Sarah Kane, Cleansed

'Either love me or kill me, Graham' is one of the longer sentences in Cleansed, echoing Roland Barthes' assertion that 'being in love is like being in Auschwitz', the somewhat tasteless variation on the Petrarchan agonised lover that is said to have inspired playwright Sarah Kane. Cleansed recreates Auschwitz in the form of some kind of hospital-turned-detention camp, in which the commandant figure Tinker and his goons deal with homosexuals and drug addicts by torturing and eventually killing them - presumably cleansing a  society of its deviants, though there is no picture of any wider political or social context. Into this arena comes Grace (the name is a hint) in search of her twin brother Graham, who is killed at the start of the play. Their ghostly sibling affection survives, sort of, though it is apparently all a hallucination; and so in a way does the love of two gays and a romantic attachment which another prisoner forms for Grace herself. Tinker has a stripper in a box onto whom he projects the feelings he has repressed and which Grace arouses. The stripper professes to love Tinker near the end, though that comes over as some kind of hysteria or conditioning. Indeed the whole play is an enactment of various aspects of hysterical psychology. The moments of love, if that is what they are, are rather crudely symbolised by flowers prodding up through the floor. At the end, the flowers, shafts of light and the descent of rain seem to promise a new beginning, humanity having momentarily crawled out from under the Orwellian boot stamping on its face forever.

Like Grace, the play too seems to want to be either loved or killed. It amounts essentially to almost non-stop torture for 105 minutes. Within a couple of minutes Graham's eyeball is injected, and this is followed by acts including a tongue being cut out, limbs chewed up in a torture machine, regular beating up of prisoners, rape, suicide, throat-cutting and shooting. There is also an endless scene involving a box of chocolates. Physical violence is complemented by other items from the vocabulary of shock such as onstage sex, masturbation, book burning and a graft of male genitalia onto our understandably traumatised protagonist. Those who love Cleansed and Kane's work in general admire the lack of compromise, the deconstruction of existing theatrical form, the challenge to theatre's own limits in terms of believable spectacle and the link it gave British theatre to middle European designer-led dramatic aesthetics. Kane handily takes elements of Buchner, Bond, Beckett (the Beckett of What Where, for example, although that places all violence, Greek-style, offstage), Howard Barker, and Pinter, and follows them to a point of extreme visceral violence that could not really be surpassed. Having seem a minor walkout by Hampshire gentry from our own mild production of The Revenger's Tragedy I think I can see the motive for such an enterprise. Sock it to the ghastly comfortable middle classes! Kane must have been following a vision of some kind. There was no guarantee anyone would hail this work, or even go to see it, when it was first put on. It can't just be a matter of épater la bourgeoisie. A nineties play, Cleansed undoubtedly picks up in its imagery on the atrocities of the Bosnian war and refuses even the consolation of intellectual examination of what it is showing, for authorial commentary is nowhere in the stabbing dialogue or periods of wordless cruelty. Perhaps we do need reminding - where we least expect it, in the plush comfort of the stalls - of our darker nature. There is nothing here that is worse than Bartolomé de las Casas on the Europeans' treatment of the unfortunate natives of Hispaniola in 1492, for example, or Goya's Disasters of War. There is an interesting essay by Dan Rebellato in the programme praising Kane's unyielding vision, and I read a warm appreciation of her talents by Mark Ravenhill later.

While such supporters love her, others will kill Cleansed and its creator for much the same reasons: the destruction of form means the removal of character development and plot, with their associated arcs, and leaves us with unchanging tone, exhaustion of compassion and ultimately disinterest in the barely formed characters, repetitive rhythms and a spectacle that continually doubles back and plays variations on its own motifs rather than taking us anywhere. Like punk, it represents an energising nihilism, another kind of cleansing; yet nihilistic language cannot of itself say anything especially interesting or involving. There is no suspense, no shift of perspective, no interesting dialogue, only the thudding predictability of something disgusting about to happen as a piece of apparatus or a chair or gurney are wheeled out yet again. Is there anything transcendent or enriching in such a vision? Goya and de las Casas believed in a concept of humanity that this work appears to dismiss. Maybe we could place Cleansed in a genealogy stretching from Oedipus through, well, The Revenger's Tragedy to Artaud and absurdism, theatre as a quasi-religious expiatory ritual. But another lineage is the gladiators, bear-baiting and snuff movies, an indulgence of the instinct that makes people slow down at car crashes. In renouncing the legacy of humanism and enlightenment, revolutionary art can end up becoming an emblem of the sensation-seeking postmodern consumerism that is busy replacing that intellectual heritage with various kinds of exploitative commodification. In the history of theatre, Cleansed is radical in its formal adventure and piercing pitch. But in the context of the wider entertainment culture, it is worrying close to horror porn.

Beyond such adulation and deprecation, there is another, and sadder, way of regarding Cleansed, which is as the product of a desperately troubled mind. Sarah Kane suffered from severe depression and took her own life at the hideously young age of 28. Of course it is dangerously reductive to read an output of five plays merely in terms of the author's tragic death. Yet while conceding that important point, I admit I find it impossible not to see such work as the expression of a mind working through its own nightmares - cleansing itself, perhaps - by giving them palpable form. The same association of life and art suggests itself in the lyrics and performance of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (much admired by Kane), however much one tries to dissociate the person who suffers and the mind that creates, or whatever it was exactly Eliot said. If this play had been witten by someone I knew, I would certainly be seriously concerned for their health. (I had a similar sensation when pondering Agnes Martin's grids at Tate Modern.)

I didn't love Cleansed, nor do I want, criticially, to kill it. The actors working with director Katie Mitchell certainly pulled off a committed and intense production. Drab design and relentless electro underscoring heightened the Bosch-like visionary feel of the work. It is certainly a young person's creation, bold in ambition, grindingly unsubtle in technique (those flowers!), an unsubtlety matched by the various clangs and beeps and buzzers of the production soundscape. The play is part of the creative career of a particular writer, and if the universe were just it would be seen as an early work. It wasn't her last play. I saw the later Crave a couple of years ago, which is strikingly different, simply four voices speaking across each other (and owing a good deal to Beckett's Play).  It is clear that Kane was setting herself interesting challenges and finding different shapes for the expressionist aesthetic. What could it have led to? Telly, is a likely guess. It's odd how some of this material now seems absorbed into the mainstream in grand guignol series like Luther and Whitechapel. Aficionados of brutality turn to film and television now: Lars von Trier's Nymphomania, Dennis Kelly's Utopia. Kane's theatre, inyerface, brutalist, whatever you want to call it, had to happen, perhaps, just as black canvases and 4'33" had to happen, following lines of enquiry to their natural terminus. But it seems quite a period piece now. It's the art of the dead end, and the problem of dead ends is that they don't go anywhere. There are no doubt special websites for those who like this sort of thing.