Cleansed (National Theatre)

Oh please do report back what she says, I'd love to hear it.

For me, Katie Mitchell misses the point of this play, focusing on the torture porn aspects to exclusion of the love aspects.

I don't think Katie Mitchell remotely respects the mindset of Sarah Kane, and prefers to distance herself from what she probably perceives as Kane's perversity.

Kane was a massive fan of Joy Division, and I'm betting that the title of their song "Love will tear us apart" was spinning round her mind when she wrote this. Pain is the body of the play, love is it's soul. Pain is merely Kane's tool to test the power of love.

Spoilers follow. . .

This play is like "Shakespeare in Love," but with Josef Mengele, aka Tinker, substituted for Shakespeare: "Mengele in Love" if you will. In Kane's perception, Tinker's experiments are designed to measure love's limits, to dissect it's true nature, even while he himself succombs to love's overwhelming power. Kane's perversity is that we are NOT supposed to shut Tinker himself out, to exile him from our consciousness, but instead to relate to his love problems just as we relate to the love problems of his patients.

In Kane's play, Tinker finds love of sorts, and Kane wants us to deal with that. Mitchell is repulsed by Kane's conclusion, so (BIG SPOILER). . . she has Tinker shoot his love object and himself as well (offstage, by implication). For Mitchell, Tinker is beyond the pale, irredeemable is any way whatsoever.

Mitchell works hard to exile all aspects of Tinker's humanity. She glosses over the parts where Tinker seeks consent for what he is doing, and the parts where Tinker is revealed to be a mere agent of an even more judgemental power, that seeks to "cure" incestuous and homosexual and obsessional longing. When Tinker injects Graham's eye with heroin at the beginning, it is because Graham wants that, begs for it, and Tinker gives in to his request, but in Mitchell's presentation, Tinker's charm and restraint are absent, only the torturer remains.

Because Mitchell is so keen to demonise Tinker, who in fact is a stand-in for Kane herself, she surrounds him with faceless nazi-style monster minions, and she forbids him a relatable demeanour.

More damning, she fails to bring out the loves that are to be tested by violence, leaving only brutality on stage. This is a mistake even torture-porn makers typically avoid. For example, in Eli Roth's "Hostel" films, the humanity and concerns of characters are established first, before the torture starts.

A superior torture porn series, like the "Saw" films, which have a guiding morality, gets a LOT closer to Sarah Kane's mindset than Mitchell does. In those films, Jigsaw is Tinker, and like Tinker, Jigsaw sets out to test the limits of people's humanity. He hopes to make these suicidal and careless, soulless husks of people FIND their humanity, as a life without a soul is worse than death for Jigsaw. If they don't, they die.

Like Jigsaw, Tinker is Kane's agent for finding the love in her characters, even the humanity in Tinker himself. Mitchell sees only butchery.

Mitchell elides over when characters actually begin their process with Tinker. Michelle Terry's Grace, whose incestuous longing for her brother is to be tested by Tinker, is denied her proper introduction, six months after the opening scene. Further, Tinker is denied his chance to refuse to "treat" her, and she is then denied the chance to beg for the treatment that will bring her closer to her dead love object, her own brother, to slowly become him. Instead, Grace is introduced by Mitchell as a ghostly presence right from the start, as a kind of mournful judge of Tinker's behaviour. It makes no sense, unless the only point is to look at torture and sigh "oh the humanity!"

Michelle Terry is brave and bold and brilliant in this, but her character, Grace, is challenged by Mitchell only to suffer. Surely, Kane would have preferred to have Grace's incestuous longing for her brother to be more prominent, for her own agency in Tinker's asylum to be more of the focus, a test of her love, an attempt to reunite.

Grace's achievement in Kane's "Cleansed" is that she succeeds where Tinker fails. Love exists, despite Tinker's attempts to prove the opposite. In Mitchell's "Cleansed," there is only torture, misery and degradation.

Personally, I don't think that presenting the body of Kane's "Cleansed," absent it's soul, is a good way to introduce Kane to the mass audience of the National Theatre. The woman behind me was fuming: "what a lot of crap. If I was an actor, I'd have refused to be in it. The director needs to be thrown into a  mental home."

Maybe, I thought, but not the writer.

2 stars, for what remains of Kane's vision.

Steve, thanks for the enlightenment - I had no idea how much Katie Mitchell had intervened in this. On the other hand, without really understanding what was going on, I did respond to the dark power of the play. A case, I suppose, of ignorance is bliss.

Debbie, yes, it's just my opinion. Of course, there are some facts, such as a complete switcheroo on the ending, and an altered beginning.

Mallardo, I agree. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. I'm sure I'd have enjoyed the Nahum Tate Happy Ending King Lear a lot more than the actual King Lear the first time I saw the play. Now it would annoy me lol.

Cardinal Pirelli, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I know you are invested in the play and playwright, and will have interesting things to say. I don't think it is a "pure" version though, to write a new ending to this play. It seems like Nahum Tate, a less-ambiguous less-interesting resolution which refuses to engage with the meat and heart of the play, by imposing pre-existing expectations and prejudices upon the material. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it!

