The promotional copy for the latest production at London’s National Theatre, “Cleansed,” calls the play “unflinching.”
For some, apparently, “unbearable” might be a better description. The BBC reported that at least five people have fainted while taking in the graphic play, which features scenes of rape, torture and dismemberment.
Another 40 walked out, the broadcaster says.
The play hovers on “the border between beauty and brutality” and “imagines a world in which language, human relationships and the body itself are pared away to bare bone,” the National Theatre writes in describing the play.
Some of that paring is quite literal.
One character has his tongue and hands cut off. Then there’s the beatings and the rape and the … well, let’s just forget about those parts.
Under a headline declaring the evening “torture for all concerned,” Daily Mail reviewer Quentin Letts called the play “a corker of dull awfulness.”
“Inmates of some drug-rehabilitation prison are sliced and diced, even while mating like monkeys in a zoo,” he wrote.
“Figures in black balaclavas assist in the humiliation. With mistress-of-stunts Katie Mitchell directing, we have, from the start, ambient noise, honking klaxons, cage doors clanking, fizzing strip-lights — no cliche is spared,” Letts said.
Even among those who have been kinder to the love-is-torture motif of the play, all the violence is troubling.
Guardian reviewer Michael Billington wrote that the production’s “escalating horrors have a sense-numbing effect that outweighs its redemptive lyricism.”
On social media, some who said they’ve seen the play disagreed, arguing that it’s a powerful piece of work from an artist who many call one of Britain’s most influential modern playwrights, Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999.
One Twitter used called it “as raw, sinister, elliptical, moving, disquieting & horribly pertinent as it should be.”
Mitchell told BBC Radio’s “Front Row” that even for the cast, the dark material can be tough to handle.
“We all dream huge nightmares,” she told the show. “Everyone has very, very strange nightmares where very extreme events take place.”
But, she said, those who focus on the violence are missing the point.
“All of the torture that is going on is led by a doctor whose making tests about love, its durability. The gay couple in it, the durability of their love is being tested, and they are being tortured to see whether their love will survive, and their love does.
“So love wins in this play,” she said. “Not violence.”
Though you might still want to flinch.