There’s little doubt that 4.48 Psychosis would be a lesser play if it could be considered independently of its context. Its author Sarah Kane suffered from clinical depression in her late twenties and took her own life just a few months after completing it. It was first staged in June 2000, 16 months after her death, and morosely celebrated as her last communications with the world, her suicide note.
For some, the styleless barrage of sentences come together to form a chaotic picture of her inner demons. For others, it remains a plotless and aesthetically weak play qualified only by her suicide and barely useful to theatre’s progression. But whatever its true worth, the fact that it’s so open to interpretation has meant that 4.48 Psychosis has come to be something of a stomping ground for young thesps who see in the obstruse writing and edgy subtext a blank canvas on which to practise their own creative expression. Its impact, in a way, is always assured by the ghost of Sarah Kane, making the play a sure-fire shocker and a lazy option according to the dominant school of thought.
So an over-represented play of dubious value that reads like a nightmare, 4.48 Psychosis is the bane of criticism and more often than not a deeply unpleasant experience. The TR Warszawa production of it at EIF spoils it with the immense space of the Kings Theatre and has the unlikely advantage of being in Polish to let non-natives feel at a comfortable distance from it. Using elaborate visual projections and an otherworldly soundtrack it creates two competing voices of script and stagecraft that relentlessly vie for the expressive upper hand like the two factions of a torn psyche. As the awkward wailings of Kane’s doppelganger mounts in fervour, so the stage effects become more complex and crowded, climaxing in the abrupt intrusion of a sinister calm.
It’s a sophisticated and stimulating rendering of the play that wisely takes the script as a set of signposts rather than a goal, and if we didn’t know this was 4.48 Psychosis we would probably be making a hell of a lot more noise about it.
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