of it - I would highly recommend the play if you can appreciate stuff that's a little more surreal, thematic and impressionistic). After watching the play, I came home and immediately read the script, which informed a lot of what I have to say about the adaptations and choices Frecknell makes.
I went in knowing a little bit about the play, and a little bit about Sarah Kane. I read the script for Blasted (as I couldn't find any recorded performances) and found it very interesting. She has a very unique style, a strange formal approach to writing for the stage. I knew Cleansed was about a torture facility, about love, and I knew a sunflower would pop up through the stage, that a field of daffodils would appear, and that rats would take someone's feet away. Those last three are some of the infamous stage directions Kane included in the script, as it's difficult to conceive of how a director might present these things happening while suiting the mood. Rebecca Frecknell manages two of those three very well, and sidesteps the third. Another infamous aspect of both this play and Blasted is the violence. It's also a challenge for a director to figure out how to represent a tongue being cut out, hands and feet being cut off, throats being slit, suicide by hanging, and more. Here is where in some places Frecknell's version loses me a little, but I will get to that later on.
What I didn't know about going in was the exact ways the relationship narratives play out. Really what I didn't know is that there wouldn't be much "exactness" per se. This is not a naturalistic piece, and doesn't really pretend to be, like Blasted. The form and structure is more like a collage. Bits of character strewn about in various scenes. We see Tinker's violence, and in another scene we see him masturbating to a woman in a peep show box. We see Carl and Rod ruminate on love's limits and their affection for each other, and then we see them brutalised. There are no intermediary steps. It's not important exactly what the facility is, exactly why they are there, it's important that violence is being done to them - because what could ever justify this kind of torture? In wondering about the details, the audience hopes that an explanation might put to rest the reason for the violence, that it can be tucked away under "Tinker is testing the limits of love", or that "this is a correctional facility". Sarah Kane never makes explicit the goals and specificities of the institution so that it cannot be settled into a single reason. It is all of these things, and more, at the same time. Much of the play, much of the way the characters act, must be understood in this way - on a more generalised level, on a thematic level.
There is a brilliant moment in Frecknell's version, perhaps about halfway through (maybe a little earlier, couldn't tell, hard to feel time pass during a play/movie). It is perhaps the defining moment of her interpretation of the play. After Grace is beaten and raped by the Voices - an invisible army of Tinker's footsoldiers, represented by voices played over the speakers - Graham touches her, and blood appears in the same spot on both of their backs. He climbs onto the bed with her, and one of the Voices says "kill them all". Loud gunfire is played repeatedly over the speakers, and as it continues, the entire set slowly moves back, revealing a rectangular bed of daffodils across the floor of the theatre. The stage remains in this configuration for the remainder of the play. This was amazing to see live, an extremely clever trick which not only fulfils the infamous stage direction, but provides an awe-inspiring surprise even for the knowing audience.
During this daffodil reveal, Frecknell makes an alteration to the scene that I found quite interesting. In the script, the gunfire destroys a wall and splatters it with blood. It is written to last for "several minutes", before Graham uncovers Grace's face, and reassures her with the line "No one. Nothing. Never." At that point, "Out of the ground grow daffodils. They burst upward, their yellow covering the entire stage." Frecknell combines these two directions into one, loud machine gun fire soundtracking the reveal of the daffodils. With the multitude of flowers, and the continuous gunfire, it was almost as if each daffodil was represented by one shot of the gun firing. This reminded me of remembrance poppies, where the scale of mass death is represented by fields upon fields of flowers.
