4:48. Psychosis by Sarah Kane

“4:48. Psychosis” is a Sarah Kane text that induces a state of trance by delving deep into the stream of psychic existence beyond good and evil, where defeat is possible because truths are being configured and destroyed to the limit of supportability. The performance of the Polish theatre TR Warszawa has succeeded in recreating an impressive image of the kind of pain that forbids human beings closeness to the others, comfort given by common sense and ability to live according to half-truths. Written just before she committed suicide, the last drama text of the controversial playwright who has changed the theatre of the 90’s is bringing forward the issue of suicide as a way of escaping the social and psychiatric context of a mental sanatorium, an institution that denies the insolvability of some human problems .
The performance begins with the deep crisis of a character trapped in a mentally disturbing situation— feeling fury and impotence at the idea that life is simply not worth living—, continues with the agitation caused by the inner rejection of the only suggested solution – the medication—, and ends in a troubling and slow way, in silence. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t fuck, I can’t make love” represent the abnormality of a woman who is silenced through the lack of empathic attitudes, perpetuated in the system as being the solution, through the weakening of the power to sustain her existence marked by psychic pain and through the lack of the ideal love that could pull her out of her living hell.
A long table and a few chairs in the green sterile desert of a mental institution represent the place where love is being longed for, being touched is a desperate craving and the desire to continue living is menaced; the place where closeness to other people is not easing the pain, but turning into torture; the place where the doctors reduce pain to a symptom making it seem less disturbing. Windows of lights cut into the space help introduce the idea of the slow disconnection from the others, followed by the loss of curiosity regarding the outside world. What is fascinating in this performance is that is portrays the disquieting image of grief, but its motive is never revealed. The performance conveys through the use of lighting a sense of distortion and fragmentation of the objective reality. The extremely intense and subjective reality that replaces the objective one is made by the use of strange visual inserts of a special quality, that reflect a painful lack of resonance with the others. The relations with the other characters are full of ambiguity, terror and hope being the extreme attitudes. After the real and the unreal start to mix, their mixture is rhythmically punctuated by subjective depictions of loneliness and pain. The performance succeeds in capturing the special kind of humor in the play, one that comes from lack of resignation with the order of the “real” world.
The theatre director’s option to split the lines between the main character, a superficial lover and a complacent doctor becomes a little frustrating in the second part of the performance, where the theatrical space onstage is transformed into the doctors consulting room and the woman appears to surrender her struggle for normality, resigning herself to finally taking medication. This is a moment in which the director’s approach to the theme changes, as he chooses to distance himself from the insanity and to accept the unemotional approach of mental health practitioners .While the doctors are labeling her with various diagnoses and treatments, the whole subjective world is invaded by endless series of numbers suggesting a hell from which there is no way out. The performance becomes more narrative, the scenes between the woman and the doctors alternate with scenes depicting the agony. The woman becomes more and more gloomy, the monologues become darker because of the tiredness, death takes on the image of an old naked woman, the existential despair manifests itself in a bloody climax, to the soundtrack of “When I’ll Fall In Love”. The lack of hope becomes a driving force and the moment of suicide has something in it that is troubling, beautiful and terrible. The performance ends not in bursting applause but with a revered silence that leaves us thinking about the clichés that inform our attitudes and make us desert our responsibility to make this world a place for celebrating love.

