[title]
This review is from 2018. '4.48 Psychosis' returns to New Diorama Theatre in October 2019
The stage is behind glass, like an enclosure in a zoo. ‘4.47’ is projected on to the back wall, the ‘7’ blinking before it changes to ‘8’.
Named after the time at which playwright Sarah Kane apparently would, in her depressed state, wake, ‘4.48 Psychosis’ is her last play. Kane doesn’t specify setting, stage directions or even characters in this, a text that my companion (herself a writer and long-time Kane reader) describes as almost taking the form of a poem. The director chooses how many people appear on stage and who speaks which lines.
Director Paula Garfield and her Deafinitely Theatre company have opted to present the text from the points of view of four characters, all men. Two are patients, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts, their arms bruised and scarred, their eyes wild. Two are doctors in lab coats.
Both patients are deaf and communicate in British Sign Language; the doctors communicate in coldly enunciated spoken English and BSL. The projected text on the back wall functions as a mixture of text art and subtitling. When the patients are spasming and suffering, or howling like animals, the histrionics are smoothed and lifted by the sparse, clean, perfectly articulated pain of Kane’s prose.
From my point of view, as a hearing person who doesn’t understand BSL, both the beauty and the difficulty of BSL in this play is the way it can become mime, even dance. When it works, it shines, but when it doesn’t, it looks confusingly like charades. Though not every movement is abstracted language; about halfway through the 80-minute performance there is an anarchic dance sequence and the change of movement from expression to suppression is chilling.
Garfield’s choice of casting highlights the taboo subject of mental health in the deaf community and the terrible hurt of trying to make oneself understood and accepted, as a deaf person, by the hearing. It’s an uneasy interpretation – so much of the play is about the experience of living with depression that it feels like a confusing conflation of two separate issues. Nevertheless, the sheer courage and passion that have been thrown behind this intelligent production of a daringly experimental play win out, and what lingers is its cry for love.