harrowing journey

Sarah Hemming, FINANCIAL TIMES

Rating: ****

Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is one of the most painful pieces of drama ever written. The playwright, who suffered from clinical depression, killed herself not long after writing it. Although it should not be taken as strictly autobiographical, it is hard to watch, giving, as it does, a bleak insight into a profoundly tormented mind.

But what is also remarkable about the play is that, despite being written in extremis, it has integrity as a piece of drama. It has dark wit, passages of lyrical beauty and a clear-eyed honesty that resonates and, so, particularly disturbs. It matches form to content: the elusive nature of the script seems to fit the traumatised identity of the character at its heart; it shape-shifts on the page, switches from monologue to multiple voices and never assigns lines to a particular character or characters.

The structure is both a gift and a challenge to any director. To stage the piece you have to assign the lines, and find, like the central speaker and like the writer herself, a path through the nightmarish experience.

Grzegorz Jarzyna, directing the Polish company TR Warszawa, responds by cutting and reassembling the text to give it some narrative shape and to lead the audience on a harrowing journey with a young woman. We see her talking to a friend, then a doctor, then a lover, as she sinks further into distress. But it is never certain whether the figures she encounters are real, memories or extensions of herself. Meanwhile, the apparently random numbers in the text are strung through the production, projected on to a wall, like a countdown.

It is a beautifully sculpted production, eloquently lit by Felice Ross on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s depressing, institutional set, and driven by a superb, lacerating performance from Magdalena Cielecka, who unravels before your eyes. She begins pale, taut and angry and ends blank-eyed and half-naked, appealing wretchedly to the audience to “see me”.

I found James Macdonald’s original staging of the play in 2000 more deeply disturbing: more low-key and disembodied, it drew you into the disorientated mind. Here you sympathise, rather than lose your own bearings. And this production underplays the important shafts of wit and reason. But it has inspired ideas – particularly the woman’s moving encounter with her older and younger selves – and it gives raw, physical form to Kane’s unflinching text.