Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis by Glenn D'Cruz

Author:Glenn D'Cruz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

In other words, postdramatic theatre does not seek to represent a distinct, recognisable world, nor does it attempt to tell a linear story that follows the realist conventions outlined above. Let’s break down this statement by comparing 4.48 Psychosis with Kane’s first play, Blasted (1995), while recalling Kane’s declaration that she found performance more interesting than literary drama.

Despite its notoriety, Blasted is, in many ways, a conventional play, at least until Kane blows up the fictional world she creates in the first part of the work. If we look at the first few pages of the published text, we can see that Kane identifies three distinct characters: Ian, Cate and Soldier. She gives Ian and Cate specific biographical attributes: ‘Ian is 45, Welsh born but lived in Leeds much of his life and picked up the accent’ (3). She provides details of the play’s setting: ‘A very expensive hotel room in Leeds – the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’ (3). She specifies other details about this location, divides the play into clearly marked scenes, and assigns dialogue to each of the three characters. This is not to say the play is wholly naturalistic. As previously noted, the second half of the play shatters the fictional world set up in the first part of the work but continues to unfold according to a dramatic logic determined by standard notions of character and dialogue. Today, Blasted is remembered for its sexual violence and gore – the soldier rapes Ian, shoves a rifle up his arse before shooting him and sucking out one of his eyeballs. This is obviously not a scene that resonates with the work of Ibsen (or Pinter, for that matter). It is, however, most definitely ‘In-Yer-Face’. My point is that Blasted is – on the page at least – easily recognisable as a play. The form of 4.48 Psychosis is something else. As previously stated, instead of characters, scenes and demarcated dialogue we have ‘bewildered fragments’ (2001, 210). The question I want to probe in the final section of this chapter is whether the concept of postdramatic theatre contributes anything useful to our understanding of 4.48 Psychosis.

Beyond its apparent rejection of dramatic conventions on the page, how might we understand the relationship between 4.48 Psychosis and postdramatic theatre? David Barnett suggests that Kane’s play is postdramatic insofar as it eschews representation, temporal linearity, and flaunts its references to other works (some of which I identified in the previous chapter). On the topic of representation, Barnett argues that ‘there are poetic meditations on depression that organize themselves on the page in ways that simply cannot be represented in an unambiguous fashion on stage’ (2008, 21). Indeed, it is this ambiguity that makes the play such a malleable entity – it requires the director to decide how to locate these ‘meditations’ in the theatre space without the customary stage directions. Furthermore, the play ‘does not offer a linear time structure’ (2008, 21). In other words, don’t go looking for a traditional beginning, middle or end in 4.

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