There has been some opaque messaging around this 25th anniversary revival of Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis. Gathering together the original creative team and cast – which includes current RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans – I’d half got the impression this would be a case of ‘same people, different take’. But it’s clear from a cursory look at any photo from 2000 that this is that show, brought back.
And James Macdonald’s production returns to us as somewhat luxury theatre. 4.48 Psychosis was originally staged in the Royal Court’s tiny Upstairs studio. Which made sense: mounting a formally challenging work that heavily foreshadowed its writer’s suicide was obviously a delicate business in the immediate aftermath of her death. Now, however, her passing is less raw, the play is an acknowledged modern classic, and this revival sold out aeons ago (although you can still get tickets on Mondays).
Why restage this production when 4.48 Psychosis never really enjoyed a major UK revival? (the Young Vic did it with a Romanian actor and a French director… 16 years ago). Why not at least transfer it to the bigger Downstairs theatre? Is it meaningfully different from how it was 25 years ago? I can’t answer those questions, but I can tell you that I was rapt for the entire 70 minutes.
Is 4.48 Psychosis bleak? I mean duh, yes,
The critic Michael Billlington famously described the orginal production as ‘a suicide note’. I’m not sure that’s true, though it’s obvious why he said that and why it probably felt like that in the wake of her death. Its unnamed narrator – here divided between the three actors – is obsessed by suicide, and regards it as an inevitably. It is clearly heavily, probably entirely autobiographical. But she is also hilarious: ‘I dreamt that I went to the doctors and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour’.
Is 4.48 Psychosis bleak? I mean duh, yes, But with its final destination now so utterly foregone – not painfully raw but a historical fact – I found myself revelling in the brilliance and wit of the mind it conjured. It”s less a tortured confessional, than a prodigious talent determined to spin the thoughts consuming her into pure, molten art.
Macdonald arranges Kane’s worlds like a conductor at the helm of a tricky symphony. The text famously doesn’t specify how many performers it’s supposed to be delivered by; but the division into three makes a lot of sense, turning the dense words to dialogue, a mind turning over its despair with forensic wit. I wouldn’t exactly say the three actors have been assigned different personalities. But that’s also somewhat true: Madeleine Potter is gravelly and cynical; Evans is lighter and more morally flexible; Jo McInnes is droll and down to earth but capable of the most volcanic emotional peaks. They take us on a journey: for all the text’s abstractions, it’s quite easy to follow what’s going on here as Kane takes us from darkness to rage, gives antidepressants a go, finds fault (‘let’s do the chemical lobotomy’) and journeys on into the night alone.
The actors are abetted by atmospheric video design from Ben Walden - pulses of static, TV screen-style flickers, a strangely ominous window to a sunny street - and Jeremy Herbert’s set, a huge protruding diagonal mirror in which we often look at the actors as they lie on the floor.
I wonder if 4.48 Psychosis is such a vivid summoning of Kane at the end of her life that there’s a nervousness about tackling it from a British theatre establishment full of her peers. It’s so autobiographical that a radical new interpretation would be radically reinterpreting a woman that a lot of people in the industry knew personally. But regular Kane collaborator Mcdonald’s production so clearly channels her as a personality that there’s something powerful about treating the original production as less a piece of drama than a summoning ritual to be followed, step by step. And for 70 minutes it feels like we know Sarah Kane too, like she exists in this room, in all her darkness and brilliance.
