What the Mirror Sees
By Caridad Svich
4:48 Psychosis
By Sarah Kane
St. Ann's Warehouse
38 Water St., Brooklyn
Box office: 718-254-8779
A tilted mirror reflects the interior world
of Sarah Kane's last play, 4:48 Psychosis. Originally
produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2000, this play
has been staged internationally but has never before received
a major U.S. production. Now, in a restaging of the Royal Court's
original production directed by James Macdonald, 4:48 Psychosis
is touring major arts venues across the United States, and many
Americans are encountering one of Britain's most daring, influential
dramatists of the 1990s for the first time.
The cast is composed of three actors, two
of them British (Jason Hughes and Jo McInnes), and one American
(Marin Ireland--a friend of mine), who embody the spare, fragmented
disassociations of a troubled mind on the brink of suicidal collapse.
The actors' bodies in this highly stylized, austere production
are almost always still. They look mostly away from the audience
and lie on the stage floor staring into a mirror, or writing numbers
and words on a table that occasionally serves as a surface for
projecting images of busy London streets at different times of
day. The projected images are like life seen through a magic window.
The world outside goes on in this play even as the interior world
becomes more and more depressed, desolate, despairing and severe.
Kane's mordant, incisive exploration of mental illness places
the audience right inside the disassociative mind. Written in
a flash-and-burn collage of translucent fragments that delineate
with precision the degrees of rage, wit, intelligence and hopelessness
nakedly apparent in an individual suffering from clinical depression
(here split in three voices), 4:48 Psychosis is a contemporary
re-examination of Goethe's "Werther effect." (More on this later.)
Compared during her lifetime to Beckett
and Bond, Kane's work--which includes the corrosive Blasted,
the extraordinarily painful Cleansed, the violently carnal
Phaedra in Love and the four-character dramatic poem
Crave--is demanding and extreme. She was classified as
an "in-yer-face" British nihilist playwright in the 1990s (along
with Mark Ravenhill, Judy Upton and Joe Penhall), but a re-reading
of her plays reveals that she was clearly a writer of classical
ambition both in form and content, and not simply an of-the-moment
"shock" artist. In Kane's writing there is a fusion of punk spirit
and classical reach, and with each play, the link to the ancient
dramatists becomes more transparent. Kane, unlike most of her
close contemporaries in Britain, wrote plays that spoke directly
to contemporary reality while steering relatively clear of realistic
trappings. She sought to reclaim the neo-modernist word-geography
of T.S. Eliot at his peak as much as Shakespeare's "blasted heath."
Her work--which is the main subject of
the critical study Love me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the
Theatre of Extremes by Graham Saunders, and a major subject
in Aleks Sierz's book In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today--seeks
to uproot drama from its predominant Victorian and post-Victorian
mode of representational comfort and psychological acuity, returning
it to the presentational, irrational, blood sport-infused drama
of the late Greeks and Romans. The audience in Kane's plays endures,
suffers, and is shocked, horrified and disturbed by the writer's
visions. They are asked to be forcible witnesses to acts of astonishing
violence and rage in almost Grand Guignol extremity. While 4:48
Psychosis could be seen as a comparatively serene play in
Kane's oeuvre, in that the physical violence is only described
and not seen and the play's motion is almost exclusively internal,
it does demand of an audience an uncompromising relationship to
its subject. Mental illness is not held up for view as a case
study here; the audience is rather asked to enter the state of
illness: to experience with artful distance the pain of thoughts
fractured, seemingly divorced from the self. This is a testament
to Kane's talent and skill as a writer and poet. Broken-ness is
her theme and, as in her other works, it serves as both a means
to explore the human condition and an end.
This production of 4:48 Psychosis
may be seen by some as definitive, since it was directed by Kane's
close collaborator James Macdonald, a brilliant director whose
work will be seen again in New York this season when Caryl Churchill's
A Number opens at New York Theatre Workshop. But it is
only one version of the play. It is important to note this because
the text is extremely open and can offer significantly variant
stagings. On the page, no characters are named or specified in
number, age, or gender, and no physical actions or stage descriptions
are delineated. The play reads as poem, and is not even expressly
or conventionally dramatic. It is, however, a piece for voice
and space and for a voice or voices in space across a span of
time.
Macdonald's
extraordinarily sensitive staging does not try to diminish the
possibilities of multiple readings. Clear choices are made, though,
about the use of video and lighting and spatial composition. Figures
are often seen in half-shadow, and are exposed in white light
at contrasting emotional moments. A long sequence in the middle
is staged in a bluish hospital haze of incessant, eerie somnambulance.
Another sequence is played out against loops of video static that
reflect the figures' repetitive loops of thought and feeling.
The three actors perform with humility, precision, and emotional
dexterity. One sequence of particular note places the "patient"
voice of actor Marin Ireland, one of the America's best and brightest
young stage actors, in a prolonged interview scenario with the
"doctor" voice of Jason Hughes wherein she forces herself to stifle
vocally and physically the very act of crying. The sequence, lit
as if in movie close-up, demands that the actor both express and
illustrate clinically the movement of crying in the body, while
at the same time inhabiting the emotions associated with anguish.
It's a wrenching sequence intensified by the utter simplicity
of the staging and the lack of sentimentality with which both
the action and text are delivered.
Kane's suicide in 1999 has marked the reading
of her works significantly over the last few years. A cult of
death is forming around her work, as it has around other writers
like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. There is an uneasy reverence
with which Kane's work is received now, and I think it mars the
engagement necessary for an audience to fully experience it. Kane
invites death into her plays, and wrestles with it time and again.
Hers is a voice of rage in the darkest of nights. Yet it would
be more than a shame for her work to be viewed only through the
lens of suicide, mental illness, and artistic martyrdom. It is
almost as if we are imposing a somewhat hazy Werther-like Romantic
filter upon Kane, when her work at its best is frankly carnal,
immediate, and un-romantic. She wrote love stories, as most of
the greatest writers do, but hers are hard stories of love. When
there is martyrdom at play in her work, Kane is careful to take
a critical stance toward it. The formal experimentation, emotional
risk, and poetic density of her writing transcend reductive biographical
readings.
Her work was and is alive, fierce, passionate,
and caustic. There is a self-reflexive, cruel humor evident in
her writing, and most crucially in this, her last, unfinished
play. (I say "unfinished" because she was not able to play an
active role in the rehearsal or production process of the work's
premiere.) She attacks and embraces her figures at one and the
same time. She also was clearly, if one charts the dramatic progression
from Blasted to 4:48 Psychosis, still very much
a young writer finding new ways to make her theatre. Kane's writing
is therefore in process, and always will be. While she chose to
end her life, the work only stopped, and remains to be read in
a state of suspension and speculation as to what might have been.
The restless beauty of her work is in its very limitation, and
its ardent reach.
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