Philosophy Of The World / Sarah Kane – Cleansed

Recently I’ve been to the theatre a bit; so why not bang a review up of what I saw? First one very clearly of interest to the Freq hordes; the second one, who knows?

Philosophy Of The World (In Bed With My Brother, Yard Theatre)

I’m not a theatre nerd. I’m a music nerd. As a music nerd I of course think The Shaggs are the best band. Theatre about The Shaggs? Count me in.

Now so the thing In Bed With My Brother is that they’re not massively likely to approach a subject straight-on. And that makes sense — there isn’t that much about The Shaggs here. Nominally we get the story every music nerd knows — weird dad, home-schooled kids, record nearly lost to posterity. But it’s what happens afterward (acts two and three) that’s most fun.

The experience they’ve created — bits of audience interaction, some fourth-wall breaking with an engineer-cum-Svengali / director — isn’t straight-up a story per se. It does tell the story of The Shaggs, and importantly it does intimate the difficulty that the story is kind of about Austin Wiggin — as a feminist story, it’s difficult not to see the threads of parental control. There’s a cute and touching moment where Austin dies and the girls celebrate, but realise there’s now a gap; they don’t have to play music, but maybe they could. Adapting to freedom after abusive and controlling relationships is tough.

What happens in acts two and three are where the meat of the story is though — interactions between the women playing the Wiggin sisters and the Svengali take on fraught turns. By the time of act three, a kind of iconoclasm takes hold and the set is assaulted; the closing is a pretty horrendous monologue, taking in elements of the difficulty of feminist art under patriarchal domination. There’s something of a focus on Valerie Solanas and the mishandling she faced at the hands of Andy Warhol. And through it all the woman playing Helen Wiggin persists with drumming, chaotically and excitedly.

I don’t want to give the game away more than I already have, but it is an incredible play. I was apprehensive, as a music nerd, that it’d be playing it for laughs or similar, but they did something I didn’t expect at all. In pulling at the threads of domination, they position The Shaggs in a tradition of radical female-led art.

That’s not necessarily to claim The Shaggs were feminists, but rather to claim them as an imperative subject of feminism. A band that is challenging on a facile level — the music is weird and atypical, as Freq readers will know — but also challenging on the level of how do music nerds (who heavily skew male) approach The Shaggs, and the level to which Austin Wiggin’s control is uncomfortable.

I don’t know what I wanted from this play ultimately — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this. But having seen it, this is definitely what I should’ve wanted, and you should too.

Sarah Kane – Cleansed (Rebecca Frecknall, Almeida Theatre)

More in the realm of imperative feminist subjects. If you know Sarah Kane, it’s probably for her being a playwright of extremity. Her work is incredibly violent and when it’s not violent it’s horrendous. She died young and left a small but amazing body of work (five plays, one screenplay). Of that small canon, Cleansed is probably the one most obsessed with violence and sadism.

I’ve read the play countless times and I suspect Cleansed is the one that is harder to map onto a purpose; so it’s worth saying from the off that the staging of this is important and made the play make a lot more sense. The play when read does read somewhat like a collection of ghastly violences. An instruction like “a sunflower breaks through the bottom of the stage” doesn’t carry as much weight until you see it happening.

So the thing of interest to Freq readers — assumming y’all are primarily musical — is that the sound design on this (George Dennis) and the composition (Angus MacRae) are incredible. While the foley is largely absent (which is as well — I was glad not to hear the squelching of a needle to the eyeball), there’s a great deal of buzzing ambience, intensely throbbing basslines underpinning multiple scenes, wide dynamics, screeching metal scraping. Given the care and attention to the characters — broadly, a collection of mental patients and a sadistic impotent overseer (Tinker) — it’s appreciated that the sound operates on the same level — tension is never relieved and the sound follows that to the letter.

The actors are all outstanding; Grace, the proxy ‘heroine’ is majestically absorbed into a world of her own madness. Karl, the gay male subject who is punished endlessly for his optimism and affection, is absolutely pathetic but never plays is so you stop caring about the cruelty for which he is a lightning rod.

I’ve struggled to see the play (when read) as much more than a litany of violent acts, of cruel interrelations and as a comment on authoritarianism. So it’s… I don’t know if ‘relieving’ is the right word… to see that the staging puts me in mind that it’s a kind of manifestation of depression; any optimism, any light and joy in Cleansed‘s world, is crushed, absolutely, by the actions of the world around.

Gay lovers may not look forward to a future; the absence of Grace’s brother Graham leads to her madness and wanting to become him, in the crudest possible fashion. Everything is smeared with grief and blood and even where the sadistic Tinker is absent, the world remains incapable of expressing anything but cruelty.

Finally it’s a weird one in as much as I wouldn’t ‘recommend’ this play. But you should see it. Absolutely fucking horrendous but compelling and gorgeous, beautifully and intricately set, sound is overbearing and violent like industrial concerts of yore. Every care is given to bring the characters to life and let us into their suffering without, somehow, turning it into cartoonish suffering porn.

Formidible and indispensible.

-Kev Nickells-