Was there anyone at the platform with Katie Mitchell on “Cleansed” yesterday?
SPOILERS NOW:
I thought it was very interesting: she was perfectly affable and open to questions and it was great to hear how she approached the text and the challenges that it implies. The decision to have a single set was dictated by practical considerations and she spoke of surrealism for framing the story (which in her words refused to be cohered into a single narrative) as Grace’s dream. Having Grace on stage all the time also helped to reinforce the feminist point of view: usually it is men who act violence. She said that nobody expected the fainting and she was sorry about that because it was never anyone’s intention to cause such reactions; her team (she stressed that the shaping of the show is a collective procedure and she laughed at her usual labelling as an “auteur” because of that) mostly feared laughter. The explicit and fairly realistic depiction of violence was done to highlight by contrast the moments of tenderness (love-making, someone undressing and standing there in full vulnerability). Katie Mitchell spoke several times of the beauty and tenderness of the play and told the audience that she imagines scenes visually and tries to build them based on painting rules like the golden section (ah, those years of art history at school finally paid off for me). The sound was developed in parallel to the acting and it was an essential element to create the whole piece. In order to avoid that the actors were ‘lost’ in the darkness of the violence on stage, every passage was choreographed and precisely planned so that the mechanical succession of movements reduced the understandably shocking experience of being either perpetrator or victim. She also said that they tried to find solutions for all the stage directions given by Sarah Kane but the directions about rats were something they could not manage to follow: in another production in Germany the director used real rats but they were too shy and had no interest in running away with someone’s fake foot and when Katie Mitchell and her team opted for socks with eyes, the effect was just comic and detracted from the mood of the play. There was also a question about why violence on stage make people faint whereas violence that we see each day on TV or the web leaves us mostly cold. Katie Mitchell has about 10-12 new shows to prepare from now to 2019 and she said that she is happy in her work spread all over Europe. I know that she is considered a very polarizing and unapproachable director but after she nearly hugged me when I went to see “Cleansed”, I am definitely on the side of those who like her work. I found very interesting to understand how her productions are created and how important is for her to make sure that every detail fits with the general approach to a text. Now I am looking forward to hear her and Robert Icke talk about how they approached Chekhov at the Almeida on the 17th March.

The idea that came out from the platform was that in theatre you are physically present while violence is taking place, whereas in TV, cinema or the web there is always the screen that allows you to distance yourself.

I saw this, this afternoon and I think it is a very safe assumption to make that The Lord Chamberlain would be doing cartwheels in his grave!!!

In over 40 years of theatregoing I have rarely found myself unable to find the good in everything I see. Until I saw this.

Agreed. Especially annoying as I was asked to put my bag in the cloakroom due to the possibility of someone fainting and hitting it (I was in the raised seats in the stalls). The queue was horrendous when I managed to escape.

Was this to protect your bag or the potential fainter?!

Hmmm, yes, well. Normally I'd be complaining about KM's poor lighting fetish which means even in the front rows you can't see anything on stage properly, but I didn't really mind with this...

So last night we had an actual vomiter, which added appropriate surround-smell as well as sound to the event; the clanking of the poor staff cleaning it up also blended in quite well. I hope they are getting paid extra for dealing with all of this.

It happened early on when I think something was happening with a tongue but I don't know as I had my eyes closed - which is one of my objections to this production, which is that I can't assess it properly since I wasn't looking at the stage for a lot of it. The kind of over the top slasher brutality it goes in for seemed completely pointless and got in the way of any point the play was trying to make - if there was one, which I'm not convinced about; there was no pretence at exploring the psychological or even physical effects of violence, it was just a series of horrible things happening to people. I closed my eyes because after all the PR I was hyper-aware of the possibility of not coping with it, but actually it probably wasn't particularly affecting because it was so stupid - more people were laughing than fainting.

Second main objection is that I felt the cast were being exploited to an unnecessary degree, though I assume and hope they were partners in developing it, chose that approach and could have said no to anything; like the violence, less is more and things become more intense if you imply and half show rather than just chuck everything out there.

Overall - if it hadn't been staged in so OTT a way, I'd probably have been bored for a lot of it. (In particular, I did wonder at one point why I was sitting there watching someone ponderously count up to 50...). It just seemed pretty pointless; no idea if that's the fault of the play or the production or a bit of both.

But as I said, I was deliberately not watching for good chunks of it, so I inevitably missed a lot. I did think there were some lovely, touching, tender moments.

I have wondered how a theatre would deal with this eventuality but as Abby says perhaps this was the play for it since it kinda fitted in, pity for the staff and surrounding audience members. Think I was probably wise in the end to give this one a miss.

You lost me at 'splashy'...

"Being in love is like being in Auschwitz" wrote Roland Barthes, a phrase both provocative and catching the extremity of those in love. Kane wrote the play as a response to the provocation and Mitchell, in turn, responds to Kane's provocation by turning it full circle. Two of our most forthright women in theatre, collaborating across life and death, one pushing the other whilst adapting to them, was thrilling to watch. And in the National Theatre, two theatremakers who have been in the top handful of our creative exports across Europe, in the British National Theatre this time, not exiled in Warsaw or Berlin or Amsterdam.

It's been a couple of weeks since I saw this and I still don't feel able to write about it other than saying that it's in the top echelon of productions I've seen.

In lieu of a review a quote from Kane's 'Crave'.

"If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”