“Cleansed” at Almeida Theatre
Tom Bolton in North London
★★★★★
30 July 2026
Rebecca Frecknall signs off her highly successful time as Associate Director at the Almeida Theatre (before moving to the Old Vic) with a statement production of perhaps the most feared play of modern times. This is due to both the events in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, which are unremittingly brutal, and the challenges it presents to anyone attempting to stage it.
Pearl Chanda and Jack Riddiford.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
Frecknall has said that every page of the play contains something that seems unstageable, and 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 are violently medical in nature. We meet some of the male inmates. Robin and Rod begin a relationship, although Rod is cynical about anything except the “now”. Graham begs for drugs from Tinker, who injects him in the eyeball with an overdose that kills him. It is clear from the opening moments what Kane will be giving us.
Later, Grace arrives, looking for her dead brother’s clothes. They appear to have had an incestuous relationship, and the resurrected Graham remains on stage with her throughout. She swaps clothes with vulnerable loner Carl, 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 barbaric 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 an edgy but likeable Carl which makes the play’s grimmest scene (which I will not describe) all the more terrible to watch as it involves him. Pearl Chandra’s Grace drives the play as the central female character, targeted and exposed but changing the men around her. Leo Bill shows Tinker torturing his charges like a bored plumber, in work jacket and glasses, though later he is emotionally disarmed by Lizzy Connolly’s erotic dancer who he has been manipulating. As Robin and Rod, Stuart Thompson and Parth Thakerar play out a heartbreaking real relationship amid the gore. Jack Riddiford’s Graham is the spectre at the bloody banquet.
Cleansed remains a revelatory work. Nearly 30 years after its premiere there is still nothing like it, and it is now surely recognized as a modern European classic.
