Going mental

4.48 Psychosisis a tough look at someone
battling depression

TWISTED PSYCHE: 4.48 Psychosis

by NEIL BOYCE

It’s the inaugural performance at the Segal Centre’s new Lab Space (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine) and we’re bracing ourselves for 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, the hardest-hitting and most influential of the so-called “in-yer-face” playwrights of ’90s-era Britain. There are exactly 20 seats, 10 on each side of a tiny rectangle of floor, painted clinical white and dazzlingly lit. As we tentatively take our places, there’s already a feeling of an actual laboratory—one of uncertain purpose—and looking around at the white sheets enclosing the space, the white floor, the rigid rows of chairs, our grim faces...the lab rats are probably us.

The title refers to 4:48 a.m., the bleary hour before dawn, and its author—who would kill herself within a year of completing the play—aimed to explore as fully as possible the nature of suicidal depression and the state where the boundaries of the mind have collapsed.

Stéphanie Breton and Shane Houlston (“Female” and “Male” in the program) are two aspects of one character’s mind. Not for yin and yang reasons—there’s just so much going on up there, it takes two to handle it all: “Nothing can extinguish my anger and nothing can restore my faith. This is not a world in which I wish to live…I feel like I’m 80 years old. I’m tired of life and my mind wants to die.”

The monologues—or dialogues with herself—cover the vast territory of a mind in crisis. She floats between wakefulness and dreaming, adrift yet keenly aware of the competing voices in her head and their poetic imagery: the patronizing exchanges from doctor to patient, overheard conversations, satire on the health care system, and a raw moment where words (Burn! Flash!) are spat out in a repetitive stream.

What comes across is an intelligent mind at war with itself, nearly paralyzed by mental illness, yet still lucid—and capable of the blackest humour: “...I’ll take an overdose, slash my wrists and hang myself.”

“All at once?”

“Yes, there’s no chance of it being misconstrued as a cry for help.”

The work, first performed a year after the playwright’s death, specifies no age, no character, no setting. The piece has been staged with a single actor, or two or three, male or female.

Director Liz Truchanowicz has plenty of good ideas: actors confront the audience up-close and one-on-one, locking eyes as they deliver flat statements like, “I cannot sleep” and “I hate my genitals.”

It was too much for one woman, who tiptoed out of the room when the actors turned away. I don’t blame her. In the tiny confines of the Lab, that took guts.

Still, an unwillingness to genuinely “go there” with the material is the danger in tackling Kane’s work. Shouting and raging are great—but the performances didn’t always match the daring text, and Truchanowicz and actors were able to make only a small dent in the work’s resilient armour.

4.48 PSYCHOSIS CONTINUES TO SEPT.
26, 9 P.M. INFO: (514) 222-1258,
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