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. “

The Bird And The Bee: The Bee

THE BIRD AND THE BEE: THE BEE
***
Underbelly, Iron Belly, 14:15

The performance on Matt Harley’s text is a drama about the teenagers’ solitude and their desire for confirmation in a world where the internet social networking is already a lifestyle. Successfully avoiding the traps of moralist preaches, the author chooses as main characters two girls at the age of identity crises ,15 years old, one of them who wants to become popular at any price and the other one who resigned herself to the thought of being weird.
Extremely well structured, the plot uses alternating action places that ensure a good rhythm: the action moves from the parents’ house to a disgusting basement where the lonely girl finds her quiet place, from Chloe’s meditations on what is happening around to surprising chat conversations. The tension is extremely well built in the scenario. The type of writing is surprising – the classical climactic point overlaps the final moment in the play. But having teens as characters, how could there possibly be something more important than the final hope to be liberated at any price, with any sacrifice?
When the reality is made by emails and chatting on the internet, where one can pretend to be anything one wants, that unlimited power to reinvent oneself for each new person makes the feelings of inadequacy be denied their sense. Thrown away in one forgotten corner of one’s soul, the feelings of inadequacy will unlikely find expression. One single classical and powerful ingredient in the plot, the death of the weirdo’s brother, determines a series of monologues regarding the existence of the emotions beyond words. The subtle intuition of psychological peculiarities of the characters makes the action surprising: the desire to be popular determines a girl to start a website for an unknown person who tragically died in an accident.
Out of the monologues of the inadequate Chloe grow some troubling ideas regarding the problems of an entire generation of teens: the tragedy is a way to testifying the existence of their emotions and to proving that they are (still) alive. The website created by the spoiled girl for keeping the memory of Chloe’s dead brother recalls the sentiment of irrevocability to people who never knew him, friends of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance etc. Through their involvement in Chloe’s tragedy hundreds of teens get a sense of identity they never had before, and this identity gives them a sense of purpose. Perhaps the exaggerated friendship claims of unknown people are a way of dealing with an inner feeling of emptiness, or perhaps they perform some kind of ritual that performs the repentance before the act to blame in order to receive some kind of magical protection against the real tragedies of life. The author does not solve the dilemmas and only raises this problem, linked with the major theme of the play which is the liberation from the feeling of emptiness.
The mirages created by the internet are the main theme of the play. “The Bird and The Bee: The Bee” enhances the idea that those mirages, when perpetuated at the social level, can change the very nature of emotional attachment and of the motivation. The performance brings into prominence the solitude of the teenager chatters, miserably unhappy in spite of all the comfort ensured by technological development. On an almost bare scene 3 actors perform all the characters, in a modern manner, committed to respect the message of the original play. One fine performance in the role of Chloe, who is a caring and loving nature unable to find her place among “responsible” people whom she calls marked by resignation .The rhythm conveys perfectly the stages of her quest. You should try to see the performance for yourselves.

Actors: ***
Text:*****
Scenography :**
Directing: ***

The Shadow

Underbelly Baby Belly , Venue 88,12:10
***½
Spectaculary storytelling tour de force after a tale by Hans Cristian Andersen ,the performance ”The Shadow”, produced by the British theatre company Feast Theatre, makes the audience doubtful about the ingenuity of one’s desire to control life and make it look „better” . 3 strange girls, or more specifically 3 actresses who master the fine art of clowning , draw the audience into a fantastic world where a shadow is troubled because its master, a poet, denies its importance in his life. In his pursuit of ideals, the poet wants to forget about all mundane things , writing boring poems continously and without inspiration about the good side of life.
Right from the beginning a strange captivating tension is created by the three storytelling-clowns who quarrel with each other about the storyline .The subject of the story is the basis of this fight , as the mistery of the shadow stirs a lot of questions that open up that sort of childish curiosity usually forbidden and forgotten in our daily life.
A simple mobile projection screen, a table and a chair, three talented actresses and a few inspired lighting changes transform the stage for each action scene in a very imaginative way, modern and poetical at the same time. It’s quite amazing what they can create with such unexpensive means. Perhaps what they offer is the kind of drug that makes us all go to the theatre: a little inspiration.
Each of the three actresses plays a storyteller and a character, the frail line between them being transgressed symbolically with a single rigurous gesture. The Shadow , The Poet and The Princess are the messangers of neverending dilemas surrounding fundamental problems . By avoiding thinking about violence, our shadow, we only make the ideals we fight for weaker. By sticking to our shadow there is no room left for hope.
The shadow or the least visible part of ourselves doesn’t show up in full light,and by its tricks lets us think that we can completely control ourselves. Yukio Mishima wrote somewhere about the moment of fascination when a parachutist approaches the ground: for some seconds the man and his shadow seem to be liberated of their bond. The fantasy and the talent of the young performers give the audience a ride into the fantastic shadowy world that we carry beside us.

