4.48 Psychosis

Also saw this last week, and admired it hugely. The score, and particularly the direction, made this something quite special, quite incisive, and unlike Cleansed quite a painful watch. At times I almost thought I was going to walk out – not to do a Parsley, not because it wasn’t good, but because the sheer relentlessness of this deepest of depressions was really starting to get to me – and isn’t that how this play should be? 

I wasn’t a huge fan of Mitchell’s Cleansed. It suffered from Jamie-Lloyd-itis – going all out surface level, and thus missing out on any deeper discoveries. The ever wonderful Michelle Terry aside, I felt that Sarah Kane’s play about the torture of love became a production about the torture of institutionalised violence, and thus missed the point. In prioritising the images over the emotions, I also thought the show became a very easy watch; the theatrical trickery behind the grossest moments was easy to see, and should it become too much it was easy to look away. The two exceptions, and striking exceptions they were, were Terry’s penis and the chocolate-eating scene – once the simple shock of the sight faded away, the oddity of the images remained, and unlike the other moments of gore, it wasn’t about what the moment was but about what the moment meant; there’s no looking away from that.

There was no looking away from any of 4.48 Psychosis. That’s why I thought, however this sounded and worked as a new opera, this was a truly shocking yet honourable production of Kane’s script. Venables’ music was wonderful and a wonderful match for the text; much like Kane’s script he hid moments of conventional beauty underneath. This was the wordless white noise of depression, the atonality of hopeless, the polyphony of suicidal thoughts, occasionally making way for tuneful clarity. It couldn’t have been better served than by Ted Huffman’s direction, though, which is why this worked where Mitchell didn’t. As I say, looking away from violence is fine and dandy, but looking away from the inner life is impossible. By keeping this rolling along with relentless pace, the violence that was internalised and self-inflicted was inescapable. By staging clear, simple, human tableaus uncluttered by physical superfluities, the superfluity of suicidal thoughts sang through. As I say, its mood was so convincingly created that I almost felt like walking out, as it would be the only relief from the action; in that, I’d imagine it’s a chillingly accurate depiction of a suicidal mind, and one I think it was important if almost impossible to endure, as a form of empathy. It’s not a play I know well, and one I think I’ll never love due to its relentlessness, but if it lacks variety and depth, it makes up for that in being such an uncompromising sensory experience, albeit one which (like Cleansed, and really like all Kane, I suppose) needs a convincing, uncompromising production to make its mission statement work. Huffman’s production would have worked all too convincingly on Kane’s play alone; Venebles’ score only enhanced this further.

So I don’t know how this worked as a new opera – I’m not au fait enough on that subject, though I thought the music very good and the six singers a beautifully collaborative sextet – but as a sensoround, four dimensional immersion into a suicidal mind, it was a tremendous psychological recreation of what Sarah Kane so boldly wrote. The real hero is neither Kane nor Venebles, but Huffman for his production which, in its all-encompassing mood, felt all too chillingly precise.