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Life is sweet I´ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you Rod not me more like me than I ever was Love me or kill me, Graham I won´t turn away from you If you could change one thing in your life what would you change? / My life Lots of people know me, they´re not in love with me and the rats eat my face Gagging for it/ Begging for it/ Barking for it/ Arching for it/ Aching for it
Sarah Kane's Cleansed premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London on 30 April 1998. Directed by James Macdonald. The roles were performed by Martin Marquez, Stuart McQuarrie, James Cunningham, Danny Cerqueira, Suzan Sylvester, Daniel Evans and Victoria Harwood. Cleansed is set in a university/concentration camp with episodes including in the white room (the sanatorium), the red room (sports hall), the black room (the showers/peep booth).
Gaëlle Ranc in The Notion of Cruelty in the Work of Sarah Kane writes
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You can read the full text on the site here.
Ken Urban in From An Ethics of Catastrophe - The Theatre of Sarah Kane writes
… a play which removes the final vestiges of naturalism from her work. She opts, instead, for a world of vivid stage pictures that push what theatre can show to its limits. A quick glance at the text reveals that there is almost as many stage directions as dialogue, and the spoken lines convey a sense of immense compression. She uses the smallest amount of words possible to achieve coherence and completeness. All exposition is stripped away; we are given just the most basic of details. |
You can read the full text on the site here.
“the play interrogates the limits of theatre and representation in its extremity and breakdown of conventional form. Exposing the theatrical construction of violence, through various techniques, does little to protect us from the horror of observing it… When characters are in the furthest extremity of pain, their movements become a kind of expressive dance. There is lyricism in it but not so it beautifies violence. Importantly, it never seems gratuitous, either… The poetry comes in other forms, too. There is sudden, immense beauty, declarations of love, romantic clinches and humour. Set alongside Kane’s brand of post-dramatic theatre, the play’s message is strangely romantic: the human need, maybe even demand, for love and for beauty persists, every bit as vital a force as violence” (Arifa Akbar, The Guardian, 30 July 2026, click here).
Sarah Kane says "almost every line in Cleansed has more than one meaning... I wanted to stretch the theatrical language".
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