The Bird And The Bee : The Bee

Spectacolul “The Bird and The Bee:The Bee” pe textul lui Matt Hartley este o dramă despre însingurarea și dorința de confirmare a adolescenților într-o lume în care se rețelele sociale se pot extinde nelimitat cu ajutorul internetului. Evitând capcanele moralizatoare, autorul alege drept personaje principale două fete la vârsta crizelor și constituirii propriei identități ,15 ani : una își dorește să devină populară cu orice preț, iar cealaltă pare resemnată cu statutul de ciudată. Extrem de bine structurat, textul alternează permanent planurile : întâi casa parinților, apoi regăsirea liniștii într-un loc izolat și dezgustător ; întâi meditații provizorii referitoare la sensul evenimentelor , apoi frenetice discuții pe chat sau scene cu cele două fete. Tensiunea este extrem de bine gradată până la finalul apoteotic, soluția finală de eliberare, sinuciderea pentru a cuceri celebritatea și imortalitatea pe internet. Scriitura este modernă și surpinzătoare, clasicul punct culminant fiind în această piesă perfect suprapus pe deznodământ. Singurul ingredient clasic, moartea fratelui celei neadaptate într-un accident de mașină, determină o serie de monologuri despre neliniștea provocată de descoperirea existenței emoțiilor de dincolo de cuvinte. Sentimentul de inadaptare este alungat într-un colț al eului evitat în întâlnirile și conversațiile de pe internet . Dezvoltările paradoxale ale plotului țin exclusiv de structura psihologică a personajelor: dorința de popularitate determină o fată să creeze un website memorial pentru un necunoscut, doar din dorința de a obține recunoașterea celorlalți.Din monologurile inadaptatei Chloe răzbate neliniștea noii generații de adolescenți: tragedia este un mod de a valida emoțiile și de a-și demonstra că sunt (încă) vii. Websiteul creat de adolescenta răsfățată în memoria fratelui lui Chloe le evocă în fundal tuturor puștilor sentimentul irevocabilului , care îi face să se agațe de imaginea unui om pe care nu l-au cunoscut niciodată. Sute de adolescenți capătă o identitate datorită relației cu tragedia lui Chloe, iar simțul identității le dă un scop în viață. Declarațiile exagerate de prietenie ale necunoscuților de pe website sunt poate un mijloc de a umple un gol existent . Sau poate că ei execută ceea ce altădată s-ar fi numit un act ritualic de remușcare performat înaintea existenței vinei,ca pentru a se proteja de pătrunderea tragediei în propria lor viață. Autorul nu rezolvă dilemele, lasă toate aceste întrebări deschise. Dar tema majoră a piesei este eliberarea de acest gol. “The Bird and The Bee: The Bee” este un text despre mirajele pe care le creeaza internetul, miraje care perpetuate la scară mare, la nivel social, pot schimba natura atașamentelor emoționale și a motivațiilor. Spectacolul pune accentul pe însingurare. Pe o scenă aproape goală 4 actori recrează toate partiturile, într-o manieră modernă. Fără a mai ridica problema adecvării realiste dintre actori și rol, ei interpretează și rolurile părinților. Important este ce au de spus, important este mesajul pe care vor să îl transmită. Ritmul piesei se regăsește în montare, și este din ce în ce mai accelerat spre final.

The Shadow

Spectacolul „The Shadow” realizat de compania britanică Feast Theatre este un tur de forță imaginativ după o poveste de Hans Cristian Andersen, la sfârșitul căruia este pusă sub semnul întrebării dorința de a controla totul în viață și de a o face să pară „mai bună” . 3 fete ciudate, 3 clowni care stăpânesc arta giumbușlucurilor, atrag publicul într-o lume miraculoasă în care umbra se simte chinuită de lipsa de respect a posesorului ei, un poet, pentru natura ei ascunsă. Dorind idealitatea, poetul uită de existența lucrurilor pământești, scriind plictisit și fără chef poezii care nu interesează pe nimeni. Pe scenă abia încap un ecran de proiecție mobil, o masă și un scaun, și totuși ceea ce reușesc să realizeze cele 3 fete cu această minimă recuzită, cu ajutorul unor lumini minimale, este uimitor. Cele 3 actrițe interpretează pe rând povestitori și personaje, trecerea de la un statut la altul fiind simbolică dar marcată precis. Umbra , Poetul și Prințesa sunt trei personaje dintr-o poveste cu referiri directe la dileme ale vieții contemporane, care pretinde că valorizează idealurile , dar în același timp le neagă pentru că refuză adevărul – crimele, ororile, violența , stupiditatea, neputința. Acestea sunt umbra.Yukio Mishima vorbea undeva de fascinația momentului în care un parașutist se apropie de pământ : singura oară când trupul și umbra par a fi eliberate din legătura lor. Dar desparțirea durează cel mult o clipă.