4.48 PSYCHOSIS To 8 August.
London.
4:48 PSYCHOSIS
by Sarah Kane.
Young Vic (The Maria) 66 The Cut SE1 8LZ To 8 August 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 3.45pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7922 2922.
www.youngvictheatre.org
Review: Carole Woddis 23 July.
The pain and the intensity make their point.
4:48am is a dangerous time, as anyone knows who has woken in the early hours. Said to be when we are at our most vulnerable, it is when the chimeras of the mind take on their most monstrous form. Sarah Kane characteristically turns this around. `At 4:48 when sanity visits for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind.’
Kane’s was an extraordinary talent, hollowed-out by guilt and sense of responsibility for the universe’s pain. In this, her last play before she committed suicide, she charts that ensuing death and her Christ-like search for love.
It’s an uncomfortable ride. And in Christian Benedetti’s Young Vic revival with young Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca, a static one.
For 72 minutes, Marinca, hair cropped, androgynous in jeans and tee-shirt – and bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to Kane - stands stock still before two institutionalised glass-panelled doors. Now and again an arm stretches up or she reaches out as if pushing something away or conversely steadying herself. She is a hypnotic presence. The eyes swivel and catch you in their glare.
If there is one thing that Benedetti and Marinca seem to have conspired to induce it is a sense of collusion. This may be Kane’s pain channelled through the limpid, fragile, vulnerable being that Marinca projects, but there is no escaping the connection. These demons, these angers, these yearnings for love are also partly ours. We are drawn in. We are pinned.
It’s a high risk enterprise. For five minutes at a time nothing happens; you long for relief. In James Macdonald’s original Royal Court production, the monologue was shared between three actors. Here Kane’s vision of hell is unremitting save for the occasional encounter with the mental health system, the single source for the odd blast of gallows humour. “Do you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the wrong body? … in the wrong era?” she asks.
Seeing it again, Kane’s final play seems more than ever like an epitaph to a lost love, herself; the person Kane might have become but couldn’t reach.
Actor: Anamaria Marinca.
Director/Designer: Christian Benedetti.
Lighting: Dominique Fortin.
Dialect coach: Patsy Rodenburg.
2009-07-26 00:25:36