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James Macdonald's production has three
performers, whose roles constantly switch between
doctor, victim and witness. The technique creates
an appropriately disorientating impression of
disintegration and mental anguish. "My mind
is the subject of these bewildered
fragments," says one of the play's voices,
and that mind is putting the speaker through
hell. Anyone who has suffered from depression
will recognise the way Kane's language pins down
the way in which its victims become trapped in
repetitive loops of useless thought and feeling,
and the desperate desire for peace or mere
oblivion.
When 4.48 Psychosis was first performed at the
Royal Court last year, Kane's family were anxious
that it should not be seen as a suicide note. Yet
it is impossible not to view it as a deeply
personal howl of pain, a work ripped not just
from its author's churning brain, but from the
core of her being.
Macdonald's staging, with the audience sitting in
steeply raked seats on the stage and the action
taking place in what was once the Royal Court's
stalls, is hypnotic, harrowing and strangely
beautiful. The production makes brilliant use of
an overhanging tilted mirror, reflecting the
actors and the audience; video and lighting
effects suggest the sickening fizziness of a
diseased, overmedicated mind and the distant
normality of everyday life that lies so
tantalisingly beyond the patient's agonised
solipsism.
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Michael Billington,
Guardian, 30 June 2000 Three
figures sprawl on a sparse set in front of a
huge, slanted mirror. They argue among themselves
- sometimes as if each were a facet of a single
person.
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David Chadderton, dl
reviews, 2000 (link has gone-
ourworld.compuserve.com) The
stage picture consists of a white stage floor, a
white-topped table, two chairs and three actors:
one male and two female. The back wall of the
stage is a forty-five degree wall of mirrors
sloping upwards towards the audience, so the
stage can be watched directly or can be observed
from above through the mirrors. This arrangement
allows the actors to sit, stand or even lie down
flat and still be seen. Video projections are
used onto the whole stage, half of the stage or
the table top, and the table is also used for
writing lists of numbers (backwards, so they can
be read through the mirrors!).
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Fiachra Gibbons,
Guardian, 20 September 1999
4.48 Psychosis: The play, drawn from Goethe's
novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young
man who kills himself because of unrequited love,
culminates in a young woman committing suicide
Blasted: Edward Bond, whose 1965 play
Saved stirred a similar storm, defended Kane from
the outset. "Blasted comes from the centre
of our humanity and our ancient need for theatre.
That's what gives it its strange, almost
hallucinatory authority."
Cleansed: There is an enormous amount
of depression in the play because I felt an
enormous amount of despair when writing it,"
said Kane.
Even amid the eye-gouging, castration and
dismemberment of the latter play, there were
moments of beauty and even black humour provided
by a choir of singing rats.
Crave: A poem for four voices, styled
as two parallel conversations, it drew on T.S.
Eliot's The Wasteland and the Bible
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