4.48 Psychosis: A blistering return for the most shocking play of 1989

Telegraph

5 hours ago

This is a must-see revival of the searing last play by Sarah Kane – in which the most distinctive voice of the 1990s young playwriting wave experimentally explored the subject of suicide via a stream of utterances that combined stark declaration with cryptic lyricism. It's not just any revival, though – but one that replicates the premiere 2000 production that was staged a year after she took her own life, aged just 28.
It's at the same venue – the Royal Court Upstairs (the scene too of the brutal 1995 debut, Blasted, which made her name). And the same actors – Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, Madeleine Potter. There's even the same approach to staging by James Macdonald, down to the final climactic grace-filled coup de theatre in which natural evening light from outside is allowed into the space.
Here again, as if we were picking up after a brief hiatus, are the mirrored panels slanting over the action, causing the casually dressed trio of actors to be duplicated. It remains a magical effect – someone lying on the ground can seem to float in mid-air – but also a terrifying one, as if these were souls in free-fall.
I saw it – awed – the first time. A generation later and there's no sense of it having become a museum-piece. Despite the cast being visibly older, and perhaps even because of that, it still feels raw. This is a play about the pain of being alive and mortality – the difference today is that one appreciates the staying-power of the piece, as well as its saving mordant wit.
Back in 2000, there was an inevitable attendant mood of mourning; the shock of Kane 's death remained palpable. Some critics even described the piece as a suicide note, tempted by its determined articulation of a death-wish. 'At 4.48 [am] when desperation visits I shall hang myself to the sound of my lover's breathing,' runs one early line.
But re-watching Macdonald's interpretation, I'm struck by how little the bleak circumstances of the work's creation now impinge. Whether Kane had died or not, this hour-long wrestling with despair would have endured. Her stroke of artistic ingenuity was to take us inside a psychotic breakdown – so that the boundaries between external and internal worlds collapse. What might be remarks made by a psychiatrist, say, also sound like an internal conversation. She catches the chaos of disintegration, but also applies dramatic control.
If not every line rings true, that's partly because the writing can get overwrought, partly because the delivery here can sound too off-hand and slick. But the quiet investment of the actors holds good: there's a wintry melancholy to Potter's demeanour that haunts us in its own way, while McInnes has the hopeless air of someone only just coping. Evans, now the co-artistic director of the RSC (where the production will move), brings a warm mellifluousness to the language that, of course, makes you think of Shakespeare, Hamlet, and 'To be or not to be'.
Is this in that league? No – but nothing quite like it, or Kane, has come along these past 25 years.