Cleansed - Review

Almeida Theatre, London

****

Written by Sarah Kane

Directed by Rebecca Frecknall

Pearl Chanda

Sarah Kane’s Cleansed is a bleak tale. A 100 minutes straight through detailing man’s inhumanity to man and woman, and how power can be so easily abused. Not for the faint hearted, Kane’s narrative is graphic and under the gifted helming of Rebecca Frecknall, the stagecraft on display at the Almeida is as brilliant as Kane’s writing is horrific.

Set in and around some dystopian institution, Leo Bill is Tinker, the play's authority figure and the rotten apple at the core of the evening’s malevolence. Sexually inadequate, his misogyny and sadism knows no limits as he wreaks unspeakable forms of torture upon the institution’s inmates.

 

All of Kane’s characters are deeply damaged, desperately needing care but at Tinker’s hands all they receive is cruelty, meted out in gruesome manifestations of rape, sodomy and violence that descend into inevitable nadirs of murder and suicide.

Alongside Bill, Frecknall’s cast are all magnificent. Pearl Chanda, Luke Cinque-White, Lizzy Connolly, Jack Riddiford, Parth Thakerar and Stuart Thompson capturing their respective characters' emotional pain and despair and, when required, brilliantly depicting the physical pain of the inhumane atrocities that are forced upon them.

Ingeniously, Frecknall leaves little to our imagination - and it is a credit to the show’s intimacy director (Ingrid Mackinnon), illusionist (Chris Fisher) and special make-up designer (Susanna Peretz) that, together with the cast’s sublime acting skills, this nightmare is played out with such conviction.

Harrowing drama, stunningly performed.

Runs until 29th August

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Broken Glass - Review

Young Vic, London

*

Written by Arthur Miller

Directed by Jordan Fein

Eli Gelb, Pearl Chanda and Alex Waldmann

Rarely is a production as muddled and disappointing as its underlying script as is to be found in Jordan Fein’s take on Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass.

Set in 1938 in New York's Brooklyn, Broken Glass is one of Miller's later plays. Through the dysfunctional marriage of Phillip and Sylvia Gellburg, the playwright seeks to explore his own interpretation of the American Jewish experience, set against a backdrop of the rise of antisemitism in Nazi Germany - the play’s title drawn from the infamous Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass of November 1938 that saw German synagogues torched across the country. 

Miller explores a very tenuous connection that sees Sylvia lose the use of her legs, ostensibly as a reaction to the persecution of German Jewry. That Sylvia’s concern for events in Europe is dismissed by her isolationist husband and friends is plausible - but by rendering her immobile because of what the Nazis are doing, Miller, through such crass sensationalising, weakens his argument that seeks to explore her sense of ideological loneliness. Add in to the play's storyline the facts that: 1. the Gellburgs’ marriage has been devoid of physical intimacy for 20 years and; 2. Sylvia’s physician (Dr Harry Hyman played by Alex Waldmann) is a man whose sense of professional ethics has deserted him in his sexual desire for his patient, and it becomes clear that the whole (one-act)  evening really is a mess. Coming from a writer who’s demonstrably capable of literary genius, Broken Glass has to represent the nadir of Miller’s creative arc.

Fein has a lot to answer for too. A detail of his set, he has the Gellburgs' marital bed strewn with newspapers. If the newspapers had been facsimiles of 1930s newsprint that would have been fair enough. But with the subtlety of a brick however, Fein has selected real recent British publications, all with blazing headlines that have been chosen to demonise the right-wing of Britain's contemporary political spectrum, Fein clearly not realising that this country's current antisemitic hatred is largely being stirred up by the Islamist-sympathising Left. Fein's casting choices are equally mismanaged, Eli Gelb and Pearl Chanda as the Gellburg couple appearing far too young to have raised a 20 year-old.

Disappointing theatre.

Runs until 18th April

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton