Tonight I saw the
Sarah Kane play
4:48 Psychosis at the
Summerworks Theatre Festival. I first encountered the work of Sarah Kane in 2000 during a theatre course in my MA program at Kings College London. In 2001, the
Royal Court Theatre ran a season of Sarah Kane's work and I saw almost all her plays here, including
4:48 Psychosis. It was one of the most riveting moments of my life - I did not realize I was crying until the lights came up and I was overwhelmed by the rawness and emotion and beauty of such a stunning piece of theatre. In a sentence, the play is a chaotic meditation on the disintegration of the mind from mental illness.
The play is almost like a long poem, and I suppose can be interpreted in a few different ways. But the way this director interpreted the play was just...terrible. The original production had three actors who assumed various roles (patient, doctor, witness) and rotated as such. But the Summerworks performance had the actors take specific roles which they maintained throughout the play - patient, doctor, and the witness that was portrayed as some kind of blood soaked zombie. By assuming static roles and having tremendously long monologues throughout, the intentional chaos of the play wasn't communicated at all. The play was also overacted, sometimes embarrassedly so, and this stripped the beauty out of Kane's words.
The Royal Court performance made wonderful use of props and lighting - a large mirror was hung on a slant above the stage, which reflected a second mirror that lay on the stage. As one actor counted the
serial sevens, another wrote the numbers on the mirror - but backwards, so the hanging mirror displayed the numbers in the correct form. It was a beautiful portrayal of the delicate nature of chaos. Tonight's performance, on the other hand, had a transparent plastic curtain smeared with fake blood and a handheld flashlight. Sigh. I won't go as far to say that this performance was a disservice to Kane's work, but it was appallingly disappointing. For a better idea of how brilliant the Royal Court performance was, here is a
review of it.I wanted to quote some of
4:48 Psychosis here and have spent over an hour trying to choose a passage. I could just reprint the entire play, but in the end I chose this:
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Tonight I saw the Sarah Kane play 4:48 Psychosis at the Summerworks Theatre Festival. I first encountered the work of Sarah Kane in 2000 during a theatre course in my MA program at Kings College London. In 2001, the Royal Court Theatre ran a season of Sarah Kane's work and I saw almost all her plays here, including 4:48 Psychosis. It was one of the most riveting moments of my life - I did not realize I was crying until the lights came up and I was overwhelmed by the rawness and emotion and beauty of such a stunning piece of theatre. In a sentence, the play is a chaotic meditation on the disintegration of the mind from mental illness.
I have been hunting for months for a new address book. My travels over the past little while have been complicated by sheets of paper with addresses on them, that I then lose and have to rewrite for the next trip. And with my impending move to London in a few weeks time, my hunt was taking on a slight tone of desperation.
My birthday smashed a whole bunch of heat records. (My mother, of course, insisted that it was just as hot when I was born and I should have tried being nine months pregnant in this kind of heat.) The humidity was unbelievable. Walking outside yesterday I had to continually take off my sunglasses to wipe the condensation off them. 
