4.48 Psychosis
Smirnoff Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Aireborn Theatre Company

Andrew Chippindale

Full marks to Leeds University's Aireborn Productions for a well designed, well lit, tightly rehearsed interpretation of Sarah Kane's difficult last play.

Where this production falters is in the too plaintive delivery of much of the text. 4:48 is a difficult piece for a number of reasons: no narrative, no characters, no stage directions and little for an audience to hang on to. While this production hits on a number of stylish ways of using the four girls sat on leather cubes to vocalise the 'bewildering fragments that are about my mind', speaking solo, in harmony and cacophony, layering parts of the text, it does not maintain invention for the show's hour long duration.

The play itself is not a play at all. It is, at best, some poetic fragments concerning suicide that Kane drafted shortly before taking her own life, but much of the time it feels too personal to be considered little more than the theft of a dead woman's diary.

This presentation of depression seems at times like a non-stop solipsistic rant, especially when the actors declaim their lines rather than, well, acting them. There are moments of humour, but these are few and far between. Instead there is an atmosphere of self-righteous pronouncement and of almost holy reverence of the text. Treating this play like the bible does neither the cast nor the audience any favours.

30 July to 24 August.

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