Tangram Theatre – 4:48 Psychosis

4:48 Psychosis is Sarah Kane’s final play in a body of work that changed the UK/international theatre landscape of the 90’s and continues to grow as new companies and directors explore her language and drama. Before I get to the review of Tangram Theatre’s production of 4:48 I want to expand a few thoughts on the late author.

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.