Cleansed

Read our review of Cleansed.

‘You can have empathy for anyone’ – Rebecca Frecknall on staging Sarah Kane’s Cleansed.

Sarah Kane’s harrowing masterpiece about love and torture was last revived a decade ago, when Katy Mitchell’s production caused audience members to faint. Now Almeida deputy Rebecca Frecknall waves goodbye to the theatre that made her name with a revival, and a rare deviation for her from the classic American plays she tends to direct. The plot isn”t exactly easy to describe, but it follows a group of inmates in a hospital-like inistitution presided over by the monstrous Tinker, who tortures them, experiments on them, and commits various other unspeakable acts both physical and psychological.

Leo Bill, Pearl Chanda, Luke Cinque-White, Lizzy Connolly, Jack Riddiford, Parth Thakerar and Stuart Thompson star. Genuinely about as extreme as art gets, it’s not for the faint of heart.