Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

Glenn D'Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351599375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis ' inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane's final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It's a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D'Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne's Red Stitch Theatre (2007).

1

Contextualising 4.48 Psychosis

‘Everybody loves a dead girl’ – Sarah Kane as innovator and icon

4.48 Psychosis is an unusual play. On the page, it looks more like an experimental poem than a conventional theatre script. It is divided into 24 segments (rather than acts and scenes). Some are lucid, others abstract and a few are just plain confounding. There are few logical connections between these fragments beyond thematic references to depression, suicide and various clinical practices used to treat mental illness. There is no plot, and the text doesn’t specify a setting or delineate distinct characters, although it is possible to occasionally infer such things (in the voices of lovers, friends, doctors and patients distributed throughout the work). The play’s author, Sarah Kane, said 4.48 Psychosis is about:

a psychotic breakdown and what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear, so that you no longer know the difference between your waking life and your dream life. And also you no longer know where you stop and the world starts.

(Quoted in Saunders, 2009, 81)

This account of the play partially explains its unconventional form. Perhaps Kane believed the experience of clinical depression is best conveyed through fragments that favour metaphor over literal description and conventional narrative. The play’s unusual structure poses several challenges for those interested in staging the work. Should it be performed as a monologue, or is it more suited to an ensemble of actors? How should the director allocate lines? How should actors intone Kane’s words? Is the play more effective when the performers rant or rave, or is a sober style of delivery more effective? Is it important to set the play in a particular location, or does a more abstract setting heighten the work’s potential to engender a visceral response from its audiences? That the play generates such questions accounts for why it has inspired so many diverse and compelling productions. In my view, the play works much better on the stage than the page, which is why this short book devotes so much space to the play in performance.

4.48 Psychosis is also shrouded in mythology. At the age of 28, on the 20 February 1999, Sarah Kane committed suicide in King’s College Hospital, London, thereby ensuring that the circumstances of her untimely death will forever haunt her legacy as a playwright. ‘How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?’ wrote Michael Billington in his review of the play’s inaugural production staged a year after Kane’s death (2001). Some critics argue that approaching the play as autobiography detracts from its value as a work of art (Roberts, 2015; Diedrich, 2013). Kane’s brother famously issued a press statement pointing out that while the play is about suicidal despair, it’s ‘not a thinly veiled suicide note’ (Sierz, 2000, 90). Kane’s reputation as a merchant of doom preceded 4.48 Psychosis. Regarding her earlier play, Cleansed, Charles Spencer observed that ‘you feel her work owes much more to clinical depression than to real artistic vision’ (1998). Kane countered such caricatures of her work, declaring that

I don’t find my plays depressing or lacking in hope. But then I am someone whose favourite band is Joy Division because I find their songs uplifting. To create something beautiful about despair, or out of a feeling of despair, is for me the most hopeful, life-affirming thing a person can do.

(Quoted in Sierz, 2000, 91)

The question of whether Kane’s plays are life-affirming or not is almost beside the point considering her posthumous status as a tragic icon, a fate bestowed on so many artists who die young: Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ian Curtis, and the members of the 27 club such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. Kane may have missed joining this exclusive group by a slim margin, but an aura of despair and tragedy clings to her posthumous reputation. Kane’s agent, Mel Kenyon, recalled that someone once remarked that ‘everybody loves a dead girl, especially if she was talented’ (quoted in Saunders, 2002, 144). While there is much more to Kane’s life and art than the manner of her death, there is little point in evading the fact that her suicide and celebrity status shapes the way people approach her work.

Annabelle Singer observed that there were two broad schools of thought regarding Kane after her demise: ‘one saw her entire body of work in light of her suicide, the other mourned her death, but declined to even try to connect her death and her work’ (Singer, 2004, 160). There are risks associated with adopting a narrowly autobiographical approach to 4.48 Psychosis, but there are also problems with espousing an overly formalistic approach to the text that ignores the fact that it was Kane’s personal experience of being treated for a mental illness that ‘formed the material’ for the play, ‘which is perhaps uniquely painful for the reader in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously’ (Greig, 2001, xv). In short, the former position produces a romantic deification of the author, while the latter underestimates the relationship between personal experience and creative expression.

In his seminal essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes argued that there is no compelling reason to assume that the author of a work is the ultimate guarantor of meaning. Indeed, this belief, in Barthes’ view, restricts the richness of writing by closing down interpretative possibilities and ignoring the fact that a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (1977, 146). As we shall see, 4.48 Psychosis provides an exemplary illustration of Barthes’ thesis, for Kane weaves together a dizzying array of quotations from a wide range of sources – from the run-out groove inscription on a Joy Division record to extracts from biblical scriptures to excerpts from medical textbooks. The welter of references and quotations in the play partially accounts for its dramaturgical malleability in performance. In short, the play, as David Greig astutely notes, presents a fragmented mind ‘which is the author, and which is more than the author’ (2001, xvii).

Affective aesthetics

To say the play has nothing to do with Kane’s suicide seems imprudent, but dwelling on its autobiographical elements delimits its considerable value as a play. Mark Ravenhill, one of Kane’s contemporaries, wrote that ‘Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don’t know her. We never knew her. Let’s look at her work’ (Ravenhill, 2005). Like all plays, 4.48 Psychosis leads a double life: one on the page, the other on stage. The problem with Ravenhill’s imperative is that when we look at Kane’s work in performance, we are also watching the work of actors, directors, designers and technicians. This book is primarily concerned with the play in performance because I believe the key to understanding Kane’s work lies in her exploration of the affective possibilities of performance. She once remarked:

Increasingly, I’m finding performance much more interesting than acting; theatre more compelling than plays. Unusually for me, I’m encouraging my friends to see my play Crave before reading it, because I think of it more as a text for performance than as a play. The sexual connotations of ‘performance’ are not coincidental. Liverpool’s [soccer player] Paul Ince publicly admits that he finds tackling more enjoyable than sex. Performance is visceral.

