Introduction: Sarah Kane and Her Oeuvre
One of the most influential voices in modern European theatre, Sarah Kane, wrote five plays before her “suicide in 1999, just three days after the completion of her final play, 4:48 Psychosis, [which] virtually guaranteed the visionary playwright a place in theatrical history among the likes of George Buchner, Heinrich von Kleist, and Virginia Woolf” (Earnest 153). Although Kane attracted controversy while alive now “many critics celebrate Kane’s contribution: each of her plays is an experiment in new theatrical form, challenging traditional naturalistic writing” (Hurley 1143).
Her first play, Blasted, was produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1995. Her second and third play, Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed were produced at the Gate Theatre in 1996 and at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in 1998 respectively and in September 1998, Crave was produced by Paines Plough and Bright Ltd at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. 4.48 Psychosis, Kane’s last play, premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in June 2000 and her short film, Skin, produced by British Screen, premiered in June 1997.
Kane committed suicide in 1999 at the age of 28. Her drama breaks away from the conventions of naturalist theatre using extreme stage action to depict themes of love, death and physical and psychological pain and torture. Extreme themes of her work such as violence and sexuality as well as their dreary outlook at life have made her a pioneer in “in-yer-face theatre” that pushes the boundaries of conventional theatre.
The Play
“Cleansed departed from the legible context of English playwriting and broke up into an assemblage of images with a lineage in expressionism and performance art” (Waters 379). At the beginning of the play Graham, an addict, is given an injection into his eyes by Tinker, the supreme manipulator of the institution, and he dies of an overdose. Sometime later, Graham’s sister, Grace, comes to Tinker’s institution to collect her brother’s clothes. She wears Graham’s clothes, stays in the institution and has sex with Graham who appears to her. Robin, a young boy, who has befriended Grace is tortured and then kills himself. Rod and Carl are two lovers whose protestations of love are tested by Tinker by cutting out Carl’s tongue, hands and feet. Tinker, himself, makes love with a dancing woman whom he regularly visits in a booth. Finally Grace is attacked and operated upon and is given male genitals and it is as if she is reunited with Graham through this metamorphosis.
WWII and Concentration Camps
Sparked by the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, WWII dragged on for six years and the occupation of Poland was followed by aggression against other countries. Auschwitz “much the same as other Nazi concentration camps, was a state institution, managed by the German state central authorities.” (Mensfelt 4) and it associated “as the symbol of the Holocaust, of genocide and terror”. This camp “was set up by the German occupying forces in mid-1940 in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish town that the Nazis incorporated into the Third Reich” and “from 1942 onwards — it started becoming the largest centre of mass murder of Jews.” (Mensfelt 4). “The Germans isolated all Auschwitz complex camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with towers and barbed-wire fencing. All contact by prisoners with the outside world was strictly forbidden” (Mensfelt 7).
The Jews who were transported to the concentration camps were executed there or “during selection by SS doctors, those classified as fit to work or selected to undergo criminal medical experiments, were registered in the camp” and those considered “as unfit for work were murdered in the gas chambers…[including] the ill, the elderly, pregnant women, and children” (Mensfelt 9) but “more than 50% died in Auschwitz of hunger, excessive forced labor practices, terror, executions, appalling conditions, illness and epidemics, punishment, torture and criminal medical experiments.” (Mensfelt 8).
Cleansed as a Picture of Nazi Human Experimentation
In writing Cleansed “Kane is certainly drawn to extremes”: “‘if you want to write about extreme love you can only write about it in an extreme way,’” says Kane; she adds that “‘both Blasted and Cleansed are about distressing things which we’d like to think we would survive. If people can still love after that, then love is the most powerful thing.’” (Sierz 122). So “a central concern in Kane’s work… is a passionate, almost pathological identification with pain and trauma and a concomitant desire to communicate the horror of pain in its own idiom” (Waters 373). “Kane herself talked about Blasted and Cleansed as two plays in a possible trilogy about the ‘nature of war’.” (Aston 78) and in one of her interviews Kane revealed that Cleansed “was a response to Roland Barthes’s provocative comment in A Lover’s Discourse that being in love was akin to incarceration in Dachau” (Saunders 93).
Kane’s “emphasis on representation of violence is not to glamorize it or insensate the audience towards horrendous images, but is to show local and global realities in a stark and shocking manner to stimulate awareness.” (KUMBET 1203-1204).
The significance of the title of the play lies in the fact that “with the title ‘Cleansed’ Kane may be referring to ethnic cleansing which occurred in Nazi camps where people were reduced to subjects or to Bosnia where Serbian soldiers exerted harsh torture and pain on Muslims” (KUMBET 1203-1204).
