Sarah Kane Was Not A Suicide
By Martin Harries
4.48 Psychose
By Sarah Kane
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Box office: (718) 636-4100
Sarah Kane's suicide comes first. It is next
to impossible to think about her work without thinking of that act.
Given that her last work, 4.48 Psychosis, reads as a preamble
to or rehearsal of her suicide, the fact of her death all the more powerfully
demands consideration. "I have become so depressed by the fact of my
mortality that I have decided to commit suicide." This is one of the
lapidary early sentences in the text. And this is a late pair of lines:
I have no desire for death
no suicide ever had
Kane works on 4.48 Psychosis over 1998,
and perhaps into the next year; in February, 1999, she hangs herself
with shoelaces, a suicide. And now Isabelle Huppert has come from the
grave to tell us that Sarah Kane is not dead. And of course the undead
Kane speaks French (the same language Beckett chose after he chose to
begin to die).
-- Of course I am not serious. And yet consider
the pair of lines above, and their twisted game with temporality. The
lines disown the "desire for death" that marks every other moment of
the piece, but precisely as the lines disown this desire they point
to a temporal problem. Can we say that Sarah Kane was a suicide?
Or must we use the present tense: Sarah Kane is a suicide?
When she contemplated the act, she was not yet the suicide she contemplated
becoming. The "suicide" who does not desire death is only called a suicide
once she has claimed the death she did not desire.
Is it sentimental to ask whether this lack --
the absence of a "desire for death" -- is communicable?
The program for Claude Régy's production of Sarah
Kane's 4.48 Psychose includes this quotation from Kane:
If we can experience something through art,
then we might be able to change our future, because experiences engraves
[sic] lessons on our hearts through suffering, whereas speculation
leaves us untouched . . . It's crucial to chronicle and commit to
memory events never experienced -- in order to avoid them happening.
I'd rather risk overdose in the theatre than in life.
This program for theater recalls Antonin Artaud's
manifesto "No More Masterpieces," where he argues that theatrical violence,
properly handled, will work not to produce but to mitigate -- indeed
to preempt -- violence outside the theater:
It will be claimed that example breeds example,
that if the attitude of cure induced cure, the attitude of murder
will induce murder. Everything depends upon the manner and the purity
with which the thing is done. There is a risk. But let it not be forgotten
that though a theatrical gesture is violent, it is disinterested;
and that the theater teaches precisely the uselessness of the action
which, once done, is not to be done, and the superior use of the state
unused by the action and which, restored, produces a purification.
These quotations point to a logic for Kane's
theater of cruelty, and to the reason Régy included the first of them
in his program. This 4.48 Psychose is hard to watch and harder
still, it is quite clear, to perform -- we watch Huppert limp off stage
after remaining rigidly in one place for an hour and three quarters
-- but the theatrical overdose in its sublime "uselessness" should preserve
us from bad futures. So, at least, in theory.
"Everything depends upon the manner and the purity
with which the thing is done." The manner here is spare, and every aspect
of the production works brilliantly. In Régy's production, there are
two actors: Huppert, in sculpturally severe leather pants, a close fitting
blue shirt, hair pulled back, standing in front of a scrim, and Gérard
Watkins, in red pants and an orange shirt, less restricted in his movements,
behind it. Daniel Jeanneteau's elegant setting, Dominique Bruguière's
lighting, the costume design by Ann Williams, and Philippe Cacchia's
sound design all cohere: imagine Beckett's Not I staged for
almost nine hundred spectators. The central element of the setting is
the scrim itself, which covers the proscenium opening: it looks like
synthetic asphalt and embodies the gulf between these two onstage interlocutors.
And though it is behind her, the scrim also embodies the gulf between
Huppert and audience, a gap that is all the more striking given her
proximity to us. There is nothing between audience and actress, but
that space feels all the more absolute because there is no physical
barrier to remove. The last lines of the text -- "please open the curtains"
-- left me naively wondering if the asphalt curtain would rise. Of course
it did not.
