Content note: Please be advised this production contains, and this review refers to, simulations of drug use, extreme sexual & physical violence, incest, and suicide.
The X Collective close their 2024 season with Sarah Kane’s confronting and brutal play Cleansed. Directed by Wayne McPhee, with assistant direction and design by Ronan Mason, this production is the first time Cleansed has been staged in Queensland.
Cleansed premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1998 and was Kane’s third play, part of the 90s movement of “in-yer-face theatre” by young British playwrights that used shocking or vulgar material to elicit a response from the audience.
Cleansed is set in an institution overseen by the sadistic Tinker, who styles himself as a doctor but may just be a self-important drug dealer. Tinker’s patients include a disturbed and illiterate young man named Robin, who hears voices telling him to kill himself; lovers Rod and Carl, one of whom is progressively maimed by Tinker; and new addition Grace, a traumatised young woman who comes to the institution in search of her brother only to be told he died months before.
As the play progressed, Tinker’s “patients” endured torture, mutilation, sexual violence, and other horrors, but found solace in each other. Rod and Carl talked about love and commitment to one another, while Grace was reunited with her brother Graham and began teaching Robin to read and write. Grace and Graham have a sexual relationship, but it’s not clear whether this incest is intended literally or emotionally, since it is not clear whether Graham is alive, dead, or a projected masculine self created by Grace’s mind.
The entire cast did an admirable job with the very dark and disturbing material. Robert Wainwright played the role of Tinker with complexity and focused intensity. Wainwright brought an emotional intelligence to the character alongside his violence, a strange awe and an eagerness to please or help. There were also moments, after Tinker had severed Carl’s feet, where he seemed to feel disgust or alarm at what he was doing.
Charlotte Kippax played Grace with a deep sadness, and her screams continue to echo in my brain. Sam Liddell played Graham and had a great chemistry with Kippax, and Michael Meredith-Pocock gave a heartbreaking performance as Robin. Josiah Morgan and Lachlan Boyes created an intense connection between Carl and Rod, managing the challenges of spurting blood and severed limbs as well as the emotional depth of their roles. At one point during the performance Morgan’s chair fell off the edge of the riser, but he barely blinked and continued smoothly with the scene. Natasha McDonald played the role of an unnamed woman who danced suggestively to Portishead’s Glory Box for Tinker, partially obscured behind a screen and sometimes engaging him in conversation.
Staged in Fortitude Valley’s Holy Trinity Hall, the setting was divided into a number of locations: Tinker’s command station at a desk full of monitors; the room where Carl and Rod seemed to remain throughout the play; the corner where Tinker watched the woman dance; and the room that Grace, Graham, and Robin appeared to share. Prop weapons, uncanny severed body parts, and litres of fake blood were also used in the visceral staging of Cleansed, and an especially impressive feat of stagecraft was the sudden appearance of flowers, growing in unlikely places and seemingly out of thin air.
The play began with a video projection that gave the sense of walking down a dimly lit corridor. The length and atmosphere of the video, as well as the accompanying sound design, helped to immerse the audience in the setting and give a sense of what was to come. Lighting and sound design contributed to the play’s impact, such as the strobing and heavily distorted voices that Grace hears in withdrawal.
The actors’ voices were occasionally swallowed by the high ceilings, but not to an extent that disrupted the flow of the storytelling. Both the script and the staging were filled with motifs that repeated, especially around themes of truth, love, and friendship.
Graphic violence aside, the play’s lack of definitive meaning was equally haunting. Cleansed leaves many unanswered questions to mull over but, ultimately, the play always seems to return to love and the idea that love can persist under, and fortify us to endure, the most harsh and horrific conditions. The characters’ earnest expressions of affection are even more stark in contrast with the horrors around them. Cleansed depicts tenderness amongst unthinkable brutality, and it is this tension that makes the work so memorable. I am consistently impressed by the ability of Wayne McPhee and The X Collective to mine such depths of human darkness, misery, and suffering without the resulting work feeling indulgent or sensationalised.
Between torture scenes, sexual violence, nudity, blood, and dismemberment, Cleansed is truly not for a faint heart or a weak stomach… but it is a visceral, gripping, and challenging piece of theatre delivered with absolute commitment.
Cleansed will be performed at Holy Trinity Hall, Fortitude Valley, from 17 October – 2 November 2024
For ticketing and further information, click here
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