When Adrian Osmond read 4.48 Psychosis, as a director he wasn’t sure he could do it justice. Sarah Kane, the 28 year old playwright whose swan-song it became, was already dead, and the play had subsequently acquired as much iconic status as its author even before it was produced. There were some who suggested on seeing the play’s first production at the Royal Court theatre that its collage-like stream-of-consciousness was an extended suicide note in abstract form. This week, however, the dust seems to have settled, as Osmond’s take on 4.48 Psychosis opens at Cumbernauld Theatre in a production by his own SweetScar company that’s as much sound installation as performance.
“It’s the most extraordinary piece of writing,” says Osmond. “Whether it’s auto-biographical or not, it’s undoubtedly personal, and it’s hard to avoid the power of Sarah Kane that pours through the piece. Not that you’d want to, but it was clearly written by someone going through all these things at the time. Watching it, no matter how good the production, you still knew it was actors playing at being depressed. But this is a piece that needed to be done in a different way.”
On the page, with no apparent plot, characters or dialogue in a conventional sense, the text of 4.48 Psychosis more resembles a poem or an abstract musical score. This is a gift to directors, leaving itself open to a multitude of interpretations. Most recent of these was Polish company TR Warszawa’s powerfully literal version at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival. The first professional Scottish production, in The Citizens Theatre Circle Studio, was performed more impressionistically by three women actors.
Rather than take either approach, Osmond decided to pre-record the play in its entirety using a multitude of voices. Instead of professional actors, however, he invited what he calls “the general community,” - a mixture of contributors co-opted by Tramway in Glasgow and assorted mental health organisations – with no theatrical experience, to take part. What he and sound designer Kenny MacLeod have ended up with is a work created by thirty-one people aged between three and seventy-four, plus a choir. Made up of nine hundred sound files ranging in length from three seconds to twenty minutes, as it stands the work lasts fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds exactly. Accompanying this, initially in darkness, will be actor Keith Macpherson in an environment designed to isolate the audience from each other as much as possible.
“We very consciously chose a male actor,” Osmond says. “So instead of the play being about a young woman, we’ve spread the net as wide as possible, and hopefully what the recording does is show a whole rage of different voices that can exist in your head. Where you could act out depression, what this does is move more inwards and hopefully get closer to the heart of the piece.”
4.48 Psychosis’ understated poetic cacophony recalls Derek Jarman’s film, Blue, and Samuel Beckett’s voice-based miniatures such as Play, in which three buried heads talk across each other. With a background directing large-scale opera as much as theatre, as an influence Osmond cites Glenn Gould, the seminal Canadian pianist who made a series of radio documentaries using a technique he called ‘contrapuntal radio.’ This used several voices speaking at once, which in musical terms resembled a fugue.
“It has that attitude and that sensibility,” Osmond says, “which is to do with how Gould spliced together the voices of people who’d never met. We do the same, although there’s a lot happening onstage as well. It’s not nearly as extreme as it sounds.”
4.48 Psychosis, Cumbernauld Theatre, Previews Wed-Thu, then runs Fri-Sat; Tramway, Glasgow, Nov 6-15.
www.cumbernauldtheatre.co.uk
www.tramway.org
The Herald, October 29th 2008
ends
“It’s the most extraordinary piece of writing,” says Osmond. “Whether it’s auto-biographical or not, it’s undoubtedly personal, and it’s hard to avoid the power of Sarah Kane that pours through the piece. Not that you’d want to, but it was clearly written by someone going through all these things at the time. Watching it, no matter how good the production, you still knew it was actors playing at being depressed. But this is a piece that needed to be done in a different way.”
On the page, with no apparent plot, characters or dialogue in a conventional sense, the text of 4.48 Psychosis more resembles a poem or an abstract musical score. This is a gift to directors, leaving itself open to a multitude of interpretations. Most recent of these was Polish company TR Warszawa’s powerfully literal version at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival. The first professional Scottish production, in The Citizens Theatre Circle Studio, was performed more impressionistically by three women actors.
Rather than take either approach, Osmond decided to pre-record the play in its entirety using a multitude of voices. Instead of professional actors, however, he invited what he calls “the general community,” - a mixture of contributors co-opted by Tramway in Glasgow and assorted mental health organisations – with no theatrical experience, to take part. What he and sound designer Kenny MacLeod have ended up with is a work created by thirty-one people aged between three and seventy-four, plus a choir. Made up of nine hundred sound files ranging in length from three seconds to twenty minutes, as it stands the work lasts fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds exactly. Accompanying this, initially in darkness, will be actor Keith Macpherson in an environment designed to isolate the audience from each other as much as possible.
“We very consciously chose a male actor,” Osmond says. “So instead of the play being about a young woman, we’ve spread the net as wide as possible, and hopefully what the recording does is show a whole rage of different voices that can exist in your head. Where you could act out depression, what this does is move more inwards and hopefully get closer to the heart of the piece.”
4.48 Psychosis’ understated poetic cacophony recalls Derek Jarman’s film, Blue, and Samuel Beckett’s voice-based miniatures such as Play, in which three buried heads talk across each other. With a background directing large-scale opera as much as theatre, as an influence Osmond cites Glenn Gould, the seminal Canadian pianist who made a series of radio documentaries using a technique he called ‘contrapuntal radio.’ This used several voices speaking at once, which in musical terms resembled a fugue.
“It has that attitude and that sensibility,” Osmond says, “which is to do with how Gould spliced together the voices of people who’d never met. We do the same, although there’s a lot happening onstage as well. It’s not nearly as extreme as it sounds.”
4.48 Psychosis, Cumbernauld Theatre, Previews Wed-Thu, then runs Fri-Sat; Tramway, Glasgow, Nov 6-15.
www.cumbernauldtheatre.co.uk
www.tramway.org
The Herald, October 29th 2008
ends
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