JIDARIYYA

****

Edinburgh International Festival

„Jidariyya” is a performance on the agony of living and dying , an incantation at the crossing between spirituality and modernity which tries to draw out the ultimate essence of our last shouting into this world. Philosophical deepening of the problem of human life’s meaning, “Jidariyya” is a complex and intense composition of the young Palestinian National Theatre on a play written by a famous Arab poet after his second heart attack. The insolvability of the issue turns this performance into a very imaginative and provocative artistic quest . The successive appearances of death fighting the characters representing desire and the will to live are inspired by various cultural references, among which the biblical is one of the most important.
The staging has a majestic power to overwhelm the common sense, constantly revering the ultimate limit that once crossed didn’t let anyone return. The poetry invades the stage when the main character, a man in his hospital bed, offers a perspective on life sliding from objectivity to profound subjectivity. The hospital is not only the place where the ill man is stripped off his individuality, but also the antechamber of death – the frequent visits of the doctors who can’t defeat death become part of a flowing hallucinatory stream of unconsciousness . The reality of dying can no longer be reduced to what we commonly recognize as reality, thus the doctors begin singing, endless series of questions are raised, the poet arrives at the answers through the appearance of an ideal double and first love reappears – all that while the final clock is ticking. Human dignity is kept until the very last moment with the help of that double who doesn’t let the poet desert his life until all his dreams have been dreamed and all his questions have been raised.
The main element of the scenography is a slight black slope crossing an illuminated background. Instilled with the power to fascinate the mortals, it represents the path of the souls of the dying people to the point of no return. The background is changing color, conforming to the state of mind of the hospitalized man. Like in a musical that surpasses realistic conventions, soon after the doctors have left the room the main character begins to walk and to relate to his ideal double, running into the room chasing after a writer’s desk which doesn’t let them write the final poem. The bed is slowly lifted to vertical for creating a moment of extreme sensual depiction of the first attraction between man and woman. Dying connected to machines that record physiological states is just as strange as the appearances from beyond or from the past. While past, uncertainty and death mingle together, the poet still desires to find the true meaning of life and to write courageously for the last time.

The Tell Tale Heart

*****

Edinburgh International Festival

After the lights turn off into the theatre room, after a few moments of absolute silence and darkness, the lights start vibrating over a humane figure which does not succeed in acquiring a clear shape: a young man’s face stands immobile, while infinitesimal changes of the lighting compose successive strangely obsessive faces .The beginning of this performance of peculiar accuracy directed by the controversial Barrie Kosky and based on a gothic story of Edgar Allan Poe is made by a single minimum illuminating spot that is driving our glance too high and too deep into the complete darkness of the stage and of the theatre.
The Tell Tale Heart is a performance that reconstitutes the hallucinatory state, by disrupting the horizontality from the stage and by deliriously enhancing the verticality. The staircases of the house of the murdered master acquire an excessive quality in this monologue spoken loud by an obsessive man consumed with hate and regret and suffering from a severe mental disease . During the first 10 minutes of the performance the man just sits still with his hands on his knees, the head still and his expression blank , starring at a fixed point ahead of him , while the lights cut into the darkness only a few steps on the immense stair. His story is a difficult one: “The disease has been sharpening my senses.”The sound is amplified in the manner of cinema halls , enhancing the mad solipsism of the character who exposes the story of a kill like an automat who gets stacked from time to time for a few moments . The stopping of the flow of words due to tiredness and afterwards the precipitated continuing of the idea make his way of speaking – , with illogical stops, permanently menaced by difficulty — a testimonial on the state of thought disarticulation and of dissonance between the two different positions adopted by the author of the crime.
The obsessive motive of the monologue is the cold glance of the master, and this motive is getting very the actor and the director throughout the performance. The disintegration of the human figure due to agitation and dement self-control create an extremely vivid image of madness. The tension of his immobility is punctuated by the signs of a severe retarded condition which prevents the character from fully understanding the human emotions. The tension will burst in the middle of the performance into a horrible shouting. The mad propension towards the absolute is marked by bizarre crossings between recounting the story and singing opera arias.The tension is amplified by a piano on which the director Barrie Kosky improvises during the performance on music by Bach Purcell or Wolf
For each sequence of the monologue the scenographer Anna Tregloan and the light designer Paul Jackson have created captivating images by cutting into the darkness of the stage a minimalistic picture with peculiar boldness. The audiences realize only after the end of the show that the only set is a nightmarish staircase, extended to the infinite and going nowhere, a sort of hell that holds the mad man captive in spite of his endless search of a way out. The versatility of the theatrical images finds its contre- into the demand to observe details of finest quality for extremely long time in a very strange way compared to the normal way of seeing the hole visual field. The strangely slowing rhythm suddenly turns into a very brutal one , perfectly succeeding to convey the terrifying universe and to make a glimpse into the dark side of life of the grotesque Edgar Allan Poe tales. Sophisticated crossing between music, text and performance art , the production “The Tell Tale Heart” is a theatrical event of extreme refinement who offers a delirious insight into the mind of a mad man who had murdered his master. The performance creates a one hour state of terror that troubles the audiences in an undesirable and shocking, but very intense way. “Our job is not to direct traffic on stage. It is not to bathe the audience into a warm glow of civilized experience. Our role, when we are tackling these classics, is to interpret them in a way that is truthful to us. “