Benedetti’s interpretation of the text, with a single female actor onstage, speaking directly to the audience, focuses on the rhythms and cycles of Kane’s writing to access different states of the character’s emotions. The direction draws attention to the resonance of the writing, questioning the nature of humanity now. As 4:48 progresses from time of desperation to time of sanity, the play becomes a symbol of human malady.

Anamaria Marinca embodies both despair and wit, speaking from only one point onstage throughout the performance, with two open doors behind her. Her eyes are warm, and her rare smile offers a pleasant shift in texture. The silences, stillness and sincerity are the most powerful elements in this production. It’s an ongoing discussion between Anamaria and the audience, not so much an appeal but a dialogue. Under the austere lighting, she sometimes appears like an insect, vulnerable, angry; and it is in her posture and her mode of address that we access thoughts, feelings, states of being, not a whole person but the myriad facets that make up that person.

For those who have seen Anamaria Marinca in the film 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni, 2 Zile (4 Months,3 Weeks and 2 Days) , there is a strong parallel between her character in the film and the way she communicates with the audience in 4:48: dangerous and vulnerable at the same time, confrontational, trying to reach a state of normality.

This production of 4:48 Psychosis toys with human nature and theatrical convention. While Anamaria Marinca seems to face her own dark side – natural and, at times, impulsive – Benedetti asks us to rethink Kane’s writing once more. So that maybe now, in light of our times, we can understand a different side of her. In the director’s own words, ‘It’s an attempt at an answer, the temptation of a winking eye’.

Kane is often dubbed as being one of the leading playwrights in a theatre trend called ‘In yer face‘ theatre, described by Alex Sierz as “the kind of theatre which grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message.” If naming a trend is an attempt at contextualising/positioning a body of work in a given time and place, then to pin Kane on the map surely limits the scope of her experiment. The substance of Kane’s work eludes frames of time and place through its poetic profundity, it positions itself in the jaws of evolutionary struggle.

Yes her characters are hopelessly tragic, yes her plays lie outside common morality; yes, the images she presents are raw and shocking, and yes her language is at times right up in your face, but we seem to spend so much time looking at the ground, seeing the world at eye-level that we forget to look up; and it’s up there through the ‘hatch of light’ that Kane’s attempt at capturing the poison and passion that screams in our veins, exists.

The space is clinical: white brick walls, white chairs, white neon lights on the walls and overhead, and a cast of seven women dressed in…yes, white. At centre stage hangs a noose. The space is wide but shallow in depth, cramped and intimate with no dark recesses to conceal the audience, everyone is exposed in Brechtian form – a form of confrontation. The seven actresses are poised in formation from the beginning, their sharp gazes cut through the audience. These moments of ‘extreme’ focus are a device employed throughout the show bringing silent contrast to the very dense and rhythmic text.

The seven women work as a chorus. Their speech patterns shift between unison, canon, dialogue and monologue. Tangram plays with these juxtaposing configurations to produce moments of pure flow, and moments of haunting silence that draw the audience closer to Kane’s despair. This is a play about living with acute depression, the voices in the text feed off it, it permeates everything in 4:48, even irony and the few comic moments leave an uncomfortable taste.

The production is not without its problems, the constant whitewash bars us from experiencing the world at 4:48 in the morning when it’s pitch black outside and nothing but the birds seem alive. The cast is clearly well ‘trained’, can cry on cue, can sing their hearts out and push us to the brink of the ‘acceptable’ palette of emotions but rarely do they us to the dark side in this show, and no matter how perverse, that’s the side I’m looking for with Kane.