FringeReview UK 2026

Cleansed

Almeida Theatre

Genre: Drama, Feminist Theatre, LGBTQIA+, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Almeida Theatre, Islington

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Is Cleansed finally being absorbed into the theatre? Alongside Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis returning to the Royal Court last year; and the (oddly) rarely-revived Crave? Cleansed is the one with incest and (a Kane theme) mutilation and rape; but also a trembling tenderness that some forget. And one observed suicide that seems for the observer out of character. But then they’re changing too. Ten years after Katie Mitchell brought the first production of a Sarah Kane play to the National, seventeen years after the dramatist’s death, Rebecca Frecknall brings Kane’s 1998 Cleansed to the Almeida till August 29.

There’s been less sensationalism than previously, with the National’s almost gleeful reports of faints. Phone cameras are required to be covered with a sticker. That’s it. Visceral, horrifying, provocative, gratuitous. We’ve been circling Cleansed nearly 30 years. Time to move on, just a little.

Cleansed is a pivotal play in Kane’s tiny corpus, still imbued with the violence of earlier work (and we’re talking barely five years of writing here); but pointing to the rapt withdrawals of Crave and 4.48. Like them it plays without an interval; here for 100 minutes.

Graham (Jack Riddiford) a user is injected with a smack-in-the-eye by Tinker (Leo Bill), a Dr Mengele figure denying he’s a doctor, experimenting with torture on loving couples to see how far they’ll suffer for love. Grace (Pearl Chanda) seeking her brother Graham six months later loves him in every sense. Simultaneously wide-eyed Carl (Luke Cinque-White) loves older Rod (Parth Thakerar). Late-teen Robin (Stuart Thompson), swapping Graham’s clothes with Grace, adores her.

Grace voluntarily steps into the shoes walking her to this place and finds Graham, or his very corporeal shade. Since he can’t leave, she won’t. Both couples manage to make love. Grace watches with increasing horror as Carl’s progressively maimed; in one early scene literally dyno-rodded. Yet elsewhere people are assailed by seemingly invisible forces, something Frecknall employed in Streetcar. Remarkable physical choreography, it softens some of the horror, or rather allows us to see past it.

Chanda’s Grace, in Graham’s suit or vulnerably naked, concentrates anguish and compassion not just for her brother Graham but Carl, Robin, whom she starts teaching to read; indeed everyone self-incarcerated (as in Kafka though, one might escape). The notion Grace might become physically, voluntarily the observed object of her love raises issues not even Kane can compass here, but which she intends should resonate. Chanda, who played in a Sheffield revival of Crave, is completely inside Kane’s world: of hallucinated feelings, on occasion a Strindbergian dream torture-chamber with Artaud side-aisles.

Difficulties begin in Kane’s settings: Cleansed moves from snowflakes to sun, on the whistling fence perimeters of a university. Here, dispensing with snow, Madeleine Girling’s naturalistic design replicates a derelict hospital lab with a corridor behind it where Sam Lyon-Behan’s fight direction flickers past like a silent movie framed by the windows. Chris Fisher’s illusions recess a shivering realism, aided by Susanna Peretz’s prosthetics and effects; as blood spatters everywhere.

Lit by Lee Curran, that garishly dull neon world is suddenly blinded by the outdoors. There’s a surprise with sunflowers as the set suddenly recesses, a visionary reveal. It suggests not only why flowers keep poking through when love’s made, but an underlying tenderness merely concreted over.

Elsewhere Debbie Duru’s grungy clothes bring surprise doublings. Whereas George Dennis’ sound lends eerie schlock moments, composer Angus McRae stitches Handel’s Royal Fireworks on repeat and The Kinks’ ‘Days’ at different points: tinnily out of the radio or at full blast. If music can sound oxymoronic, it triumphs here.

It’s a world gesturing to an authority that doesn’t exist save with Tinker, since Kane sets up authoritarianism’s chief desire: to torture love. The excuse is a drug-detox clinic. What is cleansed though is love and humanity. Yet everyone here wants to make love, and most do.

The text directs shrouded figures at certain points, dispensed with here, rendering it Tinker’s torture-lab alone. Equally Tinker’s own obsession, a Woman (Lizzy Connolly) dancing in a light-defined rectangle, emerges to Tinker’s compliments about her breasts. Connolly’s passionate Woman draws Bill’s Tinker into startling regions, away from his laconic monotone. That the self-loathing Tinker, inscrutably played by Bill like a dishevelled, casually brutal inquisitor, should also feel love is part of Kane’s point though. The moments of his exquisite care for the Woman during lovemaking, after everything before it, is more visceral than torture.

When – in the original, not here – live rats are shot, and Carl breaks “do it to Rod” we’re being loudly quoted 1984. Other dystopias jostle like Pinter’s The Hothouse and most of all Büchner’s Woyzeck – soldier-turned-experiment – which Kane directed. Touchingly too, flowers breed through the floor-cracks, out of a poem by Brian Patten. Another Kane joke.

Whereas Mitchell gilded and gelded, snuffing Kane’s redemptive moments, Frecknall sticks to the original. In doing so she reveals Cleansed as the most sheerly theatrical of Kane’s plays, the one with the widest range and still capable of nuance. Frecknall goes for its tenderness, rather than torture, which she doesn’t flinch from either. Not everything can be realised (rats!), but it will be some time before this production is surpassed.

Thompson as Robin and Riddiford as Graham lend a stark dignity to their suffering, as well as different kinds of passion. Cinque-White and Thakerar almost twitch and jerk on piano-wire as Carl and Rod, with their feelings stretched. But it’s Chanda’s witness of anguish, of concentration, of touching raw wounds helplessly, that stamps this production as a road to redeeming Cleansed for ourselves. Chanda’s Grace – and Cinque-White’s Carl – anchor love as the hallmark. And as Kane intended, this production is uniquely redemptive amidst the horrors.

Intimacy Director Ingrid McKinnon, Casting Director Julia Horan CDG, Prosthetics and Special Effects Makeup Designer Susanna Peretz, Costume Supervisor Olivia Ward, Associate director Roberta Zurio, Illusions Associate Andy Room, Dramatherapist Wabriya King.

Production Manager Emily Brown, Production Assistant Frances Bennett, CSM Heidi Lennard,  DSM Natalie Braid, ASM Ben Dootson, Stage Management Placement Charlotte Hamlin.

Published July 30, 2026July 30, 2026 by Simon Jenner