Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the show’s creators but I’m firmly with the exiteers. This is barely a play and more a thin, vicious pantomime with an Isis-video aesthetic. The minuscule plot follows Grace (Michelle Terry) as she visits a prison hospital to receive news of a tortured relative. She’s immediately roped in as a victim and we’re treated to a sequence of gougings, knifings, electrocutions, rectal penetrations and tongue extractions which are bizarrely interspersed with scenes of lustful romance.
Alex Eales’s design stands out. The duck-egg blue paint of the smashed-up hospital peels away to reveal oatmeal plasterwork over a mahogany skirting board, which creates a harmonious ensemble of derelict coloration. But the script is a mass of childish unpleasantness and facile symbolism. A rat gets shot each time the show reaches a new plateau of savagery. Bursting sunflowers herald a spree of dancing and rough sex. The rhythm becomes predictable. Amputations and rapes are followed by disco music and rushed copulations between desperate lovers, who never seem to remove quite enough underwear to make the pelvic joinery credible. Beautiful Michelle Terry has to spend most of the show getting brutalised while stark naked. And just when you thought she’d been stripped and gangbanged enough, she’s prised out of her clothes yet again and trundled off to have a castrated penis sewn on to her genitals whereupon she’s wheeled back in to watch her tormentor-in-chief penetrating a youthful lap dancer whom he then shoots through the skull. Thanks, National Theatre, for that cache of visual delight.
The real difficulty is the emphasis on voyeurism. To watch a creature being smothered is pornographic.
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