Katie Mitchell's Cleansed

"All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
All I want is a room with view.
I will give you my finest hour
The one I spent watching you shower
I will give you my finest hour, oh yeah"

Blondie, "Picture This"

When discussing a piece of theatre, it seems logical to begin by discussing the piece of theatre itself. 

This is not one of those discussions, because this is a piece of theatre directed by Katie Mitchell - and there are few directors working today who are burdened with suitcase after suitcase of useless critical baggage like she is. Her naturalistic productions of Chekhov, Euripides and other writers at the National were divisive, and her multimedia productions (which fused live performance with technology to create what she called "live cinema") were practically groundbreaking. In the years following however Mitchell quietly disappeared, instead working in Europe at theatres like the Schaubühne where she felt she could create her most radical, extreme and feminist productions. 

So her production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed  is quite a big deal. Not only does mark the National Theatre of Great Britain staging a play by one of the best playwrights in Great British history for the first time - I never quite believed this, yet somehow it seems that even our biggest theatre is capable of committing such an injustice - it marks something of a homecoming for Mitchell herself - an institution whose misogyny caused her to leave it.

The play itself follows various figures attempting to survive in some kind of bizarre torture institution. We have Grace, who has come to look for her dead brother Graham, and then Road and Carl, a young gay couple being tortured to test their love, and then Tinker, a psychopathic dealer/doctor who craves the love of a peep-show dancer yet doesn't know how to feel love.

While the use of a university setting was clearly the intention of Kane, Mitchell instead opts for a psychiatric institution which, due to abandonment or other reasons, has been overrun by dirt and trees, gorgeously summarizing the clash between love and hate Kane portrays. It's a beautiful design by Alex Eales. Not because it's aesthetically pleasing in the way an Ivo Van Hove production is, say, but because it's just so realistic. What he and Mitchell have done is create a small slither of a fully-realised world, and it just so happens that the slither they chose was one where such horrific, atrocious things happen. The lighting by Jack Knowles is also top marks: dark enough that this place seems like hell, but bright enough that we can see every act of mutilation crystal clear.

It's this idea of a *fully realised* world that brings me to the performances, which are some of the most un-naturalistic yet naturalistic performances I've seen. Like her production of Alles Weitere Kennen Sie Aus Dem Kino at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Mitchell has the characters perform their lines under duress, with Tinker and his attendants being an inescapable force who are often present even in the scenes the text says they aren't. Dialogue is sparse, and it's interesting to note just how little of it there is full stop. Words just sort of crop up in the haunting soundscape (sound design by Melanie Wilson and music by Paul Clark) which mixes helicopters passing overhead with ghostly replayings of lines screamed by the characters. When there are exchanges, the characters speak fast because they know they could be dead in a few minutes. All of the performances are fantastic, but Michelle Terry (on-stage the whole time, often fully nude for long stretches of it) is once again proving to us all that she's one of the best actresses working today. Her performance is worth the cost of admission alone, if I'm happily honest. And this is a demanding play, especially on Peter Hobday as the tortured Carl. Over the course of the play he has his tongue pulled out, and then his fingers and toes shredded. 

And the violence itself is disgusting. Realistic enough that it seems to be plausible, but not realistic enough that it distracts (like the working taps in Othello a few years back). When Carl has a large metal pole pushed up his anus, we see the pole lubricated and a small cardboard tray placed beneath him to catch any droppings. It's this horrendous attention to detail that just makes you squirm, and yet you can't look away because the world Mitchell presents is just so beautiful even in the moments of torture. On a personal note, the scene I found toughest to watch (after the needle being put into the eyeball) was the scene where Robin is force-fed an entire box of chocolates he bought as a present for Grace. This was the weaponisation of romance, affection as a noose. 

But the thing I loved most* about the production was how completely and utterly un-British it was. This is the kind of frightening, shocking yet ultimately moving work that just wouldn't be made under the National's previous artistic director, Nicholas Hytner. It was incredible to watch Cleansed and then step outside into the chilly London night. If this marks the start of the National producing more challenging work that will - one day - put us in the same league artistically as theatres in Germany and the rest of Europe, then this really is a significant production. Not that is isn't significant without all the contextual baggage about our relationship with Europe - it's pretty much a flawless production in every regard. It's one of the few pieces of theatre (re: Oresteia) that I've become utterly and completely *lost* in. The sum experience, the emotions that emerge organically from every single individual reaction it causes are so overwhelming and powerful. It's relentless in both horror and love, so uncompromising in the message it blasts into the head of anyone who watches it. 

And hearing a song by Blondie in a National Theatre production put a big fucking grin on my face: 

* I didn't, actually. I loved everything about it.