4.48 Psychosis

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Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Relentless Pain

Words are powerless in the predetermined universe of “4:48 Psychosis”, Sarah Kanes breathtakingly beautiful and ugly suicide note of a play. Religious litanies, psychological cant, pharmaceutical names for mind-altering medicines, starkly repeated verbs of destruction and poetry both lyrical and scabrous: none of these forms of language can soothe, stanch or even explain the pain that this drama’s oxygen, the element that allows it to breathe.

Yet watching the stunning American premiere of “4:48 Psychosis”, in the Royal Court Theatre’s travelling production at St. Anns Warehouse in Brooklyn (which runs only through Sunday), I found it hard to think of another recent play in which words, on their own, have such primitive power. Written as a refutation of reasons to live by Ms. Kane not long before she hanged herself at 28 in a London hospital five years ago, “4:48 Psychosis” is charged with the raging verbal energy of someone trying to make sense of a situation long beyond the reach of rational thought.

To say anything in “4:48 Psychosis” becomes a Sisyphean venture – defiant and pathetic – in the eclipsing shadow of this writers anguish. In part by virtue of its very futility, Ms. Kanes language creates the most persuasive and authentic portrait of what it means to be terminally depressed that I have ever encountered in a theater. The words may be useless as lifelines, but they definitely leave their marks on those who hear them.

Originally presented at the Royal Court Theater in London, where Ms. Kane made her name with bleak and violent narrative plays like “Blasted” and “Cleansed”, “4:48 Psychosis” would not seem to lend itself to theater. On the page, it reads like a poem of negation from a single disembodied voice. It is composed of clusters of images, questions, numbers, lists, and internal dialogues with people real and imagined. But as directed by James Macdonald, who also staged the Royal Court production, what might have registered as a protracted, abstract, scream becomes a theatrical work of hypnotic balance, variety and vividness.

The play – the title which refers to the moment in the early morning when the muddled mind assumes fleeting, damning clarity – is spoken by not one but three people, a man and two women. Though this might seem an obvious device for conveying a fragmented self, the excellent ensemble members (Jason Hughes, Marin Ireland and Jo McInnes) are not meant to embody three sides of one character.

Mr Macdonald understands that nothing here should be reduced to so fixed a formula. There is comfort in such patterns, and Psychosis offers no comfort at all. It is a supremely self-conscious work, but it is also devoid of any secure sense of self. “Watch me vanish,” goes one typical, self-deconstructing fragment, “watch me vanish, watch me, watch me, watch.”

The performers are endlessly and fluidly interchangeable, though Mr. Hughes, Ms. Ireland and Ms. McInnes each have a crisply distinctive theatrical presence. And thanks to extraordinary work of the design team, overseen by Jeremy Herbert, they multiply and mutate to mind-scrambling effect.

This achieved not with acid-trip phantasmagorias but with a sharp elegance that is far more disturbing. An immense angled mirror hangs over the stage, so you focus shifts between the players real and reflected selves. Changes in lighting, brilliantly designed by Nigel Edwards, seem to alter the forms and textures of these people. One such effect, like a snowy television screen, makes the performers in the mirror look no more substantial than waded paper. “Here I am, and there is my body,” as one line goes, “dancing on glass.”

A precise video streetscape is seen though a window, both tantalizing and forbidding in its flattened glimpses of everyday life. And there are moments when you become abruptly aware of the patterns of words and numbers that the performers have been scribbling on the stages surfaces.

This frantic scrawling captures the creative, despairing vigour that course through Ms. Kanes writing. A sad, slight hope lingers that if things can be written down whether seemingly random numbers or the reasons for despairing oneself – they will assume a manageable form.

The tones of voice assumed by Mr. Hughes, Ms. Ireland and Ms. McInnes range from gallows flippancy to flat-line numbness, from coruscating rage to vicious contempt. Their postures slide between fetal curls and tortured, elongated stretches. Sometimes they seem to be speaking as doctors or friends, offering up helpful, hopeful platitudes of reassurance.

But then there are the apocalyptic rants, couched in biblical language, and the catalogs of historical atrocities, from Nazi Germany to Bosnia (events Ms. Kane explored more specifically in earlier plays), for which the speaker seems to feel herself responsible. At the centre of it all lies an irredeemable sense that a life that ends in death is ultimately only about loss. I have avoided quoting much from “4:48 Psychosis”. Out of context, occasional lines sound as exquisitely chiseled as Auden’s; others suggest entries from a miserable, adolescents diary. But its the plays rhythmic, sweeping pulse that counts most and that has been so lovingly and illuminatingly captured here.

Since her death, Ms. Kane has acquired a cult following among young theatregoers. An aura of romantic gloom always clings to artists who kill themselves that is irresistible to masochistic 14-year-olds in everyone.

Yet I think that Ms. Kane’s appeal goes beyond easy morbidity, that in a way her writings speak to her generation the way T.S. Elliot’s did to his when “The Waste Land” was publishes in the early 1920s. Like the young Elliot, Ms. Kane portrays a landscape stripped of hope and faith, gods and heroes. But her bleakness goes further.

The will to die assumes the brutal, instinctive force usually associated with the will to survive. Ms. Kane does not celebrate or glamorize this urge. “4:48 Psychosis” is no theatrical version of the Blue Oyster Cult song “Dont Fear the Reaper”.

And if some of the arguments here smack of college existentialism, that isnt the point either. This plays scalding strength comes from its unparalleled ability to render the visceral, unanswerable tug of death to someone for whom living is simply no longer an option.

Ben Brantley THE NEW YORK TIMES 28 October 2004