From our critic in residence:
The word “extraordinary” is overused, but everything about the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs production of Sarah Kane’s “4.48 Psychosis” (2000) merits it. In this twenty-fifth anniversary of the original production, the director, designers, and, in particular, original three actors have all reunited. Kane herself had already died – suicide – months before the premiere, at age twenty-eight. She had taken European theatre by storm with her savage, violent, plays “Blasted”, “Phaedra’s Love”, and “Cleansed”, and had become the leading figure of a new wave of confrontationalist playwrights (“in-yer-face theatre” was the useful label given by critic Aleks Sierz).
Kane’s play is a multi-voice soliloquy, a drama in which separate voices question and answer one another while seeming part of the same conflicted mind. Part of its stingingly painful beauty is that it captures several dissimilar levels of the mind at once – a mind haunted by sexual love and its failure, by the failures of psychiatry and of a world that increasingly seems uninhabitable; a mind that can inflict and describe self-harm. Although the whole drama hovers on the brink of madness, the fragmented voices we hear are ruthlessly sane. And they are sonorous, rhythmic, eloquent, in lines that are worthy of both Eliot and Beckett.
Any critic will find on revisiting a work of art that his or her opinion will have altered (deepened, intensified, whatever), but part of my 2025 pleasure in “4.48 Psychosis” is that I objected strongly to it at the time of its 2000 world premiere. Depression and suicide are divisive and angering subjects; I am able to feel them here with greater distance than I could them.
Amazingly, the production has visual imagery to match Kane’s words. In Jeremy Herbert’s designs, the stage is overhung at forty-five degrees by a mirror like an attic ceiling. The actors sit or lie at angles that make us see them from two contrasting views at the same time: one sitting actor appears to be standing, actors who seem to be facing away from us prove to be facing us. One peaceful video of a street corner becomes an emblem of the real yet intangible world outside this interior one; words and numbers that are spoken are shown in spectral images that can be erased.
Daniel Evans (also artistic co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company) has become one of our most versatile and exceptional performers: his speaking of Kane’s lines reaches us like great verse-speaking. Madeleine Potter’s voice is the least lucid of the three, but both her presence and verbal inflections show evidence of deep feeling. Jo McInnes is often the funniest, frankest, most direct, and most intense of the three. They are completely unlike one another; they work together marvellously. A most singular and great event, performed at the Royal Court until July 5, this will then tour to Stratford-upon-Avon in July 10-25.
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) exists for us at the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum from Kane. Some of his plays address suicide, death, and anguish, but all of them exemplify the values of the old-style well-made play: civilised life and discourse must continue. We can see now that the division between some Rattigan plays and John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1956) is not large; but at the time Rattigan and Osborne led opposed forces. The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, has a good Rattigan record; currently (until July 5) it is presenting his 1973 play “In Praise of Love” – in which husband and wife continue a relationship that often seems to contradict the play’s title.
The wife, Lydia (the excellent Claire Price), sacrifices herself to an often monstrously unfeeling husband, the husband, Sebastian (Dominic Rowan), maintains his façade of unfeeling callousness because he understands her needs only too well. There are lies within lies, evasions within evasions – but their sum is to praise love, albeit a form of marital love that was already old-fashioned by the time of the play’s premiere. Rattigan shapes his play so well that you enjoy believing in it while you watch. Its sanctification of the submissive wife, however, becomes hard to enjoy. The courage of his earlier “The Deep Blue Sea” (1952) – where the wife learns to live without a much kinder husband and lover – is missing.
At the Donmar Warehouse, Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” (2003) – which opened on Thursday 20 June and will continue till August 9 – stands somewhere between these two dramatic extremes. (Nottage is older than Kane, but has come to fame – two Pulitzer Prizes for drama (2009 and 2017). Set in 1905 in New York City, it touchingly dramatises the life of Esther (Nicola Hughes), an female African American corset-maker and seamstress, who marries George (Kadiff Kirwan), her Barbadian male pen-pal. But she, unable to write or read, has not told him that one of her white clients has penned her letters; and some time later, she discovers that her handsome husband cannot read or write himself. Next, she discovers that he is cheating on her. This is not a play that supports marriage at all costs. As with so many American plays, its drama is its gradual revelation that the American dream of self-fulfilling success isn’t working out.
On press night, the audience gasped and laughed and gurgled with eagerly responsive naivety. The touching wedding-night scene turned – for these observers – into a series of naughty or dirty nuances. And, when Esther, discovering the extent of George’s betrayal, vehemently told him not to touch her, she earnt a hearty round of applause.
This, directed by Lynette Linton, is a marvellous production, with six mainly British actors speaking in a range remarkably convincing American accents and that make the America of 1905 remarkably large and absorbing. Part of the pleasure of “Intimate Apparel” is sociological: it vividly reimagines the 1905 American intersections of class, race, gender, and sex in ways that always ring true. Nobody onstage pretends that marriage in 1905 is a neat solution to these women’s problems. Multiple details – a silk jacket, a woollen suit, the start of a Joseph Lamb piano rag – help this production to become wholly engrossing.
4:48 Psychosis
Royal Court Theatre Upstairs until July 5 https://royalcourttheatre.
Stratford-upon-Avon, The Other Place July 10-28
https://www.rsc.org.uk/4-48-
In Praise of Love
Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, to July 5: https://orangetreetheatre.
Intimate Apparel.
Donmar Warehouse. https://www.
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