The setting of the play is also critical since it becomes the visual representation of Kane’s ideas about war crimes and atrocities; it’s a university that is also a prison: “the institution Grace enters is described as a university with cricket grounds and medical rooms, but it functions like a site for animal experimentation… it is a death camp but also, in a contemporary twist, a rape camp… the setting is also a house of correction, a prison and an asylum” (Waters 380). Like those imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, the characters in the play are physically concentrated in one location: the university that is reminiscent of a concentration camp. It looks like an extermination camp where experiments are performed as well. The victims have no chance to escape. They are torn from the ones they love, are killed and are used as test subjects.
This play is a vision of “severe bodily torture” (Urban 43) and the tortures inflicted on the victims in this horrible place remind one of extermination practices by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. There are four main relationships in Cleansed: “Grace and Graham represent the fantasy of incestuous, identity-sharing twins; Carl and Rod are the classic couple, one member of which is idealistic, the other realistic; Tinker and the dancer represent domination and alienated love; Grace and Robin experience a teacher and pupil, mother and child rapport” (Sierz 119-120). Graham is an addict, Rod and Carl are homosexuals, Grace has incestuous desire sand Robin is a seemingly careless and shy person; thus their death and killing show an attempt to sterilizing those with undesirable trait slice those who were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered under the Nazi Germany. Just like the inmates of concentration camps who were subject to cruel experiments to determine how well and how long they could survive in those situations, the individuals in Cleansed are involuntary victims of harsh experiments as well, to test the durability of their love.
In Cleansed “five inmates are imprisoned in a barbarous university, each one viciously controlled by a doctor named Tinker” (Urban 43) and their acts are scanned and scrutinized by him. In fact, Tinker, a central character, is both a healer and a torturer. Tinker’s act of injecting a fatal dose of heroin into Graham’s eye at the beginning of the play, which leads to his death, hints at the experimentation on twins in Nazi camps during which chemicals were injected into twin’s eyes to change their eye color.
Conclusion
Kane’s Cleansed can be interpreted as her concern for social and political issues and by representing violence in her play, Kane purposefully attempts to dramatize our violent world using theatre as her medium. The play portrays a vivid picture of violence, torture and unethical human experimentation similar to those performed in Nazi concentration camps as a source of inspiration for Kane and as a background against which to explore love. These tortures include dismemberment, rape, forced feeding, surgical procedures, gunfire, physical assaults, injections and hanging. To Sierz the central theme of the play is “the ability of love to survive fascistic, institutional cruelty” and the fact that “love is the one basis of hope in an evil world” (120). The story is set in a death camp and the victims are brutally tortured to prove “that love is strong and that lovers endure” (Sierz 123); a topic that is itself worth pursuing in another research.
Works Cited
- Aston, Elaine. Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Biroglu, Esma. “The Depiction Of Violence In Sarah Kane’s Cleansed: Torture And Mutilation” Journal of Social & Humanities Sciences Research, 5 Dec. 2018, pp. 738-745.
- Earnest, Steve. “Theatre Journal.” Theatre Journal, vol. 57, no. 2, 2005, pp. 298-300. JSTOR.
- Gutscher, Lea Jasmin. Revelation or Damnation? Depictions of Violence in Sarah Kane’s Theatre. Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014.
- Hurley, Richard. “BMJ: British Medical Journal.” BMJ: British Medical Journal, vol. 340, no. 7756, 2010, pp. 1143-1143. JSTOR.
- Korda, Andrew. “The Nazi Medical Experiments.” ADF Health, vol. 7, Apr. 2006, pp. 33-37.
- KUMBET, Pelin. “A Web Of Power Circulating In Every Direction: Deleuze And Guattarian Reading Of 1 Sarah Kane’s Cleansed.” DTCF Dergisi Journal, 27 Dec. 2017, pp. 1180-1207.
- Mensfelt, Jarko, et al. Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Past and the Present. 2007.
- Ravenhill, Mark. “The Beauty of Brutality.” The Guardian, 28 Oct. 2006.
- Rayner, Francesca. (2009). Written on the body: gender, violence and queer desire in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. Ex aequo, (20), 55-64.
- Saunders, Graham. Love Me Or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester University Press, 2002.
- Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. Faber, 2001.
- Urban, Ken. “An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 23, no. 3, 2001, pp. 36-46. JSTOR.
- Waters, Steve. “Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma.” A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, John Wiley & Sons, 2008.