'4.48 Psychosis' allows for artistic freedom

"When I said I wanted to do Sarah Kane, no one in the department had heard of her." Joe Cermatori '05 is directing "4.48 Psychosis" the final work by the British playwright Sarah Kane who committed suicide shortly after completing the play. Kane is most famous for her first play "Blasted", which made her name with scenes of masturbation, fellatio, frottage, micturition, defecation, homosexual rape, eye gouging and cannibalism. But Kane was a constant innovator of form, and after her Beckettian debut she found new but equally powerful voices in her next four plays.

"I think it's something completely different from anything else most Princeton students have seen before," Cermatori said. Plays produced at Princeton have a tendency to reflect a conservative taste and a play like "4.48 Psychosis" forces its audience to reevaluate definitions of theatre."

The title refers to 4:48 a.m., the darkest hour before dawn, and the theme is suicidal despair and psychosis, a state in which the normal boundaries between waking life and dream life, between the self and others, collapse. It is composed of monologues and dialogues whose content includes exchanges between patients and therapists, notes about grief, mental anguish and psychological distress, caustic accounts of the therapeutic use of drugs and diary entries. Each of the lines could be spoken by either a man or a woman. The effect is of a mind full of competing voices, a mix of poetic images, idiomatic snatches of conversation, satires on psychobabble and repetitive, quasi-liturgical rhythms, conveying the experience of psychological crisis, when the barriers between reality and different forms of imagination disappear. Originally staged with three actors, Kane's most experimental play is the culmination of her quest to make form and content one. On the page, there are no characters, nor any indication of how many actors are required. The text is laid out more like a modernist poem than a play. In view of her ceaseless desire to innovate in form, an audience should expect "4.48 Psychosis" to be more of a poetic extravaganza than a traditional three-act play.

The problem with a text that lacks the usual dramatic guides, such as the fundamental division of the dialogue between voices, is that the director is confronted with absolute artistic freedom. "Trying to decide which interpretive and dramatic choices to make when countless options presented themselves was a hugely daunting task," Cermatori explained and "finding legible forms for the abstract moments in the text was a challenge". Watching "4.48 Psychosis" involves being exposed to a text in which lyricism is laced with powerful stage images and where missives from the edge of extreme experience are laced with a wry humour.

Humour and despair are hard to marry, especially in a world with so many images of pain and suffering that people become emotionally anaesthetized. This production, however, is very powerful. Performances by the three members of the cast — Rob Grant '07, Nikki Muller '05 and Laura Breckenridge '07 — are exceptional. The emotional range is perfect and there is brilliant physical subtlety.

The crucial directorial choices are well justified. Cermatori's set design conveys the oppressive white sterility of a hospital environment, as well as a sense of looking into another mind, which is hauntingly inseparable from the vision of the viewer himself — adding an important touch of claustrophobia. This production imparts a very personalized experience, which, I think, is the source of its emotional impact. There is a perfect sense of theatrical illusion, yet one is uncomfortably aware of being a voyeur and, therefore, more susceptible to a disarming gaze. I cannot be specific about the details of the set and the production as, at the director's request, "it should all be a secret for the full experience." This is theatre where you're afraid to swallow for fear of breaking silences.

"4.48 Psychosis" is often thought of as performance rather than theatre, but Cermatori's production breaks the boundary. Emotionally and intellectually challenging, the production avoids the pitfalls of abstraction that could plague such a text in performance, potentially alienating an audience. This production is completely engaging. Sadly there are very few seats for the three performances, and it seems they are sold out. If you haven't got a ticket (and you've already seen PSC's "Othello") you can sit in Small World thinking about how boring your life is over a slice of lemon and a bitten macaroon; if you have got a ticket, you lucky, lucky thing, prepare to change the way you are.