Frecknell represents the Woman's peep show booth using a square of neon lights around a window, and a coin slot highlighted with pink light. An analysis of the play I read (Yeliz, 2017) talks about the mise en abyme the peep show creates with relation to the audience watching the play. Tinker's sad and frustrated masturbation and desire for parasocial relationship with the Woman somewhat mirror the audience's look into the depraved hellscape of the play. Frecknell literalises this mise en abyme by outlining the entire stage with a neon light rectangle, which draws the parallel directly between the way Tinker looks at the Woman and the way the audience look at the characters in the play. This was a particularly subtle inclusion that draws a lot more out of the Woman/Tinker storyline than just the strange sympathy the ending provides to him. In fact, it makes that ending scene feel inauthentic, that he's not supposed to have that relationship with his object of desire, because the parallel between Tinker/Woman and audience/actor is more sharply drawn. It could perhaps be read as mocking the audience, in this sense.
Tinker's torture is reciprocal. He picks on things the characters have said and done, and challenges them. The most obvious and most prominent way this is shown is in the progression of what he does to Carl. First, while Tinker is listening in, Carl says he would be willing to die for Rod. Under threat of gruesome metal pole crucifixion, Carl is forced to admit that he wouldn't actually die for Rod. Perhaps this means that Kane thinks Carl's declaration was inauthentic. Or perhaps it's that Tinker does not really understand the what it means to love, what Carl figuratively meant when he said that he would die for Rod. This is a way in which different interpretations of the play can significantly diverge, over whether it ultimately is hopeful or nihilistic.
In Frecknell's version, I felt that a few of the torture scenes were depicted a little confusingly. I really liked the way in which a light song starts off many of these scenes, which then becomes loud and distorted as Tinker goes about his business. It was a great way to contrast the love the characters have for each other to Tinker's wanton cruelty. Particularly with Carl, though, I found exactly what was going on a little confusing. I am not a frequent theatre-goer, and in a few places I felt like the implicative theatrical language might have gone over my head a little bit. For the removal of Carl's hands, Frecknell has Tinker tie up both of Carl's hands individually, then bring in a bucket, which he forces Carl's hands into. The music blasts distorted noise, Carl screams, and when his hands come out of the bucket, they are covered in blood. The script says his hands are "cut off", but it seemed to me that was not exactly what Frecknell was going for. There was no sawing motion, no cutting sound effect, no drop of the hands hitting the bucket. To me, without having known the script, it seemed perhaps that his hands were being shredded, or dunked in acid or lye. Something pain-causing, not an amputation. This is quite a significant thing for me to have misinterpreted, as the progressive removal of Carl's tongue, then hands, then feet, then penis, is made very specific by the script, and I find it a pertinent part of my interpretation of Tinker's torture. In the scene where his feet are removed, Frecknell has Tinker cover each of Carl's feet with bags (filled with blood - not sure if the audience is supposed to notice the blood before the bags are burst). Tinker then lifts Carl's legs up and bites at the bags, getting blood all over Carl's feet and legs, as well as his own mouth. Again, perhaps I'm missing the theatrical implication, but to me this didn't seem like an amputation.
Tinker biting at the bags seems to be a reference to the rats present all over the script. Frecknell choses to skip over most of the rat stuff. Rats are written to be all over the field where Carl and Rod talk to each other, they are always biting at someone's arms or legs. In the scene where his legs are removed, the stage direction says that they "carry Carl's feet away". Frecknell does not show this, and I think Tinker's rat-like biting at the bags is the replacement. At the conclusion of the script, when Grace/Graham and Carl sit together in a field, the squeaking of rats are written to get louder and louder until the sound is deafening. Instead, Frecknell makes her only explicit reference to the rats here, as at the end of the play a short squeaking noise is played over the speaker, with a light rustle in the daffodils.
Ultimately, I thought this was a brilliant production of a brilliant play. There is so much that Frecknell manages to tease out of the script with her creative staging, and the script itself is already so interesting, layered and complex. I liked it so much that I would be willing to go again, except it would probably be £55, a little expensive for a re-watch (whereas I managed to secure and under 25 ticket for yesterday's performance, which was only £5, and I think those are all bought up now).
References:
Biber Vangölü, Yeliz. (2017). Sarah Kane's Cleansed as a critical assessment of disciplinary power. Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi - DTCF Dergisi. 57. 274-288. 10.1501/Dtcfder_0000001514.