4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, directed by Alyson Campbell. With Richard Bligh, Olivia Connolly, Tom Davies and Suzette Williams. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, until July 26. Bookings: 9533 8082

Like Heiner Mueller’s 1977 play Hamletmachine, Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, at last having its Melbourne premiere at Red Stitch, is the kind of work that redefines the possibilities of language on a stage. Hamletmachine, most famously realised by Robert Wilson, is a six-page text in which Mueller’s political and psychological obsessions are given explosive expression through the traumatised figure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a densely allusive, almost cubist text that at once expresses a deeply personal sense of despair and critiques the social conditions that produced it.


It has other suggestive connections to 4:48 Psychosis. "It became, more than ever anticipated," says Mueller, "a self-critique of the intellectual … It is the description of a petrified hope, an effort to articulate a despair so that it can be left behind. It certainly is a 'terminal point', I can’t continue in this way."

Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, as is well known, was her last play: this vastly talented young writer hanged herself in 1999, at the age of 28. While Mueller went on to create other works – although Hamletmachine was the last play of its kind that he wrote – Kane reached both a personal and an artistic end point with this play. Contemplating it is rather like looking at Rothko’s final bleak canvases: it is impossible not to feel the weight of the artist’s suicide behind the work.

But an artist’s life is not the same as her work, and it’s unfair to conflate the two. For all its terrifying expressiveness, 4:48 Psychosis is a work of art, not a diary entry: it may be an expression of personal despair – written, perhaps, as Hamletmachine was, in an effort to leave it behind. But that is not why it matters as a work of art. What I find most terrifying about it is, in fact, how Kane manages to draw so rawly from her personal experience of mental illness and yet to frame it with an absolutely icy intellectual and aesthetic discipline. In this achievement – her ability to successfully objectify, critique and theatricalise her own pain – she is arguably only matched by Antonin Artaud.

Stylistically, 4:48 Psychosis is most certainly a "terminal point", the logical end of a continual stripping away of theatrical convention, in which she was influenced by artists like Howard Barker and his Theatre of Catastrophe and the plays of Caryl Churchill. Her first play, Blasted, scandalised theatrical London by conflating sexual violence with the extremities of civil war, physicalising on stage the traumatic wounds of the psyche. Its crudity is at once brilliant and shocking. And she continued through her tragically slim oeuvre of five plays to refine her aesthetic, questioning every aspect of the contemporary stage, until she reached the terminal point of 4:48 Psychosis: a text with no stage directions, no characters, no direction even of how many actors might perform it.

Some people question if it’s even a theatre text. A critic colleague claims that it’s a poem, a text that is whole on the page and doesn’t “demand to be performed”. For me, 4:48 Psychosis falls on the theatrical side of that shadowy divide that distinguishes a play from a poem, even while it sits uncomfortably close to the boundary: it’s definitely language that’s written to be voiced and physicalised in space. But there's no doubt that part of its radicality exists in how it brings modes of interior expressiveness to the stage that more traditionally live in the realm of the lyric poem.

Under Alyson Campbell’s direction, Red Stitch gives Melburnians their first chance to see this extraordinary text on stage. It’s a creditable production, intelligently staged with some excellent performers, but it left me with a nagging sense of disappointment. There’s no doubt that this is a difficult play to realise: again like Hamletmachine, which on its US premiere was judged a “dull monodrama” and was only fully realised when Robert Wilson got his hands on it, to experience its full power requires a production as radical as the writing.

Given that there’s no direction on who says the text, or how many actors might perform it, there have been a wide number of interpretations. In France it was performed as a monologue by Isabelle Huppert; the Royal Court used three actors. For this production, Campbell has distributed the text between four actors, Richard Bligh, Olivia Connolly, Tom Davies and Suzette Williams, perhaps calling on an anima/animus model of the human psyche.

Campbell has carefully ignored the possible division of the play into different “characters” – the psychiatrist, for instance, or several “I”s. While this deflects the possibility of turning the play into a more conventional drama in disguise, making all the voices interchangable splinters of a shattered psyche, it also has a curiously muffling effect on its emotional power. Most seriously, when the lines themselves are split, word by word, between different voices, it destroys the careful orchestrations of Kane’s linguistic rhythms: and I couldn’t see what these splintered lines added to the performance. The production’s most powerful moments are, in fact, where the actors are permitted monologic moments, when the rhythms of the language begin to exercise a fatal power.

Here psychosis is imagined as a place of unbearable cold and endless perspectives: the stage floor is covered with fake snow, which attaches to the performers’ clothes as the work progresses, and the set itself is a series of receding doors or frames, dwindling into an imagined distance. The actors perform a series of “scenes”, with pauses between each one, discovering an ingenious variety of physical correlatives for the language.

It is, as I said, a creditable attempt, and worth seeing for its serious and uncompromising realisation of Kane’s text. Strangely, given my reservations about Campbell's attack on Kane's rhythms, I suspect it is all too reverent of Kane’s poetry, too respectful of her language: this text might be traumatic and traumatised, but it is not, as it sometimes seems to be here, catatonically frozen. It is, in fact, a passionate struggle for life itself: and I wish I could have felt a little more of that passion.