As we can see from this quotation (1998, 12), Sarah Kane liked football. She also enjoyed music. More specifically, she was a fan of Manchester United, and Joy Division. I mention these autobiographical facts because they convey something important about Kane’s artistic ambitions, and if you want to understand why so many people continue to stage 4.48 Psychosis and celebrate its considerable innovations, it’s important to note that Kane wanted her plays to generate something akin to the visceral experience of attending a football match or a rock concert: ‘I frequently walk out of the theatre early without fear of missing anything. But however bad I’ve felt, I’ve never left a football match early, because you never know when a miracle might occur’ (Kane, 1998, 12). She also lamented the fact that theatre rarely creates the affective intensity produced by music, pointing out – with reference to attending a concert by The Jesus and Mary Chain – that music often directly connects with the experience of its audience in a way that often eludes the theatre: ‘It [music] puts you in direct physical contact with thought and feeling’ (1998, 12). Let’s pause here and unpack these statements.

What has football and rock music got to do with the theatre? And why am I writing about sport and music in a book about 4.48 Psychosis? First, if you’re not a football fan, or if you’ve never attended a rock concert by the likes of, say, Patti Smith, or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, it’s going to be difficult to make sense of Kane’s enthusiasm for these events. The experience of attending a sporting event or concert, for those with an emotional investment in these spectacles, is a physical experience. At their best, sport and music can invoke a Dionysian energy that produces a palpable bond between performers and spectators. This is not to say that such a relationship is unique to these performance events; in theory, any invested contemplation can produce visceral sensations – that’s one of the reasons people weep at the cinema, for example. We possess the ability to be emotionally affected by two-dimensional representations on the silver screen, and much else besides. However, we often apprehend the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings in sporting arenas and concert halls, where audiences vicariously participate in sublime feats of athletic and aesthetic prowess. As a fan of these popular entertainments myself, I know what Kane means when she observed that ‘there are some wonderful performances in Edinburgh … but there is only one David Beckham’ (Kane, 1998, 12).

I don’t fully understand Kane’s enthusiasm for Beckham since I’ve spent most of my adult life in Melbourne, Australia (I’m assuming ‘Becks’ was a fair footballer!). I am, however, a fan of Australian Rules Football (AFL), which, like the so-called ‘world game’ has an aesthetic appeal which is eminently theatrical. Two teams engage in hostile combat, which generates dramatic tension; the spectators witness sudden changes of momentum, tragic reversals of fortune; the game has its heroes and villains, and it’s foolish to predict the outcome of the contest in advance, for you never know when an underdog is going to become feral and take a massive bite out of a champion’s backside. What’s not to like? At the risk of sounding like a proselytising maniac, I’m going to give you a short account of what Ric Knowles calls kinaesthetic empathy – that is, the physical sensation that makes the spectator feel as though they’re playing the game themselves (2017, 26). Now, some people would have you believe that live performance is especially good at facilitating such a kinaesthetic exchange between performer and spectator. I take Philip Auslander’s point that there are no convincing grounds for claiming that live events are defined by enabling a transfer of energy from performer to spectator and back again in a feedback loop. In fact, he dismisses attempts to celebrate the co-presence of actors and spectators in the theatre as mystification (1999, 2). Put another way, he argues that there is no absolute distinction between theatre and media: all mediums can trigger emotional and kinetic sensations in spectators. So, I proffer a televised AFL match as an example of what I am calling, after Knowles, kinaesthetic exchange.

It’s 13 August 2016. My team, the West Coast Eagles, look like they’re about to be knocked out of the finals race (which is something akin to the NFL playoffs). For the last two minutes, the Eagles have been locked in a fierce goal-for-goal contest against the GWS Giants. I can feel my heart racing, and beads of sweat cling to my clammy skin; I feel exhausted, my hands are shaking, and my knees are weak; I’m not in love, but, as the old Elvis song says, I’m all shook up. I watch the clock tick down to 54 seconds on my TV screen, and I can see the opposition supporters celebrating their anticipated victory. Surely, it’s all over. I’m now slumped on my couch; I feel tightness in my chest – even though I’m resigned to my team’s impending demise, the palpitations won’t let up. Then, a minor miracle – my favourite player, Nic Naitanui, somehow breaks away from his opponent and snaps a kick towards goal, and my right leg involuntarily mirrors the champion’s kicking motion. I scream like a banshee from hell as the ball sails through the big sticks just as time expires. I collapse in a heap on my lounge room floor exhausted, spent and elated. This is not the sort of behaviour one sees in the theatre on a regular basis, yet this is precisely the kind of visceral response Kane hoped to generate through her work.

The salient point is that, for the committed fan, football – whether experienced as a live event or a broadcast – produces powerful, visceral affects through the display of rigorous athletic performance. Kane found the performative dimension of theatre the most compelling thing about the medium, and I suspect her enthusiasm for football and music was partially the result of her finding a resonance between these mediums and certain kinds of theatrical performance. Of course, Kane was by no means the first person to make the connection between sport and theatre, or attempt to conceive of theatre as a primarily affective medium, and in any case, we can only stretch the analogy between sport and theatre so far. But as a drama student, Kane was well versed in the theories of Antonin Artaud and the principles he espoused in his writings about performance and the so-called theatre of cruelty. Consider this quotation from Artaud’s Manifesto in Clear Language: ‘I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evi...