'Cleansed' Means Catharsis

By Piotr Gruszczynski

France’s Festival d’Avignon will feature Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of Cleansed by the late British playwright Sarah Kane. The production, which premiered this season, was a collaboration between three Polish theatres: Warsaw’s Teatr Rozmaitosci, Wroclaw’s Teatr Wspolczesny and Poznan’s Teatr Polski. It runs in Avignon July 20-23.

These days, one could well say that Sarah Kane is Poland’s national writer. Recent stagings of her dramas Cleansed and 4.48 Psychosis, in the Polish cities of Warsaw, Wroclaw and Poznan, have prompted astonishingly strong discussions between critics and people who normally have no interest in theatre. Poles have, in fact, felt obliged to say something about these performances without even seeing them. In particular, Cleansed, staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski, one of the younger generation’s most talented directors, generates polemics even now, several months after its premiere. What is the reason for such visceral reactions? Why all the discussion of Sarah Kane?

The most obvious reason is the provocative character of her plays. Kane belongs to the trend in contemporary British drama that Poles call “new brutalism”—a seemingly pejorative term that in fact refers simply to the shock of the audience. But of course, shock alone does not provoke serious discussions of theatre.

So the more likely explanation for the Kane phenomenon is the relative dearth of Polish contemporary drama. Young directors are staging mostly classical pieces these days, and they are hungry for new authors. British, German and even Russian writers seem to present a temporary solution to the shortage.

But, the primary reason for the deep interest in Kane’s plays here is the fact that they mesh with the most important research that has been conducted by Polish theatre artists (as opposed to the craftsmen): i.e., the search for the true nature of the human being and for the nature and origin of evil. After a long period in which the theatre community focused on political drama, now existence itself seems the most important subject.

Warlikowski was a student of Polish master director Krystian Lupa and worked as an assistant to Peter Brook and Giorgio Strehler. For a long time his theatre was practically disowned by very conservative, close-minded Polish critics, but now he has formed a relationship with Warsaw’s Teatr Rozmaitosci (Polish theatre’s new hot spot) and with some European theatres, and has persevered in creating his own stage language. His stagings of several of Shakespeare’s plays reject the “official,” politicized interpretation given for years by Jan Kott. For Warlikowski, history and politics aren’t the most important themes in Shakespeare’s writing: Instead, the young director turns the audience’s eyes toward the dark side of man. A similar emphasis has been key to Warlikowski’s stagings of the ancient Greek tragedies. His production of Euripides’ Bacchae, the darkest of the ancient Greek dramas, questioned an assumption that up to then had been unquestionable in Poland, namely the goodness of God.

Cleansed is the next step into the darkness. In the play, the residents of a strange campus, which resembles a psychiatric clinic or a concentration camp, are living on the edge of humanity. All of them suffer from a total absence of love. They are helpless all of the time and stupid some of the time—the way only people can be. Warlikowski gives Kane’s play the arc of a classical tragedy, and that creates a huge paradox, because Kane’s characters are not tragic characters. He has found a poetic, almost lyrical language that makes Cleansed wildly beautiful—sometimes even to the point of kitsch—and renders the cruelty of the drama even more brutal. I think this is the only way to put Kane’s plays on stage.

Warlikowski’s production is like a razor: extremely sharp and extremely clean. By emphasizing the beauty of cruelty, the director seems to give birth to a new style of Polish theatre: far from playing, close to being. Artaud would be satisfied.

Piotr Gruszczynski is a theatre critic based in Warsaw.