Cassandra

Piotr Gruszczyński, TYGODNIK POWSZECHNY

„Cleansed" directed by Warlikowski reached the limits of intimacy. Jarzyna prefers the poetry of text to carnality.

One cannot know her name and reason for which she wants to kill herself. One thing is certain: she wants to commit suicide and is going to do this to our silent presence. The main character of Sarah Kane's last play „4.48 Psychosis" is a tragic one, she is a Cassandra of her own fate. Although she kills herself, it is not her choice - it is a destiny imposed by depression.

„Sorrow is a man's fate" - that way begins Antoni Kępiński's „Melancholy" (as the depression was called formerly). „I am sad" - says the patient of „Psychosis" coming out of the darkness. Thus opens the play and the character's first monologue about her life's catastrophe or even about the silent implosion of her mind. Negation of herself, rejection of the past and the future, feelings of guilt and tendency to blame herself for world's crimes: „I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs". The mood quivers from resignation to aggression, from stupefaction to loud despair. Blood and tears. Dry eyes and cold look. The sorrow starts to absorb the audience; it is a passive feeling. Contrary to Walikowski's „Cleansed", where feelings initiated rage, joy and empathy. After „4.48 Psychosis" one plunges in sadness.
There are no separated characters in „4.48 Psychosis" and the text has a structure of a complicated poem. The numbers appear twice in it. For the reader, not introduced into depression's symptoms, the sequences of numbers might seem chaotic. However, only the first one is ruled by the illness' disorder. The second, written at the end, is composed of the proceeding results of seven subtracted from one hundred: „100, 93, 86..." down to two. In mental clinics it is one of the tests checking the stadium of depression. The better the patient performs in this task, the closer he is to the way leading to the real life. As the numbers become correctly ordered at the play's end, the main character is supposed to be recovering. She does it only in order to commit suicide consciously.

Ill with death

Grzegorz Jarzyna based the construction of the play on the countdown expressed by the dispassionate reader's voice (Ksawery Jasieński). Very small, sometimes being even unnoticeable, numbers are projected simultaneously on different parts of the stage. The countdown is pitiless like the decrease of main character's life and time. It continues icily, without emotions and one cannot do anything. The decision has been undertaken at the beginning of the play; the hour was precisely set: 4.48. We go towards the death. The framework of the right wall moves gradually to the left, concentrating the events the more on that side. We go through to the side of death.
The text of „4.48 Psychosis" seems impossible to be staged. It affords all the ordinary difficulties of Sarah Kane's dramaturgy, even though it is the least drastic in the common meaning. It requires the metaphors able to bear this text over the banal of realism or naturalism. And finally it presents an incredible difficulty to the director: how to play a suicide avoiding the sentimental and maudlin states, compassion of the audience and whimper for pity? How to play a person ill with death.
Jarzyna leads Magdalena Cielecka the most arduous way by trying to reduce the dramatic aspect of her performance. Every word and gesture should be a result of the inner need and sensibility of the actress having a task similar to the one of the monodrama's actor. The auxiliary characters are: a mistress (Katarzyna Herman), a bad one-doctor-therapist (Mariusz Benoit), a friend (Rafał Maćkowiak) and doctors (Janusz Stolarski and Edward Warzecha). They come from within the patient and their existence is undefined. Those characters are not directly present in the text - they have emerged out of it thanks to the director or patient's mind.
From time to time one can hear the another suicide's song - „When I fall in love" by Marilyn Monroe. The source of this sweet and jaunty song, rushing into the chilly and sterile hospital's interior, remains unknown. The song either sounds in tune or sometimes slows down like the sounds heard by someone losing his consciousness. MM sings and the patient-actress takes pills drinking Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon. In the background, there are turquoise walls, mirrors and washstands - a hospital. There is a mat floor and a prosectorial trolley in the middle, serving almost as a family table. All the actors are well or even fashionably dressed. The patient wears beige bell-bottoms and a soft sweater from which a cherry-patterned underwear protrudes.
But the unnatural attractiveness of depression is to be lost when the second patient appears in the hospital hall. She is old and ugly, has hideous hair and wears coarse glasses, slippers and pink dressing gown. Her appearance disorders the harmony of the performance; is like a mute tune that starts to upset. The depression and the sorrow gradually grow within the audience. In one of the last scenes the old and the young one are naked on the scene staying face to face. The another depression's inevitable stage starts.

Big really

The numbers maniacally build the play's construction and capture the space for a moment. It is the most brilliant of the performance's scenes. The projection of the numbers, coming down like the obsessional „Tetris" elements, results from the conversations about medicines and dosage. The numbers multiply, unfold and disperse in vertical sequences and immediately start to run. There is more and more of them everywhere.
In the spotlight appears the actress' face again. It is covered with blood after she has injured herself. MM sings again and one can even notice the black snow she has been singing about. The light fades, but then becomes more intensive again. „Watch me vanish" repeats the patient and disappears in darkness. The reader repeats the last number: two, two, two... The beginning of the Jarzyna's play as well as the end of it, differs from Kane's text. In the original, the last sentence sounds: „please open the curtains" and Jarzyna makes us stay in the twilight.
The comparison of Warikowski's and Jarzyna's plays seems inevitable. Moreover, it was, to some extend, the directors' intention. The set of those performances is almost similar (Małgorzata Szczęśniak's infallible hand) and Felice Ross directed the light in both cases. There was no big time span between the plays' first performances, but there is no sense of creating an atmosphere of a race. Those two stagings are incomparable.
The way actors' carnality is treated and used makes a significant difference. „Cleansed" directed by Warlikowski reached the limits of intimacy, forcing everyone to overcome their embarrassment and thus to open new doors of perception. Jarzyna prefers the poetry of text to carnality. The dramatical effect is weaker and less shocking. I find „4.48 Psychosis" a complement to „Cleansed". It is like the second act of the play throwing us into the chasm of sorrow. We lose last rays of „Cleansed". And the biographical fact of the author's suicidal death of 20th February 1999 is of no importance. The last play by Sarah Kane is a very poetic work, enclosing her short, yet intensive dramatical career.

***
The director's name is replaced by „+" sign on the poster. The heroine says: „I have resigned myself to death". One can easily work out the interpretation of Grzegorz Jarzyna's latest pseudonym.
But this sign resembles sticking plaster staunching the flow of blood from a wound. There are, however, wounds that a sticking plaster cannot heal. The director does not console us. Neither the performance nor the play itself does judge whether the main character's suicide is a liberation from life's torments and sadness accompanying them, a departure towards light or a step in the direction of some land of darkness. The suicide is not judged, nor should the performance be. Death gives no release and we are bound to die. Cassandra did not speak of herself but mostly of ourselves. Sarah Kane foretold the future of our existence. +.