4.48 Psychosis, King’s Theatre

Neil Cooper, THE HERALD

Laughter isn't what you expect in Sarah Kane's final play, first performed posthumously in 2000 following the death of this most dynamic of writers the year before. When it arrives a few minutes into Grzegorz Jarzyna's T R Warszawa production following a self-loathing rant by Magdalena Cielecka's central cipher of mental and emotional anguish, it's an ever-so-slightly silly guffaw from a man who might be her significant other. It's the sort of laugh that only lovers in full pelt of tearing chunks out of each other use to puncture the moment's apparent seriousness.

Jarzyna's approach to a play which on the page reads as an opaque tone poem is at times a literal one, involving a re-ordered text, a love affair with a female doctor and numerous exchanges with figures of seeming authority. Each scene puts Cielecka at its centre, her hair scraped back as she lashes out at anything in her path, mainly herself. Intermittently, a disembodied voice straight out of Godard's Alphaville punctuates each snapshot with a sombre countdown to the woman's slow self-destruction.

What emerges is an increasingly impressionistic set of dramatic markers to a play that helped redefine how mental illness is treated on stage, but which is still hidebound by its own sad mythology. Following her turn in T R Warszawa's equally intense Dybbuk on the same stage last weekend, Cielecka gives an even more fearless performance in this seven-actor version that's as emotionally wide-open as its author. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when the legend of Sarah Kane doesn't have to be recounted with every airing of her work. That time will come soon. But not yet.