Stage directions

The play is notable for its many difficult to achieve stage directions which have been described as "impossible". Examples include: "Tinker produces a large pair of scissors and cuts off Carl's tongue" (Scene Four).^[17] "A sunflower bursts through the floor and grows above their heads" (Scene Six).^[18] "The rats carry Carl's feet away" (Scene Fourteen).^[19]

Sarah Kane said "There's a Jacobean play with the stage direction 'Her spirit rises from her body and walks away, leaving her body behind.' Anyway, Shakespeare has a bear running across the stage in A Winter's Tale, and his stage craft was perfect".^[8]

Sarah Kane's friend and fellow playwright, David Greig, wrote about the play's stage directions in his introduction to Sarah Kane: Complete Plays:

"Theatrically, Cleansed is a daring challenge. It's physicalisation of lyrical imagery raises the same question that dogs Kane's first three plays: how do-able are they? […] This is a question that goes to the heart of Kane's writing. Every one of her plays asks the director to make radical staging decisions […] In a Kane play the author makes demands but she does not make solutions. Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, it was possible to represent it. By demanding an interventionist and radical approach from her directors she was forcing them to go the limits of their theatrical imagination, forcing them into poetic and expressionistic solutions. […] With Cleansed, Kane wrote a play which demanded that its staging be as poetic as its writing."^[20]

Director of the 2016 National Theatre production of the play, Katie Mitchell, has said "Kane's stage directions request literal violence […] A tongue is cut off with a pair of scissors. Hands are cut off. So how do you do that in a way that is not symbolic?"^[21]