Edinburgh Festival 2008: bleakness and brilliance

Alastair Sooke, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Sarah Kane completed 4.48 Psychosis shortly before she killed herself in 1999. An unflinching journey into depression and extreme mental breakdown, it can be tough going at the best of times.

With no defined characters or divisions into acts or scenes, it feels more like a fragmentary poem than a play. So the prospect of watching it in Polish, in a production first staged by the Warsaw-based theatre company TR Warszawa in 2002, threatened something bewilderingly impenetrable.

In the event, however, having the piece performed in another language, albeit with surtitles, proves an inadvertent masterstroke.

Hearing unfamiliar sounds coming out of the actors' mouths adds to the acute sense of psychological chaos, as the main speaker negotiates what he or she describes as the "piecemeal crumple of my mind" before planning suicide at 4.48am.

Director Grzegorz Jarzyna sets the drama in a claustrophobic psychiatric hospital in which an intelligent blonde woman is suffering pathological grief. As her condition worsens, she rails against her ineffectual doctors, before attempting to take her life by slashing her wrists and swallowing pills washed down with a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

Magdalena Cielecka gives a stupendous performance as the patient, channelling the bleakness, anxiety and menace of Kane's words while never losing sight of the moments of gallows humour ("I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the f***ing waiting room half an hour," she jokes).

Her body is tense and taut, indicating the adamantine nature of her illness and providing a masterclass in the power of restraint, even when conveying a thunderstorm of agonised despair.

Inspired by Kane's apocalyptic imagery, Jarzyna choreographs extraordinary sequences that perfectly express the state of mind of Cielecka's character: towards the end, an old woman walks naked through the gloom, like a skeletal vision of death.

Similarly, the sterile set, designed by Magorzata Szczes'niak to resemble an interrogation room or a cell in a madhouse, suggests the speaker's imprisoning solipsism.

Watching 4.48 Psychosis can be almost unbearably harrowing. But when it is staged as brilliantly as it is here, it also feels profound, moving - and unforgettable.