Things you don’t need to know before seeing 4:48 Psychosis at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon:
- That this is the original cast, who premiered the play 25 years ago.
- That 4:48am is the time (pinpointed by a study conducted at Nottingham University) when suicidal ideation is at its strongest.
- That the playwright, Sarah Kane, committed suicide at the age of 28 after writing it.
The question is, does it help to know these things? Does the knowledge that this is not just a creative stab at clinical depression but a true howl from the depths give it a degree of authenticity that it would otherwise have lacked? Does the presence of Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter confer a sense of commemoration on the silver anniversary of the author’s tragic death?
The answer, I think, is that the play – and the production – are strong and authentic enough to penetrate the emotional carapaces of the most sceptical of observers, even without the heart-breaking context hovering, unspoken, at the stage door. But if your commitment and concentration slip for a moment, those sobering facts are there, like mementos mori in your mind, to keep you pinned to your seat in dreadful fascination.
And this is important. In the quarter-century since her death, Kane has occasionally become a gateway drug for sensational horror: a sloppy byword for torture porn, teenage angst and theatre of cruelty. Ladies and gentlemen, the Elephant Man. Peer in prurient fascination at the mad playwright, rocking on the floor.
But Kane is more than that. The honesty, despair, wit and plain-speaking lyricism of her writing make her stand apart. This is no Morrissey, massaging the egos of wannabe depressives, but a poet for those dark corners of the human heart most people don’t even want to acknowledge exist, never mind discuss in polite society. She is always observing herself with the dispassionate eye of an analyst, while simultaneously suffering like a Francis Bacon self-portrait. She switches from primal rage to gallows humour at the flick of a hospital light (and her frequent use of the word ‘gallows’ hits harder when you think of her own chosen method of death). She’s a correspondent from the actual shore of death.
Which brings us to this production.
Evans, McInnes and Potter have been here before. And their performances are imbued with a sense of responsibility, care and understanding, like custodians for the playwright’s memory. They do not merely speak the lines. They wait for them to come. There is a pause at the start that lasts about a minute before McInnes feels the moment is right, and starts to speak. This is about an actor recognising the moment of truth, and stepping into it. That instinctive deliberation guides them through the play, listening to each other, speaking what they feel, not what they ought to say.
The script has no characters, no stage directions, no divided speeches. It is simply text. And the effect is hypnotic, like following a faint path through a dark wood, or listening to a string trio in perfect unison. Each actor takes different turns to be the solo instrument, but all three are constantly together, supporting, harmonising, shifting through different movements of the overall piece. Repeated refrains (‘But you have friends’, the ‘serial sevens’ which sound like the counting of musical beats, or that line of supreme beauty and despair, ‘I have been dead a long time; I sing without hope on the boundary’) give a genuine musicality to the text. There’s a bluntness to the performance: they tell it like it is. There’s no programme, no cast list, no interval, no readmission. In other words, no compromise. At the end I thought they might even leave without bowing, abandoning the audience to struggle from their seats, unshriven by the catharsis of applause. But they didn’t. I wish they had.
There is a fourth member of this cast though, and that is the astonishing set. A perfect, white square, a table, a chair. That’s it. But above, and covering the entire stage, is a mirror tilted at 45 degrees. So by looking over the actors we can see directly down upon them and their little world. The effect is one of terrifying, geometrical precision. It’s cold, clinical, observational. That white square becomes a cell, the table (with a bit of perfectly aimed projection) a window onto the anonymous London street outside.
Being trapped in a tiny square or cube suits the theme of clinical depression. That mathematical precision is the stuff of nightmares. Think again of Francis Bacon and his insane, abstracted figures imprisoned in geometrical structures. Think of Blake’s Tyger and the fearfulness of his symmetry. A previous, and equally brilliant, production of 4:48 Psychosis from a few years ago literally placed the characters in a cube isolated in the middle of the stage, semi-concealed from the audience by diaphanous curtains. The rectitude of the geometry confronts the mental mess of the struggling inmate, and there can only be one winner.
But the overhead mirror offers another perspective: it allows the actors to lie on the floor and be seen from above, laid out, full-length. They look like dead bodies fallen from a skyscraper window, or a collection of insects pinned to a white board by a fascinated Victorian collector. Not human beings, but specimens.
Sarah Kane died too young. But, in an art form much possessed by death and madness, where horror, exaggerated violence and vicarious thrills never fail to bring in the crowds, she left us a unique legacy: a still, small voice of truth, speaking with poetic resonance and urgent individuality. 25 years flies by in an instant. And 4:48 Psychosis has lost none of its relevance. Will the same actors be back in 2050? I hope so.