Five stars for the Barbican's 4:48 Psychosis

Benedict Nightingale, THE TIMES

I saw TR Warszawa’s revival of Sarah Kane’s play in Poland recently, when one or two people remarked that the actress playing the dramatist, or her doppelgänger, wasn’t generating the intensity she could. Well, that made me feel very English. Maybe Magdalena Cielecka was scorching rather than searing that night but I experienced her as a human blowtorch. Better take an asbestos coat to the Barbican, for if this deceptively fragile woman’s performance gets still more powerful she may set you, herself, the rest of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s cast on fire.

Not that the performance — in Polish with English surtitles — is lacking in subtler shades of darkness. Jarzyna sees the strange, unrevised text of 4:48 Psychosis as a fragmented suicide note that Kane left before she killed herself in 1999, but it’s one that has its rueful humour and wry self-analysis. The Warsaw audience, like me, laughed when Cielecka said that she dreamt that a doctor gave her eight minutes to live when she’d been waiting to see him for half an hour; and that she had become so depressed by the idea of mortality that she’d decided to kill herself. But never for a moment do you doubt her desolation or despair.

It’s an eternal 4.48 am, the time when Kane often found herself waking in agony. It’s a grim institution, peopled by more actors than the three who appeared in the play’s more temperate premiere in London 2000. Is the bloke who sits nonchalantly picking his teeth a medical man? Who is the infinitely aged, androgynous person who stares out from the sidelines? But mostly Jarzyna — who cuts, rearranges the text and makes his own decisions about who speaks the lines that Kane left unassigned — makes it clear who’s who.

Doctors earnestly reassure Cielecka, prepare to operate on her brain, coldly diagnose and prescribe while she clutches her stomach and retches. A woman lover appears, to be seized, pushed away, hugged, rejected and accused of rejection.

Is the production too detailed, too busy? I didn’t feel so and, in any case, thought that the physical volatility successfully evoked Kane’s mental turmoil. Cielecka can rage, screech and ferociously swear at doctors she identifies with the Antichrist, but also slump to the floor in pain or numbly denounce herself as complicit with the world’s evils, or gleefully declare that self-harm feels great. Now she’s crashing into the line of basins and loos at the back, leaving smears of blood behind, and now she’s still, pinched, pale, bandaged and near-naked as she quietly says “watch me vanish”. Bravura stuff — but disciplined, pointed, terrifying and true.