Enacting the Lost: Theatrical Form of Mourning in Sarah Kane’S Cleansed

The Society of English Studies 31 『英米文化』45, 31–40 (2015) ISSN: 0917-3536 Enacting the Lost: Theatrical Form of Mourning in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed ISHIDA Yuki Abstract Cleansed (1998) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre as the third play by Sarah Kane (1971–1999). Set within a male institution, this drama portrays romantic relations of characters, and Grand-Guignolesque atrocities suffered by the inmates. As the author states, this play inherits a key setting from Twelfth Night (1600). Its heroine, Grace, is a cross-dresser imitating the appearance of her late sibling Graham, just as Shakespeare’s Viola dresses herself the same way as her lost brother Sebastian. In this article, our analysis focuses on closely looking at the theatrical within Cleansed. Starting with a comparison of disguised heroines in this piece and Twelfth Night, Section II and III demonstrate that Grace’s partial imitation of her late brother can be interpreted as a theatrical form of mourning to produce her private illusion that Graham is alive. In the last section, referring to Grace’s final remark “help me” to another inmate of the institution, our discussion reveals how the function of her quasi-transformation into her sibling allegori- cally represents the staging of this play, whose performance is to be completed by imaginary commitment of the audience to reunite its fragments. I. Introduction Cleansed (1998) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre as the third play by Sarah Kane (1971–1999), who is described as the “British theatre’s newest enfant terrible” (Ravenhill, 2006). Set within a male institution called “a university” (1:107)1, this drama portrays romantic relations of seven characters, and atrocities suffered by the inmates. Although details of Grand-Guignolesque tortures in this institution might be reminiscent of Shake- speare’s Titus Andronicus (1594)2, this play inherits a key setting from Twelfth Night (1600)3. Its heroine, Grace, is a cross-dresser imitating the appearance of her late sibling NII-Electronic Library Service The Society of English Studies 32 『英米文化』45 (2015) Graham, just as Shakespeare’s Viola dresses herself the same way as her twin brother Sebas- tian, lost in a shipwreck4. The aim of the present paper is to look into the little-discussed self-consciousness in Cleansed as nothing but a play. The following two sections treat mournful and theatrical aspects within this drama: with a reference to the case of Viola, we examine characteristics of Grace’s cross-dressing, which is to produce her private illusion that her dead brother is living. Finally, it is to be argued that such imitative behaviors of this heroine can be read as a self-reflective allegory. Our discussion reveals that Grace’s duplicating the lost represents the staging of this play, whose enactment is accomplished by imaginary commitment of the spectators to reunite its fragments. II. Playing in Mourning While C. S. Lewis metaphorically titled one chapter about his school days “Concentration Camp” in Surprised by Joy (1955) (Lewis 23), the university in Cleansed literally functions as a concentration camp “designed to rid society of its undesirable”5 such as drug addicts, the homosexual, and the incestuous. This university has, at least, four rooms converted for discipline and treatment: the white sanatorium, red sports hall, black peep-show booth, and round library. Aston’s comment on the gay couple―Carl and Rod―holds true for the situa- tion of the other inmates confined within the university: they belong to “the wrong side of the divide; [and] are locked away to be ‘cleansed’ in the interest of the ‘healthy’ citizens out on the other side of the fence” (Aston 90). Divided into twenty scenes, Cleansed starts off showing Graham’s death by overdose on the drug he got from the doctor/dealer/dictator figure Tinker. Informed that Graham’s corpse was incinerated, Grace decides to remain in the institution. Having a reunion and metaphys- ical intercourse with Graham’s ghost, she begins to copy him by means of several devices. Although she manages to exchange her own clothes with Graham’s (now worn by another young inmate, Robin), she unknowingly ends up being drugged and loved by Tinker as her brother was. She finally has a sex-change surgery operated to fulfill her wish of becoming Graham by Tinker. In front of the perimeter fence of the institution, the curtain falls with this chimerical girl smiling and Carl weeping. In the first place, Grace’s obsessive imitation of the appearance and movements of Gra- ham’s spectre can be considered as an act of mourning, since it consequently leads her NII-Electronic Library Service The Society of English Studies ISHIDA Yuki Enacting the Lost 33 ghostly company to cease appearing and to say farewell to her, just after her quasi-transformation is