4.48 Psychosis, at the Barbican Theatre this week in a Polish language version by TR Warszawa, is Sarah Kane’s last play; written at the very end of the 90s and her life.
The printed text contains neither stage directions nor even a list of characters and, after its first (posthumous) performance in 2000, it was written up (and sometimes off) as Kane’s suicide note; as supposed to a work of dramatic fiction in its own right.
Grzegorz Jarzyna’s production makes Kane’s play a young woman’s terrifying struggle for her soul and sanity. Magdalena Cieleka gives an uncompromising performance as an inmate of both a Kafkaesque asylum and her own mind. She contends with a series of frightening figures with whom she pleads for love or rescue or both: a friend, a lover, a doctor, a younger self and ultimately the entire audience.
Malgorzata Szczesniak’s excellent set, with its row of identikit institutional sinks and shuddering glass wall, is perfectly lit by Felice Ross. The combined effect is extraordinary: the gathering darkness in the young woman’s mind flows from her and blots out everything onstage including herself. A nightmarish version of When I Fall In Love blends with a series of sound effects that would not be out of place in a David Lynch film to add yet another layer of unease to this profoundly disturbing piece.
I always expect to find the subtitles board much more intrusive than it turns out to be in an excellent production such as this in which all the elements fuse seamlessly. So little of the storytelling depends on the words that you almost forget to glance up at the red letters above the action.
TR Warszawa’s production is pretty frightening in parts and it’s not for the fainthearted but, crucially, it achieves the difficult task of being about depression without being depressing.
