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.