Review: 4.48 Psychosis

Stuart Denison, WHATS ON STAGE

[Sarah Kane]'s final work before her suicide, a staging of 4.48 Psychosis usually proves to be an intense experience for any audience, and this production by Polish company TR Warszawa is no exception. For one brutal, breathless, heart-clenching hour, everyone's eyes are glued only to the harrowing spectacle, as a poetic chasm of despair and depression is torn open in front of them.

The open-endedness of Kane's play (there are no characters or stage directions specified, only text) is daunting and inviting in equal measure for directors, and means that there are radical differences between interpretations. Grzegorz Jarzyna, in a production that was originally premiered in Poland in 2002, decides to mainly explore the "Victim" aspect of the piece, out of the tripartite thrust of "Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander" that the original Royal Court version centred upon. This means that there is one central female presence surrounded and interrupted by various other figures who slide in and out of her consciousness. The text has also been shuffled up considerably, with several significant sections cut out entirely.

Whilst there is little problem with this in principle, these manipulations force the early dialogue into a narrative which the piece not only doesn't need, but actively refutes in its very form. Fortunately, though, and presumably deliberately, this approach soon fades away - as the satellite characters themselves do - stripping back the attempts at formal structure
to reveal the pure, inexplicable, incomprehensible torment of the central woman, performed with passion and intensity by Magdalena Cielecka.

Also removed or played down are the frequent metatheatrical references and linguistic diversions made by Kane, which concentrates attention fully upon the interior emotional side of suicidal depression. This makes the inclusion of the "I gassed the Jews" and the "F*** you" segments all the more jarringly dissonant, as screams of pure pain lashing out from a
darkened place, one which the average human could never hope to understand.

For theatre which strangles the soul, to which there can be no artificial reaction, you need look no further than the final 25 minutes of this production. As the text itself proclaims, this is indeed the most "beautiful pain which says I exist".