Cleansed: Theatregoers faint during rape, torture and incest scenes in graphic National play

Prepare for tongues being ripped out, forced genitalia transplants and electrocution

Kane, who wrote Cleansed, killed herself a year after its 1998 debut performance (Stephen Cummiskey)

Graphic scenes in new National Theatre play Cleansed have left some theatregoers passing out in shock.

Katie Mitchell’s production of Sarah Kane’s stage show features rape, torture and incest, with notable scenes involving electrocution, a man having his tongue ripped out and a woman undergoing a forced transplant to give her male genitalia.

Cleansed, which runs for an hour and 45 minutes, comes with a warning that it contains “graphic scenes of physical and sexual violence”.

Previews opened on 16 February, with sold-out audiences of 318 people attending each of six performances.

Five people fainted and another forty walked out before the end, according to The Telegraph.

Blogger Victoria Sadler claimed in her review that one man “collapsed thirty minutes in”, prompting the lights to go up as ushers came in to “escort him out”.

The play is set on a university campus that has become an interrogation centre where a man brutally tortures characters to test the durability of love.

“It’s not about violence, it’s about love,” Mitchell said on the BBC’s Radio 4 Front Row programme. “All of the torture that is going on is led by a doctor who’s making tests about love, it’s durability. The gay couple in it, the durability of their love is being tested and they’re being tortured to see whether their love will survive.”

Mitchell added that she believes British audiences are “afraid of that dark female voice that insists we examine pornography and violence”.

Kane killed herself aged 28 a year after Cleansed’s 1998 debut. She had been suffering from depression.

Reviews of Mitchell’s revival have been mixed. The Daily Mail gave it one star and describing it as “torture for all concerned” while the Guardian and The Independent both awarded it a more middling three. The Evening Standard’s Henry Hitchings gifted it four, writing that he found it “gorily immediate and somewhat intoxicating”.

Cleansed runs until 5 May with tickets currently on sale.