Hull Drama Students Rise to Challenge of 4.48 Psychosis
Year 2 Level 3 Actors & Kerrie Louise Marsh Presented Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis at Riverside Theatre Hull College. Reviewed by Michelle Dee – Images by Nina Lu Steele …
‘Loving someone who doesn’t exist’, just one of the many ideas and questions posed by Sarah Kane in the infamous 4.48 Psychosis – a seminal text that explores deteriorating mental health with stark, relentless, brutality. What do those words mean, ‘loving someone who doesn’t exist”? And how are a director and company to interpret the idea? Director Kerrie Louise Marsh chose to focus in on what Kane describes as ‘pathological grief’, the continuation of loving someone who doesn’t exist anymore.
The decision to set the play in a mental institution could just as easily have led us to interpret 4.48 Psychosis as being about enduring torture, of loving someone who never existed. Its subject a schizophrenic patient, with a delusional love for a figment of their own making perhaps. Alternatively, the object of desire could be very real, but the lover’s perception of the object of their affections is so skewed and altered that it has no basis in reality. Intense relationships are often turbulent due to one side’s misconception of what is actually happening, people often choose to dwell inl a fantasy world, rather than face the idea that the love is not all they believe.
At what point do you say, I’m ready to relinquish that what makes me, me? This is behind the torturous decision to go on to medication, in order to ease a mind filled with unstable thoughts that could lead to suicidal actions. Kane describes this intervention as a ‘chemical labotomy’ where drugs are administered as a way to control the patient. The plethora of prescription drugs to treat the mentally ill are underlined in this interpretation, as orderlies coldly recount patients’ pharmaceutical regimes.
Mental health professionals’ (in Kane’s text and Kerrie’s interpretation their capacity to practice any sort of healing is questionable) attitude to self harm is looked at in a series of more and more combative interrogations. “Did it give you relief, did it ease the tension?” is repeated parrot fashion like judge, jury and executioner. The murmuring from the inmate, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I did it?” gets ignored, as if asking what would seem to be a justified question, could somehow lend some kind of permission or credence to self harm. Bullied into submission by the inquisition, the patients concede that there is no relief or easing of tension to be had through harming one self. Yet the shame, self-loathing and stigma attached to self harm endures.
Mental health and illness, self harm and suicide, existence and death, futility and despair, are all challenging concepts for a cast, at any level, to comprehend and portray to an audience. This task is made much more difficult when you consider the fact that this production was made by college students and the text, from which they are to draw the ideas, contains no characters; no discernible dialogue; no scenes, no structure – to guide or shape the outcome – whatsoever.
4.48 Psychosis has no standard format and every time it is performed it is different due to the immense amount of room for interpretation to be found between the lines. It appears to be increasingly popular as a Drama study text. Every director who sets out to bring the work to life will inevitably have his or her own idea as to what it should be about. Perhaps that is one of the work’s enduring appeals to students and teachers alike, there is no right or wrong way, there can never be a definitive response, version or answer. Just like there can never be a definitive response or answer to questions of the mind.
Due to the abstract nature of the production it is hard to pick out characters for particular praise; rather phrases, ideas, themes and sequences are lodged in the memory to be recalled at a later date. Hence the way this appraisal reads is fragmented; disjointed. However, that being said, the young lady portraying the pain and futility of unrequited love, ‘I’m angry because I understand, not because I don’t,’ stood out amongst some very good other performances.
By using immersive elements and theatre of discomfort – such as the sound of maniacal laughter emanating from a rocking patient at your feet as you search for your seat, or the zombie-like figures moving, weeping, laughing, amongst the audience – Marsh breaks down the protective fourth wall.
Anything could happen, there are no rules now, you are no longer in your comfort zone, this is not your world, you are no longer in control.
A thought hits home like the cosh of chlorpromazine,’There but for the grace of God go I’
Further reading:
http://www.thisisull.com/articles05/selfharm/selfharm.html
http://www.thisisull.com/fiction/michellefishhead.html
http://www.thisisull.com/poetry/shellyd9.html
Very thought provoking. They were all great, Well done all of you