4.48 Psychosis, Young Vic - theatre review
Sarah Kane's mesmerising last play about depression and suicide at the Young Vic is quite extraordinary
30 July 2009
Rating: 4/5
THIS country doesn’t like depression. For starters, it’s given it a doughy, jokey name, which is a bit like calling a scorpion a trifle.
Playwright Sarah Kane killed herself a few months after writing this, her poetic last play, based around the premise of depressive insomnia and that the madness therein is the clarity gained in the small hours before dawn. It’s the truest description of the unrelenting horror that plagues so many people, delivered here as a frenzied monologue.
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But one woman’s clarity is another’s madness, and that frustration of watching the world operate on a parallel level outside one’s reach (“I have no desire for death. No suicide ever had”) is brought sharply to life with insistent repetition and streams of verbs held together with jagged diatribes on medication, loneliness and unsuccessful therapy.
Director Christian Benedetti, gifted with a play written as a poem and without stage directions, puts in pauses that would alarm Pinter, deeply unsettling and deserving better than the audience coughing or getting up halfway through as when I saw it.
Anamaria Marinca, who bears a startling resemblance to Kane, is quite astonishing, standing in one spot throughout with all the coiled energy of someone about to hurl a javelin. Her Romanian accent gives Kane’s pin-prick, poisonous eloquence a softness which makes the mind reel.
It’s relentless, devastating and difficult and does a trampled-down illness justice. The euphoria afterwards on breaking free of the mood and the words is quite extraordinary. The tragedy is that Kane never could.
To 8 August, Young Vic, 66 The Cut, SE1 8LZ, 020 7922 2922
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