4.48 Psychosis

Sarah Kane
TR Warszawa
Barbican Theatre
(2010)

Production photo

4.48 Psychosis is a gift for a director. Kane's text - her last - is more prose poem than script, lacking stage directions or delineated characters: a nearly blank slate onto which a director can impose context, character and narrative. To Grzegorz Jarzyna, of Polish company TR Warszawa, that creative freedom is a double-edged sword: by over-exercising it in certain areas, he almost crowds out the strongest elements of his interpretation.

Every scene of this Polish language production has its conceit. In one, pills rain from a table onto the floor. In another, lead performer Magdalena Cielecka is silently mirrored by a small girl. Later, a naked old woman circumnavigates the stage while Cielecka speaks. These images are more of a visual accompaniment to the dialogue than an interpretation of it, and actually serve to distract from the production's main strengths.

One of these is the oppressive atmosphere, sustained largely by the monotonous bass drones and seasick pitchshifted showtunes of Piotr Dominski's soundscape. Combine that with lighting designer Felice Ross's palette of confining spots and sickly washes and even the 1,166-seater Barbican Theatre starts to feel claustrophobic.

But the production's stand-out, defining feature is Magdalena Cielecka's performance. Her every twitch, tic and gesture is more fascinating and meaningful than the production's whole complement of devices and visual metaphors.

As she details her planned method of suicide, she clutches her belly, or wrings her hands together masturbatorily through her trouser pockets. Eloquently but venomously she rails against the doctors that rattle off easy chemical fixes for her every symptom, and against the people and circumstances she blames for them.

It's clear without any supplementary imagery that this person is grieving rather than self-pitying, that she's damaged as much by unfeeling diagnoses and labels as by whatever's happening inside her, and that, far from taking the easy way out, she's desperate to free herself by any means, however extreme.

It takes until the play's final passage for Jarzyna to whisk away all the window dressing. Here Cielecka's face, softly illuminated by a narrow spot, is all that's visible on an otherwise darkened stage; Jarzyna decodes Kane's final lines solely through the medium of his star's delivery and countenance. It's revealing that this understated moment, rather than, say, Cielecka's earlier crazed, blood-drenched assault on the cyc, is the production's most enthralling.

Until 27 March

Reviewer: Matt Boothman

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