Why put on 4.48 Psychosis? The question is genuine. Why Sarah Kane wrote the piece is easier to understand: she was a playwright, and it was what she had to offer at the time of writing. But why show 80 minutes of mental suffering as a performance? What does the theatre-maker think an audience can take away from such a performance, apart from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing someone mentally disintegrating?
Any appeal to beauty, truth, art etc. as a rationale for producing the piece immediately strays into dangerous territory. The mental state about which Kane is writing is none of these things: it is not significant or meaningful, and attempts to find an aesthetic in it risk glamorizing it. There is nothing special or unique about the condition which is being described. In fact, it is repetitive, self-indulgent and uninteresting (beyond a professional medical point of view). These qualities can be seen echoed in the writing itself, in which phrases are endlessly repeated, cliché is rife (“I am a complete failure as a person”, “I cannot write”), and attempts at poetry are often vacuous and unimaginative (“black snow is falling”, “behold the light of despair”). Even when the language and play of words is complex and poetical, the fact that it is describing something so hollow makes it feel empty. Perhaps this is just what should be taken away from 4.48 Psychosis - that the protagonist’s attempts to overcome her mental anguish through elevating it to poetry or intellectualising it are a failure.
Yet, there is more to Kane’s play than remorseless suffering: at times, the piece manages to gain perspective and comment, often wryly, upon the protagonist’s situation. In these moments, we gain the sense of a person, rather than just a condition – a person who realizes the absurdity of what she is going through, but is unable to do anything about it.
When TR Warszawa’s production picks up upon these moments, and starts to explore the identity of the main character (which they take to be based on Sarah Kane) it has most raison d’être. In one section the woman rolls around on the floor with her lover, giggling, stroking, cuddling, groping and finally rejecting her. In another she reveals she dreamt she “went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.” We are given a glimpse of someone.
However, throughout the production, ever more focus and energy is devoted to dramatizing the protagonist’s mental state. The simile of feeling like an eighty year old is given a physical manifestation in the naked figure of an old woman lingering in the background; the scenes are woven together by a thrumming, amelodic and alien-sounding soundscape; the piece climaxes in the protagonist half-naked and covered in blood beating manically against the back wall, as if in an attempt to get out. There is no doubt that the company delivers intense and powerful performances and that the production holds the audience in its grip, but ultimately, there is little content, merely extremes of suffering elevated to beauty. In spite (and because) of being intensely theatrical, it is therefore difficult to see how this is theatre, in the sense of it having a reason to be shown to an audience.
