June 7, 2011
Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is not a comfortable seat for viewing. The intimacy of the Burton Taylor forces the audience to confront meticulously dissected mental deterioration, the rage directed at the front two rows. You are eyeball to eyeball with your worst nightmare: white clad figures, keening, tearing at their arms, sticking plaster around their wrists, muttering, calling, chalking up the phrases of mental anguish on blackboards, again and again, underlining their pain. Kane writes that 'Love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears',and we see its structure, its string walls restraining a figure in a foetal position, curled, eyes closed against the world's incomprehension.
But the text is clear-eyed, and the four patient personae record in intelligent hyper-aware voices the inexhorable spiral of a mind disintegrating, unable to meet its dreams. The moment of death is the only choice over which there is any control.
The play is a challenge, both in its subject matter and staging. It has no identified characters, and no stage directions, and Marchella Ward's production used two excellent techniques: a black and white video of the actors, showing different viewpoints, and two black boards summarising key moods and messages, so the audience did not get lost in the fragmented, disjointed text.
Fran Denny was superbly assured, and delivered the spine of the narrative. Alice Bullough's passive aggression oozes out of her white coat: 'It's not your fault, but you allow it.' Ellie Geldard's batsqueaks of optimism are ineffectual but well meant, and Ben Llewlyn's wavering assurance: 'You will get better' is skewered by Denny's crisp response 'Your disbelief cures nothing.'
We do not need Joanna Demaree-Cotton searching Denny's hair for cockroaches,restlessly rocking, to understand the nightmarishness of clinical depression.
Sarah Kane's friend and fellow playwright summarised the play's 'uniquely painful' power: 'It appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously.
It was. Sarah Kane hung herself aged 29. Eighteen months later the play was first performed.
But the text is clear-eyed, and the four patient personae record in intelligent hyper-aware voices the inexhorable spiral of a mind disintegrating, unable to meet its dreams. The moment of death is the only choice over which there is any control.
The play is a challenge, both in its subject matter and staging. It has no identified characters, and no stage directions, and Marchella Ward's production used two excellent techniques: a black and white video of the actors, showing different viewpoints, and two black boards summarising key moods and messages, so the audience did not get lost in the fragmented, disjointed text.
Fran Denny was superbly assured, and delivered the spine of the narrative. Alice Bullough's passive aggression oozes out of her white coat: 'It's not your fault, but you allow it.' Ellie Geldard's batsqueaks of optimism are ineffectual but well meant, and Ben Llewlyn's wavering assurance: 'You will get better' is skewered by Denny's crisp response 'Your disbelief cures nothing.'
We do not need Joanna Demaree-Cotton searching Denny's hair for cockroaches,restlessly rocking, to understand the nightmarishness of clinical depression.
Sarah Kane's friend and fellow playwright summarised the play's 'uniquely painful' power: 'It appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously.
It was. Sarah Kane hung herself aged 29. Eighteen months later the play was first performed.