Sarah Kane's Cleansed, inspired by Roland Barthes's comparison of a rejected lover to a concentration-camp prisoner, closed the Almeida's summer season under Rebecca Frecknall's direction.
Rebecca Frecknall directed Sarah Kane’s 1998 play Cleansed at the Almeida Theatre in Islington from Tuesday 21 July to Saturday 29 August 2026, closing the theatre’s summer season.
Kane wrote the play after reading a passage in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse that compares a rejected lover to a prisoner at Dachau. She set it in what her stage directions call a university, run as a torture chamber by the sadistic Tinker, where two lovers and two siblings face extreme violence.
The script asks a stage to grow a sunflower through the floor and to show rats carrying away a severed foot. It premiered at the Royal Court’s Theatre Downstairs in April 1998, directed by James Macdonald, then the most expensive production in the theatre’s history.
Kane wrote five plays before her death by suicide in 1999, aged 28. The critic Aleks Sierz grouped her with the writers he called in-yer-face theatre. Cleansed reached the National Theatre in 2016, the first of her plays staged there.
The Almeida is a single-auditorium house on Almeida Street that stages one production at a time, so the run had the whole building. Leo Bill played Tinker and Pearl Chanda played Grace.