completed by Tinker’s renaming Grace as “Graham” (18:146). Yet, what appears more crucial here is a manner of her reproducing, as her first confrontation with his spectre demonstrates: Grace dances opposite him, copying his movements. Gradually, she takes on the masculinity of his movements, his facial expression. Finally, she no longer has to watch him―she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time. When she speaks, her voice is more like his. GRAHAM. You’re good at this. GRACE. Good at this. GRAHAM. Very good. GRACE. Very good. GRAHAM. So / very very good.6 GRACE. Very very good (5:119). This scene vividly portrays Grace’s thorough imitation, which is achieved by highly theatrical devices, such as dressing herself up in a male costume and copying the way Graham’s phantom acts and speaks. Besides, in the finale, “Grace now looks and sounds exactly like Graham. She is wearing his clothes” (20:149), when she unwittingly echoes Graham’s dying words (20:150) which he said in Scene 1: “Thank you, Doctor” (1:108). During the process of becoming “Graham outside like Graham inside” as she feels (7:126), Grace’s mimesis and self-obliteration make his absence a theatrical presence. While there are a number of methods for memory-keeping, it is noteworthy that language, especially written language, seems to be presented as less eloquent than such theatrical behaviors in Cleansed. In the subplot of Carl and Rod, for instance, Carl is severely deprived of his literacy by Tinker’s cutting off of Carl’s tongue and hands, like the mutilated and muted Lavinia with “no tongue to call, nor hands to wash” in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (II. iii. 7). Additionally, though the illiterate Robin learns from his dear Grace how to read and write in the institutional library, his newly-acquired writing skill consequently records nothing. What is worse, many of the library’s books for his study are burned on Tinker’s instructions. The means of writing is always seized by the watchful supervisor NII-Electronic Library Service The Society of English Studies 34 『英米文化』45 (2015) in this way. By contrast, the theatrical actions by characters in this drama remain as the only efficient way to keep part of reminders of the deceased, though not in its entirety. In his introduction to Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (2001), David Greig accurately observes that, after Tinker’s dehumanizing tortures, inmates’ “[l]imbs are removed, skins removed, genitals removed, and identities forcibly changed until, in the play’s final scene, each inhabitant carries the fragments of someone else’s identity” (Greig xii). As Greig notes, alongside the heroine’s change into “Grace/Graham” (20:149), Grace herself is also fragmentarily translated into an anonymous pole-dancer called “a Woman” in one of the black peep-show booths. If Tinker can be described as “Kane’s perverse Prospero [in his] private theatre” with his dominant power for manipulating others (Kuharski 295), this booth might be a small stage to realize his unfulfilled wish in a domain of dramatic fiction. Every time Tinker visits this booth to see the Woman performing in the cell, he projects his beloved Grace onto this dancer calling her “Grace” (6:123). Yet, after his eternal separation from Grace, the Woman voluntarily steps out to the other side of the partition for the first time in this play to embrace him, identifying herself as “Grace” (19:149). This moment, like the scene featuring Galatea’s humanization in the Greek Pygmalion myth, illustrates that the Woman’s perfor- mative action bears part of Grace’s obliterated femininity, just as Grace’s mournful cross- dressing and imitating achieve a theatrical incarnation of the dead. III. Private Illusion Materialized Cleansed is dedicated to “the patients and staff of ES3” (105) ―an acute psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital in London―into which the author was taken before composing this piece and her fourth drama, Crave (1998). Added to this fact, the dark and psychoana- lytic aspects of Cleansed might even remind the audience of another diseased cross-dresser, Norman Bates, in his dead mother’s gown in Robert Block’s Psycho (1959), although, as mentioned above, Grace’s copying of her lost family is based on Twelfth Night. Few critics have compared this darkest romance by Kane with this comedy by Shakespeare, probably because of the totally different tones and settings of these two works. While the former is filled with “the series of vivid images” of surrealism and aestheticized brutalism in the horri- fying asylum (Sierz 113), the latter is an Elizabethan romantic comedy in merry Illyria. However, juxtaposing Grace with Viola helps us unveil a characteristic of theatricality NII-Electronic Library Service The Society of English Studies ISHIDA Yuki Enacting the Lost 35 within this play by Kane.

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