4.48 Psychosis

Once every year or so a play comes along to ruffle the feathers of Singapore’s anglophone theatre establishment, a scene more accustomed to Shakespeare and Wilde than harrowing examinations of primal human instincts. Now Christina Sergeant, who directed W!LD RICE’s typically iconoclastic The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles a year ago, takes the helm in this debut professional performance of a Sarah Kane play in the city-state – a searing study of mental illness with a cast of just one.

At the eye of the mid-’90s cultural hurricane dubbed ‘Cool Britannia’, Kane was to theatre what Damien Hirst was to art, and Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh was to novels: an immensely provocative enfant terrible whose work probed the ugliest recesses of the contemporary psyche. When her excoriating first play Blasted was performed in 1995 – a howl in the dark graphically detailing the most debased behaviour imaginable – it triggered media and public outrage that’s since only been rivalled by Jerry Springer: The Opera. Yet Kane’s early champions included the late, great Harold Pinter; it was clear right from the outset this was a writer we should be taking seriously.

A long-term and acute depressive raised by evangelical parents, Kane went on to write four more plays before hanging herself at the age of just 28. Premature death has ironically sealed the immortality of so many young talents – from John Keats to Kurt Cobain, Vincent van Gogh to Heath Ledger – and given the content of Kane’s work and the manner of her death, obituarists were tempted to trot out ‘troubled artist’ clichés in their epitaphs. But a decade since she committed suicide, her legacy represents something far greater than the romantic myth of the tortured genius.

Assimilating the gritty (anti) social commentaries of writers like John Osborne and Steven Berkoff with the absurdist tradition of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, her bleak explorations of sexual violence and savagery were presented within a moral, humane framework. She littered her work with lyrics by her favourite bands (Radiohead, Joy Division et al) and her final play 4.48 Psychosis became in 2003 the subject of a tribute from cult UK art-rock group Tindersticks. The least typical of all Kane’s plays, 4.48… is about as free form as theatre can get, and something of a director’s dream. Containing absolutely no stage directions, its cast comprises just one actor, and it’s written as a monologue akin to a poem – a kind of theatrical companion piece to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s fêted 1994 novel Prozac Nation.

Context lends added gravitas to 4.48 Psychosis – since it was completed just before Kane’s suicide, it’s all too tempting to read the play as a suicide note. Even with its glimpses of pitch-black humour, it’s the sort of work you’re destined to admire rather than enjoy. Sarah Kane’s tragic life and death tell their own story, but in this interpretive staging, Sergeant and choreographer/dancer Kuo Jing Hong aim to prove that redemptive art can shine a light on even the most profoundly dark corners of our existence.

4.48 Psychosis performs at the National Library (16-26 Jul)