The "observ'd of all observers" here
is not Hamlet but Huppert. Fists clenched, body rigid, she speaks for
a long while in a sort of incantatory monotone. In the last forty-five
minutes or so, there is more vocal variety: for instance, a rapid tour
through a series of violent verbs ("wring slash punch . . ." and so
on in Kane's text). Her gestures are few: she packs a world of furious
resistance into the occasional upward movement of a curled finger. That
raised finger at once accuses someone unknown and looks like a minute
scythe in the hands of a dancer of death. After short breaks and blackouts,
she is caught in oblongs of light from new directions, and these simple
changes have the effect of making her look like a different person,
older, or younger, or yet more distant. Kane's epic list of psychoactive
drugs and dosages becomes an intense monologue. Certain key curses such
as "putain" ("whore," which here often translates "fucking" when Kane
uses it as an intensifier) return as grim moments of punctuation. Huppert's
performance is painful, challenging, hard to watch, and unforgettable.
She also at once defies and invites our sympathy, and it is oscillation
between an aggressive defiance and an equally aggressive solicitation
-- to us? to her interlocutor? -- which makes 4.48 Psychose
so unsettling.
Jared Stark's lucid discussion of the prevailing
modern discourses surrounding suicide has helped me to understand the
power of this production:
Sociology, psychology, and medicine attribute
suicide to causes beyond the control of the individual, of which the
individual becomes the agent and victim. These diagnostic discourses
might be accused, not without reason, of producing explanatory regimes
that erase the specificity of any suicide and render it a passive,
symptomatic gesture. Any countervailing effort to give voice to a
particular suicide, however, equally risks generating false identifications
and vicarious appropriations.
Watkins's character is at once friend, doctor,
and psychologist, and we can tell that his words will not penetrate
the black veil between him and Huppert. This audience knows better than
to fall for these "explanatory regimes" and the "chemical lobotomy"
that is Kane's phrase for the vanishing point to which they lead. The
danger of "false identifications and vicarious appropriations" looms
larger in staging 4.48 Psychosis. And a disciplined avoidance
of the seductions of such vicarious pleasures explains the relentless
affectlessness of Huppert: "I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE LOOK AWAY FROM
ME."
Some do look away, and walk away: their clatter
toward the exits becomes an inadvertent and oddly threatening, if not
entirely unanticipated, element in the sound design. But for many others
4.48 Psychose may achieve a certain strange intimacy, an intimacy
that is all the more powerful for its resistance to rapid identification,
to the immediate thrill of a vicarious occupation of a "decompensating"
body (to play with one of Kane's neologisms).
"Rien qu'un mot sur une page et il y a le théâtre,"
intones Huppert. In the absence of Kane's text, one would most likely
translate this line back into English: "Nothing but a word on a page
and there is theater." The translator, Michael Bugdahn, however, renders
Kane's phrase: "Just a word on a page and there is drama." When is a
"drama" not a "drame"? Where did this word "théâtre" come from?
From Artaud, one might say, and from a whole
tradition that considers the word on the page a stagnant thing until
enlivened by a "theatrical gesture": drama won't cut it. It may be,
however, that the English playwright uses the word "drama"
for the same reason her French translator jettisons it: she claims her
place in a stage tradition that has become too comfortable. Kane continues
a dramatic struggle against fluent identification, against
easy translation from the body of the spectator to the body of the actor.
This production understands that.
And yet Kane's word "drama" points to something
else this production understands. To resist quick identification is
not necessarily entirely to resist identification. Kane's text includes
a trio of positions: "Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander." In the first
production, directed by James Macdonald at the Royal Court Theatre in
2000, as in last year's revival of it at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn,
Macdonald cast three actors, as if taking this set of positions as a
list of characters. In 4.48 Psychose, there are only two actors
onstage. This "théâtre" is a drama that has cast the audience in one
of Kane's roles. But we should not assume too quickly that we know which
position we occupy.
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Two notes:
Caveat spectator: Régy chose to keep
the supertitles to a minimum, so I would urge those without fairly fluent
French to read the text in advance. Régy's "note on the supertitles"
in the program claims that the "language of the soul is immaterial."
Maybe so. The language of these bodies, however, with the exception
of a single phrase in English -- "happy hour" (which provokes Beckettian
titters) -- is French.
I regret not having seen Macdonald's production
of 4.48 Psychosis at St. Ann's Warehouse. For a review, see
Caridad Svich's "What the Mirror Sees," published in Hotreview.org.