Clinical depression, which Sarah Kane navigates with unflinching honesty in her final play 4.48 Psychosis, is a condition one cannot escape (without some serious help). TR Warszawa – one of Poland’s leading theatres – has devised a raw but refined show that shares similar, overwhelming and inescapable, qualities. This is a painful and haunting show that wraps itself around a captive audience and squeezes tight.

Grzegorz Jarzyna has created a stage bursting with fear, shame, hope, anger and despair, always despair. All the elements on-stage - the music, the lights, the actors and the words – are on the verge of break down. The music threatens to slide into a deadening hum, the lights snap shut without warning, the actors’ emotions spill over unchecked and the stark script staggers bravely forward. The audience watches, frozen and helpless, as theatre itself nearly implodes under the awesome weight of Kane’s peculiarly honest and ensnaring play.

Magdalena Cielecka, as the protagonist struggling with the isolating condition that is depression, is outstanding. Watching her alternately resist and submit to its ‘charms’ – watching her wail, scream and laugh through the pain – is the guiltiest of pleasures. It is like marvelling at an open, oozing scab. But it is worse than this – Cielecka’s searing emotions seem to grab that scab, tear it wide open and force us to look inside.

This is not a relentlessly desperate performance, though. I have seen a number of one-note productions of 4.48 Psychosis – a flat line of unending agony – and left curiously unmoved. The beauty of Cielecka’s performance is that she shows us the chinks of light between the gloom; the character trying to break free from depression’s strangling grip. Even when Cielecka’s character is toasting her talent, whilst gulping down hundreds of pills in another failed suicide attempt, this isn’t an altogether unhappy scene. Cielecka injects this moment with a giddy hopefulness and we realise that these suicide attempts, horrifying as they might be, are also assertions of the self.

Following this umpteenth botched suicide (did she mean to succeed?) a small girl crawls on-stage, with pounding music accompanying her unsteady progress towards a flattened out Cielecka. The woman and the girl sit side by side and, though the audience partly longs for this girl to escape this woman and her illness, it is also comforting to watch these two together. They sit side by side, grotesquely mouthing along with the mutating music, melting down off-stage. It is funny, touching and frightening.

Each scene is as surprising as the next; the combined result of Kane’s prowling and unpredictable script and Jarzyna’s unfettered, abstract, direction. Though there is an admirable looseness to the production – the scenes spiral off in directions unimagined – it also feels complete.

Initially jarring touches start to make sense. A string of spoken numbers punctuates the action and, at first, they are frustrating and disruptive. Yet, as the show continues, the numbers (boomed by a man’s voice off-stage) become part of the play’s fabric, a rhythm that starts to settle. Near the end, Cielecka’s character submits to a ‘chemical lobotomy’ and the doctors bleat out a series of futile prescriptions. Each prescription contains a number – the exact dosage supposed to save this girl – and every number is projected onto a backstage wall. The numbers trickle down slowly at first but gather pace, until they are streaming down like rain. They soon become a torrent, streaking across the front of the stage, obliterating everything behind them. We start to understand why these numbers persistently interrupt the play; that the medication these numbers represent is both this girl’s cure and destruction, something that might keep her alive but might also stop her from completing her work. 

One might think the surtitles – the production is performed entirely in Polish – would prevent this play from taking hold, but they actually add to its piquancy. The script is exceptionally stark as it is but, projected on a small strip above stage, the words seem bleaker still. Hopeless utterances take on even darker tones when we see them in isolation: ‘I am a complete failure of a person’. The words linger on screen, glaring at the audience and humiliating the protagonist below. There is also something about the Polish language – so many of the words end on a vowel – that makes the script sounds like an endless scream. Sometimes the emotions hit one harder when one stops reading and surrenders to the noise instead.

Near the close, a naked Cielecka runs and pounds herself against a backstage wall. Over and over again. At the start of the scene, the nakedness feels innocent – she pleas with the audience, ‘See Me, Rescue Me’ and we feel for the fragile girl, alone and stripped bare. But as Cielecka continues her assault with this wall, blood starts to spurt from everywhere and she screams her pleas at the audience, dripping in red. Suddenly that body doesn’t seem so innocent anymore – more accusatory instead – as we watch that scab opened wide and deep, never to be healed again.

Till 27 January 2010