Cleansed

Rating:
Summary: Love in extremes
Review: Although many may be shocked by the violence in this work--and I don't think I've ever read as violent a play--(critics frequently tore her work to pieces), Sarah Kane was not out to shock for shock's sake--she was interested in pushing her characters (and audiences) to their limits.
In "Cleansed" they desperately try to cling some semblance of love. Characters merge, blur, and combine. Many die. All suffer.
Her work is visionary in the best sense of the word--The nightmarish university sticks in my mind in the way most horror films don't.
I don't consider this her best play--Phaedra's Love had more of an emotional impact on me--but it provides a dazzling, maybe blinding introduction to one of the most important British playwrights of the 90s.

Rating:
Summary: "Hold That 'Compassion!'"
Review: In "Cleansed," somewhat in the old-fashioned manner of the imagist poets of the early 20th century, Sarah Kane chose to eliminate all back story and pare away at narrative presumably to give audiences only "pure" drama. Granting the artist her Pinterish donee, this viewer is still perplexed by the question of how successfully finished a piece for dramatic representation the resultant work is. "Cleansed," whether seen or read, seems to me to come up short on realized meaningfulness. While there's no denying the power of some of the hallucinatory, indeed nightmarishly brutal individual scenes, the absence of audience friendly connectives suggests the author was not so much writing for the stage about the nightmarish as herself caught up in the grip of it, not so much on top of her material as in fact overwhelmed by it.
Oscar Wilde once said that the flip side of brutality - surprisingly enough - is the most mawkish sentimentality. In "Cleansed," Kane oscillates between these two unfortunately reductive poles, offering a vision of the human scene in which symbolic Senecan violence is lamely conjoined with some very tired, indiscriminately "compassionate" representations of salvation through "love." Not surprisingly from this vantage point, even the worst of her characters it turns out is also just a "victim."
The incomparable Eric Bentley saw the great playwrights as thinkers. I don't think, at least in "Cleansed," that the undeniably talented Sarah Kane could justly be called a thinker. In this play, she is operating on a less demanding principle, "I feel; therefore, it is." In "Cleansed," she might best be called the playwright as "feeler."

Rating:
Summary: My favorite play from the last 5 years (or so)
Review: This is my favorite play of sarah kane, an incredible playwright who i think would have grown to be an incredible force in theatre. her work is a revolution. this play is beautiful yet tradegic and sickening. Imagine seeing it. it is a visual marvel.