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4.48 Psychosis

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Ellen West - web producer | 13:51 UK time, Tuesday, 19 August 2008

It's impossible to talk about British playwright without mentioning its context - that she committed suicide shortly after its completion. Watching the play count down to the death of the main character it is irresistible to draw parallels with Kane's own mental illness and experience of psychiatric hospital, but voyeurism isn't the only reason that this performance is compelling.

The play's text is free from stage directions and none of the participants is identified, so theatre companies have a free hand as to how many characters appear on stage and whether they are male or female. Polish company present us with a doctor, a friend, a lover and a figure that appears briefly and seems to represent the protagonist's own vision of her emotional state. plays the main character with passionate intensity - she burns with rage at the medical establishment and her own weakness. As she moves closer to her own destruction she greets it with flashes of black humour and a despair that is all too convincing. None of the other participants are characters as such - they appear and disappear in a narrative that is moving inexorably towards the destruction of the person at its centre.

If this makes the play sound like a horrific experience that is only partly true. The poetry of the writing and the rhythm of the countdown (apparently mirroring a test for mental alertness called 'serial sevens') exercise a sort of spell. Watching the play I felt in a trance, waiting for the inevitable and fearing how it might come about. 4.48 Psychosis is a powerful evocation of mental illness and despair, and demonstrates with complete plausibility how some people inhabit a world where death seems like the only answer.

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