4.48 Psychosis
The Other Place, Stratford upon Avon
★★★★★

PARADOXICALLY, the only person who could be expected to fully appreciate the impact of what is recognised as Sarah Kane’s dramatic suicide note would be someone suffering from the similar mental torture that she “rehearses” in this 70-minute experience. At the same time, as I wrote in my 2008 review of a Polish production in Edinburgh, I hope no-one suffering from the same anguish will involuntarily see this revival of her last stage work before taking her own life in 1999.

It would be wrong to call this a play. Theatre is about artifice and here we have reality. Kane gave no help to directors of future productions. There are no stage directions in her text, nor even a suggestion of how many characters she intended. There is no plot-line development in 24 short scenes, changes signalled on the page only by a series of dashes, necessarily indicated by lighting changes, in this 25th anniversary revival of the original production.

“My mind is the subject of these bewildering fragments” is one of the few clues the text allows. The speaker, here given to three voices in James Macdonald’s co-production between the Royal Court theatre and the RSC, weaves through a maze of memories, which include love affairs, sexual identity crises, and desperate medical attempts to contend with her despairing depression, all climaxing at that deadly moment in a sleepless night, 4.48 pm.

The stark reality is born home by the realisation that the extra theatrical fact of the author’s actual death is inevitably central to its powerful message, surely made even more telling today, with society’s anxieties over increasing mental illness, than it was a quarter of a century ago.

Sarah Kane’s work is essentially a theatre poem, the equivalent of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland but focusing on the individual, rather than society in general, in its sense of a helplessness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness, which can touch everyone at moments, and especially as we are bombarded by obscene television images of cruelty and destruction.

Sarah Kane was not asking for sympathy or empathy in her choice not to live in this world, but for understanding of that choice.

The director’s task is to hold an audience through the visual image that supports the words. Designer Jeremy Herbert’s surgical set, a cross between a hospital ward and a prison cell, is enhanced by an angled mirror which at times presents the speakers pinned to the back wall like helpless butterflies on display.

The long silence after the actors leave the stage, before returning for audience acknowledgement, marks the momentous impact of a unique theatre experience.

Runs until August 30. Box Office: 0789 333111, rsc.org.uk