Cleansed is the third play of Sarah Kane, first performed in 1998 at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs - Blasted opened in the same venue, only upstairs.
Just like Blasted, Cleansed is a violent, disturbing piece of work, influenced by Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, 1984 and Woyzeck.
The plot concerns a so-called university that functions more like a prison or an asylum, run by the sadistic Tinker as he seeks to rid the world of "undesirables." A woman named Grace, trying to find her dead twin brother, enters the university, only to be admitted and subjected to Tinker's sick ministrations.
Cleansed received a typically chilly reception in the UK, although not to the same extent as Blasted; however, it was very well-received in the rest of Europe.
This work contains the following Tropes:
- Ambiguous Ending: Grace is subjected to a sex change, with Carl's penis cut off and grafted to her pelvis. She is grateful to Tinker, while the limbless, mutilated Carl silently weeps; eventually, the sun comes out.
- Becoming the Mask: Throughout the play Grace is dressed in the clothes of her twin brother Graham, and imagines him speaking to her. By the end, a sex change operation has made Grace more or less exactly like Graham.
- Big Bad: Tinker.
- Bury Your Gays: Rod is dead, and Carl is most of the way there.
- Butt-Monkey: Robin is subjected to some of Tinker's most humiliating cruelties. It's hard to blame him when he kills himself.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Tinker does this to everybody that is admitted to the institute in some way or another.
- Creator Cameo: Kane played Grace in the last three performances due to the original actress injuring herself.
- Despair Event Horizon: Brought upon by someone learning to count. Robin learns how to count, but once he learns how long his stay in the university would be, he promptly hangs himself.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: There's quite a few:
- The institution is meant to be a place of learning, but it feels more like a concentration camp.
- During Carl's torture scene, some lines are reminiscent of Winston's torture in 1984.
- Carl suffers the same fate as William Shakespeare's Lavinia, being raped and deprived of hands and tongue, while his lover is murdered in front of him. And it only gets worse for him from there.
- Drugs Are Bad: In the first scene Tinker is presented as a dealer and deals Graham a fix after Graham states that he wants to quit, leading to his death.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Tinker appears to be somewhat fond of the peepshow dancer.
- Incest Subtext: There are implications that Graham and Grace's relationship went deeper than just being twins.
- Karma Houdini: There's no indication that Tinker will face any comeuppance for his atrocities.
- The Peeping Tom: Tinker watches everything and knows everything.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Graham's death brings Grace to the university.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: There are implications that the play is Grace's view of her time in a mental hospital.
- Tongue Trauma: Tinker cuts out Carl's tongue - a particular challenge for stage directors.
- Shout-Out: Sarah Kane was very open about her inspirations.
- The name came from Aristotle, who talked of theatre cleansing the audience of unwelcome emotions - in other words, catharsis.
- The concept came to Sarah after reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes where he claims rejected love is not unlike the situation of a prisoner in Dachau. Kane was appalled at first, but came to realize that it represented a loss of the self - and from there, where else can one go but madness?
- Carl's torture by impalement really happened in the Bosnian Genocide.
- The scenes with the flowers and chocolates are inspired by Freud's lectures on sexuality.
- The line "Love me or kill me" is taken from 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, which might help towards the incest subtext.
