Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩
by Sarah Kane, directed by Vikki Anderson
Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
February 14-23, 2013
“4.48 / the happy hour / when clarity visits”
British playwright Sarah Kane, author of such modern classics as Blasted (1995) and Crave (1998), wrote 4.48 Psychosis in 1999 and shortly afterwords committed suicide at the age of 28. Psychosis had its premiere posthumously in 2000. Kane struggled throughout her life with severe clinical depression and wrote the play whose subject is depression while in one of her most debilitating bouts of depression. Theatre critic Michael Billington of the Guardian famously asked after the play’s premiere, “How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?”
Some critics dismissed Kane’s work as projects of mental illness just as people used to do of works by August Strindberg and Franz Kafka. Now most people realize such a view is reductive and numerous productions of 4.48 Psychosis around the world have shown that the play stands on its own without reference to the author’s biography.
Viewed simply as a play, Psychosis is clearly the next logical step after a play like Crave that explored the demons haunting four individuals in a prose so heightened it approached poetry. Psychosis focusses on a single individual and the multiple voices haunting her in a similarly heightened prose. The play, written in 24 sections, goes a step farther in presenting the text without stage directions and without assigning the lines to characters. This unfettered structure gives the director enormous power in determining how to present the text. Over the years it has been presented by only actor and by up to twelve. The original production used three actors – two women and one man – and that is what director Vikki Anderson has chosen for Necessary Angel’s current production.
The play is Kane’s shortest with language boiled down to a minimum and achieving its poetic strength through its very sparseness. The problem with Anderson’s production is that it is anything but sparse. It gives the effect of a single thistle planted in a such an elaborated decorated vase that you look at the vase rather than what it contains.
What you see on entering the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs is an image of the raked seating of ruined theatre exactly the same size as the one you are in. Bottle of wine and spirits and plastics pill bottles cluster at the edges of the rows. The three actors – Bruce Godfree, Laura Condlln and Raven Dauda – sit in the middle row facing out. The basement below the seats seems to have flooded since part of was once an orchestra put has collapsed and is full of water. On its own Yannik Larivée’s design creates a fantastic image of decay as if we were gazing into a mirror that reflected us at our saddest. The question, however, is whether such an elaborately detailed set suits such minimalist text. The answer is that it does not.
The same problem arises with Anderson’s division of the text among the three actors. Laura Condlln gives a great performance as Sarah Kane’s alter ego shifting among moments of rage, self-loathing, tenderness, contempt and desire for oblivion. Godfree is effective as Kane’s lover and other friends while Dauda compassionately plays Kane’s various therapists and doctors. Anderson stages encounters between Condlln and Godfree or Dauda as miniature naturalistic dramas. The trouble is that by doing so we begin to think of Godfree and Dauda as representing people external to Condlln-as-Kane.
Jennifer Tarver in her production of Crave for Nightwood Theatre presented us with four individuals in what seemed to be isolated display case and yet was able to suggest that all three of the four might really be memories of the fourth characters, a depressed young woman. With Psychosis, this is exactly what we should feel because it shows that Condlln’s character, despite her deep depression, is still able to portray rationally the arguments and cajoling of others. This is important because it suggests that the suicide of Condlln’s character is not merely the final act of a woman with mental illness but rather an act rejecting the world of normative behaviour that beliefs, like hope, that she has opposed as inauthentic throughout her life. From this point of view Condlln’s character takes on a role similar to that of Sophocles’ Antigone, who opposes the normative world of authority represented by Creon and love as represented by Haemon. Here, in the internal battle within the mind “to be or not to be” (as another famous depressed character put it), lies the universality of Kane’s play, not in the story of the playwright’s own battle with depression.
Larivée’s set is just one indication that Anderson’s approach to Kane’s text is to render it as theatrical as possible. The problem is that the extroversion of theatricality hardly is appropriate to the introversion of the subject matter. Bonnie Beecher gives a fantastic display of lighting effects from illuminating the bleachers-like seating on stage from behind to make it seem unreal to pinspots on individual actors’ faces to enhance their isolation. John Gzowski’s sound design conjures up the interiors of hospitals and nightclubs while magnifying the sounds of iron doors slamming shut. Anderson presents a number of scenes in an intentionally jarring way. Condlln-as-Kane’s recital of her symptoms is greeted, incomprehensibly, with a sitcom laugh-track. Anderson has Condlln dance with Godfree to intentionally tacky music, undercutting the potential tenderness of the scene with laughter. Condlln-as-Kane assuming a pose as the crucified Christ is both pretentious and clichéd as once. And later Anderson has Godfree and Dauda list Condlln-as-Kane’s medication history while dancing a bossa nova enhanced with a few disco moves. Anderson’s general emphasis on spectacle draws us away from its subject, but scenes like these make it impossible for the play project the disturbing, searing intensity the play has been known to achieve.
Since this is the first professional production of 4.48 Psychosis in Toronto*, those who want to fill in their knowledge of iconic works of modern theatre will need to see it. There is no doubting the fierce commitment of Condlln’s performance. The set, lighting and sound design Anderson has called for are all excellent in themselves, though unnecessarily extravagant for a play like this. This is a highly experiment work where the text itself should take absolute primacy and one can easily imagine it would be even more effective and moving if performed by three actors simply sitting in chairs on a bare stage.
©Christopher Hoile
*Correction 2013-03-13: Reader Barbara Fingerote has pointed out that Necessary Angel’s is not the first professional production of the play in Toronto. There was a previous production at SummerWorks directed by Rick Roberts in 2006 starring Liz Saunders, Maggie Huculak, and Marjorie Campbell.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Bruce Godfree, Laura Condlln, and Raven Dauda. ©2013 Necessary Angel Theatre Company.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2013-02-15
4.48 Psychosis