Title : 4.48 Psychose de Sarah Kane
Duration : 1h10
Type : Drama
Director : Ulysse di Gregorio
Set Design : Benjamin Gabrié
Costume : Salvadore Mateu Andujar
“The play analyses a psychotic episode and what happens in the mind of a person who no longer distinguishes between reality and imagination or dreams’.
It is, in these terms that SK spoke of her ultimate work to a journalist. She went on, ‘4-48 Psychosis is the fragmented story of a person facing a de-humanised medical institution, of an angry person, broken, without hope, who, contemplating suicide, logically clamours in a lucid, clear, coherant way, an identification within a medical environment’ We witness the patient’s deepest feelings; the meandering of her thoughts, her coherant ways of living with her anxiety. We see the gap between her inner world and what her doctors make of it. We observe a diversity of medical treatments’.
In this whirlpool of apparently incoherant words drawn from the chaos of her inner self, the author tried to shine a light on the darkest corner of her mind and using the collision between her two parallel worlds finds her raw and poetic voice portrayed by an abyss pierced by flame, as ephermeral as they are distractive.”
SARAH KANE
Notes from the director:
As in: ‘Une Sorte d’Alaska’ by Pinter that I have recently directed, already broached was the seam of the tenous thread between dream and reality and a gaze of the patient facing the medical world who neither hears her nor understands her but who wants to tend to her, heal her, even despite herself. She (the patient) who is becoming less so, not considering herself to be ill. The mysteries of the labyrinth of the mind are also at the centre of this play by SK heightened by the writing style and by the core of her universe, full of silences and screams, of words whispered, or spat which express the interior conflicts too long suppressed by an exterior world, troubling, distressing, nightmarish, without hope or so fragile that one cannot join it. This thread of life that weaves a web around it’s prey, when it becomes too heavy to bear, the only solution is to break it. It is the lesson that SK gives us; not content with writing it and describing it, she has experienced it… ending her life like a final full stop. I wanted to show that suffering, that rage, that despair of being without hope in that play written with her blood flowing through her whose pulsation must be heard on stage. This is why, in order to focus on this abundant discourse, I decided to channel this explosion keeping the scene tight and the text too, giving it to one actress only who becomes the vehicle of all the roles, real or imaginary.
To bring to the stage a text which speaks of one’s death as the ultimate act when nothing holds, everything shatters like the pieces of a puzzle that cannot be constructed; this was the task that I wanted to fill.
The spectator powerless and captivated witnessing the sacrifice taking place in front of his eyes, incredulous and fascinated at the same time, is left facing the abyss of his own questions.
