Thatcher’s Ghost

In his 1909 essay ‘Family Romances’, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud describes a fantasy familiar to almost every child: ordinary, disappointing parents are temporary stand-ins for more extraordinary ones — aristocrats, monarchs, even gods. Despite her attacks on the maternalistic welfare state, Margaret Thatcher has, somehow, endured as the choice fantasy parent of neoliberal Britain. For one, Nigel Farage claimed that he was the only politician ‘keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive’, and war criminal Tony Blair claimed that his job as Prime Minister had been to ‘build on some [of her] policies’.

Harder, stricter, and more punitive than most of her predecessors, Thatcher’s political project replaced the state’s promise of collective provision with the supposedly liberating discipline of the market, dressing austerity up as a kind of tough love coming-of-age. But just as children eventually grow up, politics do too. That Andy Burnham, in the first week of his premiership, both announced a historic break with Thatcherism and oversaw Labour’s rapid ascension in the polls, overtaking Reform for the first time since March 2025, suggests that, at long last, the British public has finally realised that we deserve better.

Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), now revived at the Almeida Theatre, returns us to the psychic wreckage of post-Thatcher Britain. Set in a ‘university’ that more closely resembles a concentration camp or a psychiatric facility, the play follows the sadistic exploits of Tinker (Leo Bill), who presides over the institution’s inmates. After Graham (Jack Riddiford) dies of an overdose, his sister Grace arrives there seeking him, only to be admitted herself. Lovers Carl (Luke Cinque-White) and Rod (Parth Thakerar) are subjected to Tinker’s escalating trials of devotion, their love punished by rape and gradual dismemberment. Meanwhile Robin (Stuart Thompson) is taught to read by Grace, only to take his own life once he understands the true length of his sentence.

A fair warning, if the content guide — referencing the torture, mutilation, incest, forced eating, and needles to come — isn’t clear enough: Cleansed is incredibly difficult to sit through. At my performance, a few audience members left after watching Tinker inject a lethal dose of heroin into the eye of Graham in the play’s opening scene. Those who remained continued watching through our fingers. Carl loses his tongue, hands, feet; Rod’s genitals are cut off and grafted onto Grace; and Robin’s suicide is so lifelike that I still don’t understand how director Rebecca Frecknall and her team managed to pull it off. By the end, the stage looks like an abattoir.

During her lifetime, and still today, many critics have mistaken Kane’s cruelty for senseless sadism. Her first play, Blasted (1995), an attempt to yoke together the mass ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian civil war and the more domesticated racism and sexual violence of nineties Britain, insisted on treating both as symptoms of the same social ills. But the theatre critic Jack Tinker — widely suspected to be the nominative inspiration for Cleansed’s ‘doctor’ — slammed it in The Daily Mail as little more than ‘a play which appears to know no bounds of decency’ and a ‘disgusting feast of filth’. In my own introduction to Kane, courtesy of a first-year English lecture at the University of Sussex, I felt the same way: I was put off by her totalising bleakness, and unable to imagine her stage directions realised beyond the page. Watching a Kane play live, though, is a very different experience. Vacillating between agony and ecstasy, beauty, and terror, the abject and sublime, Cleansed is less torture porn and more a return to the theatrical violence of Greek tragedians and Jacobean dramatists. In fact, Kane borrows rather liberally from the latter, with Carl’s amputations recalling Lavinia’s in Titus Andronicus, leaving him unable to touch or talk to his lover.

Despite this, Rod continues loving him. Kane once claimed that Cleansed was inspired in part by her reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977), likening the situation of a rejected lover to ‘a prisoner in Dachau.’ Frecknall certainly seems to understand this connection, going Guantánamo-lite with a looping tape of The Kinks’ ‘Days’ and shackling her characters to radiators and walls. But Kane’s greater interest here concerns the prevailing power of love. When Graham and Grace make love (though it’s ambiguous whether this literal family romance is real or hallucinatory), a giant sunflower blooms up through the floor; later, a field of daffodils bursts out from under the stage, and Carl performs a ‘dance of love’ for Rod. Robin also earnestly declares his love for Grace while wearing her dress.

According to Kane, the university setting was conceived as a place where society sought to rid itself of ‘undesirables’. Given that Thatcher’s Section 28 — prohibiting local authorities from ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ — was still law when Cleansed first premiered, the few moments of queer (and possibly genderqueer) tenderness are all the more heartwrenching. But read more broadly, the play also feels like a sort of rallying cry against Thatcher’s dogmatic individualism, especially her claim that there is ‘no such thing as a society’. For Kane’s characters to keep fighting for each other amidst Tinker’s relentless torment is to insist, sometimes brutally so, upon our irreducible capacity for loving.

The university’s resemblance to a psychiatric facility feels particularly poignant, too. Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis (2000) — following an unnamed speaker’s experience of psychiatric treatment, and suicidal despair — is widely understood as her cri de coeur; she took her life shortly after its completion. Under the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act, accelerated deinstitutionalisation and closure of psychiatric facilities left many people living with severe mental health issues increasingly at the mercy of the police, prisons, and a patchwork of inadequate care services. 

Watching any Kane play, it’s difficult — almost impossible — to abstract her revelatory depictions of mental anguish from Thatcherism’s abandonment of those most in need of psychiatric support. While she didn’t exactly intend to be a political commentator, Kane and her in-yer-face contemporaries — Philip Ridley, Patrick Marber, Mark Ravenhill, and Martin McDonagh — have been often claimed by critics as ‘Thatcher’s Children’ and, perhaps more fittingly, as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s disenchanted children’. These were playwrights angered by the inequality and social fragmentation left over from Thatcher, unimpressed by John Major’s efforts to reverse them, and sceptical that Blair’s Cool Britannia would offer any meaningful alternative. The same may well be said about Burnham’s shiny new approach to politics. After all, his cabinet is largely a reshuffle of Keir Starmer’s own: a government that presided over two years of assaults on the trans community, the disabled, and migrants and refugees.

Kane was no didactic, though we can still glean something important from her work. Her willingness to depict the extremities of human cruelty was not to argue for its inevitability, but against our indifference to it in everyday life. While I’m sceptical that Burnham will finally rid us of the ‘wrong turns’ wrought by Thatcher, I’m still holding out hope that we may rid ourselves of her ghost once and for all.