A glimpse into the darkness
Twenty-five years on, 4.48 still packs a gut punch
When 4.48 Psychosis was first staged at the Royal Court in 2000, it did so in the shadow of the death of its writer, Sarah Kane.
What I’ve seen
TW: discussion of suicide
I wonder if Kane, who took her own life the previous year at the age of 28, knew all along how it would play out. The play, just 43 pages of fractured text interspersed with long silences, is a stark attempt to express in theatrical form the unbearable pain of severe depression and the icy clarity of the terrible logic that the suicidal brain generates, that the best option is that one ceases to exist.
The cast of that first production was made up of three actors, Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter, then 26, 31 and 41 respectively. This restaging, a co-production with the RSC, of which Evans is co-artistic director, reunites them, 25 years on, with the original creative team.
I didn’t see it the first time, but props to both-times director James Macdonald, because when you see it on the page, you cannot begin to fathom how he conjured the imagination to stage it. It is wildly abstract; experimental in a way that you rarely see, especially at the moment – theatre’s not really in that place right now.
It’s a good idea, I think, to bring back the original cast, which immediately highlights that suicidal impulses don’t just occur in young people. Far from it.
For various reasons, I thought I was going to be devastated by this. But actually – and this does sort of make sense – it’s extremely difficult to engage with. It’s very much a testimony of what it’s like to be inside the suicidal brain – and it is a cold, unwelcoming place to be.
The script, which only very occasionally slips into anything approaching dialogue – these are not characters, but voices – is quite funny in places; there’s a sardonic, gallows humour to it: “I dreamt that I went to the doctors, and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour.” And there’s poetry too, an unabashed lyricism to some of it, though that too can be a bit alienating.
But why should it be easy, and why should we expect it to speak clearly to us when most of us find that state of mind to be anathema? For most people, even those who have gone through hell of one kind or another – seeing your family slain, crossing the world in fear to escape a devastating conflict or vicious regime – staying alive remains a fundamental imperative.
We don’t even think about it, it’s instinctive. The idea that you would inhabit a state of mind where the ending of your own life is even an option, is very difficult for most people to wrap their head around.
The play is eloquent, in many ways. There’s an undercurrent of rage in it which is unmistakable (and sometimes violently expressed, particularly by the voice embodied by Jo McInnes); that of someone furious at the pain she experiences and the perceived impossibility of being in the world. It’s not a cry for help, it’s more a sort of furious hiss: “oh, you don’t understand? Well let me fucking tell you”.
The set, by Jeremy Herbert, is stark but effective – a white square with a basic table and a couple of chairs, overhung by a huge mirror that reflects the actors and (if you’re sitting anywhere up to about halfway up the very steep rake) the audience. Nigel Edwards’s lighting design is rather good as well, helping to delineate moments that are hard to unpack on the page.
It’s not remotely enjoyable. It’s bleak and dark, reflecting what she beautifully but agonisingly describes as the ‘cold black pond of myself’. It makes it very difficult to grab onto, but it’s also very truthful and you hear her, loud and clear.
That’s on until July 5, before heading to the RSC for a run at The Other Place from July 10-27.
About as far from that as you can get is Hercules, the stage version of the 1997 Disney film, booking at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane until next March. I saw the movie a couple of years ago, and seem to remember really enjoying it.
The stage musical is… fine; a slightly by-numbers live version of a rather better film, with quite good songs, a nice enough set mainly made up of moving Grecian columns and topiary (and a slightly random gantry for the underworld) and at least two confetti explosions, which pretty much always improve things, a bit like cheese. The audience, which had a lot of kids in it (it’s absolutely for kids, this), were loving it, I think. The book, by playwright and director Kwame Kwei Armah, is good fun, as far as it goes but slightly oversimplifies things.
That said, all I can now remember is everything that’s wrong with it. It casually dispenses with quite a lot of the fun Greek mythiness of the original film – hero trainer Phil (Trevor Dion Nicholas) is no longer a Satyr (I’m not sure why they couldn’t have at least given him a tail), and Pegasus doesn’t come into it at all.
The classical myth nerd in me finds it slightly maddening that Hercules (which is the Roman equivalent of the Greek hero, Heracles) is here the son of Zeus and Hera (the Greek equivalents of the Roman gods Jupiter and Juno).
Plus in theory he was actually born to Zeus/Jupiter and Alcmene, a mortal woman and Zeus’s great-granddaughter, because gods are perverts. Hera tried to prevent Hercules/Heracles being born, and then sent two serpents to strangle him in his cradle, which the infant managed to fight off with his divine strength.
Needless to say, all of that has been done away with too, leaving him with a set of loving, godly parents who have no discernible personality.
The singing is pretty good, the dancing is brilliant, but there’s not a lot of what you’d call acting going on. I didn’t love the musical arrangements, which err heavily on the massive ensemble side, making it very difficult to actually hear the (quite clever and funny) words – problematic when the backstory is being belted out at speed by five muses, all of whom have fantastic voices but none of whom have been given anything to differentiate them as characters except slightly different dresses.
I wouldn’t say there was one outstanding performance (other than the muses, making very much the best of what they’re given) and there’s a marked lack of chemistry between Luke Brady’s naive Hercules and Mae Ann Jorolan’s sardonic Meg.
Stephen Carlile’s Hades struck me as a carbon copy of Scar from The Lion King, and indeed, having looked him up, he is best known for playing that role on Broadway.
The costumes, by Sky Switser, are great, particularly those for Hercules and Phil – a sort of high-end, ancient Greek drapery-inspired athleisure – though Meg’s dress is a bit High School Prom, and I don’t really understand why she’s in heels, it looks completely out of place.
Look, it’s a Disney musical, you kind of know by now what you’re going to get. As far as I can tell, the only time they’ve ever artistically justified making a stage version of a movie (as opposed to doing it to make shitloads of money, which they do, and there’s nothing wrong with that), is with The Lion King, which is genuinely innovative and imaginative in and of itself as a piece of theatre, and stands head and shoulders above all the others as a result – 25 years in the West End and counting, more on Broadway. I don’t really see why they can’t at least try to do that every time, but I suppose it’s because they don’t need to.
Also on
A few months ago I reviewed Anselm Kiefer’s big show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which explored his career through the lens of the influence of the Dutch painter. I loved it (JJ in the Guardian hated it). A reiterated, smaller version of that show, Kiefer/Van Gogh, is now about to open at the Royal Academy, and personally I think it’s worth seeing. I sometimes forget, because his work is so monumental, how humane Kiefer’s paintings are, but when I see them, especially en masse, I find them rather touching. It opens on June 28 and runs to October 26.
Book now
A couple of filmy things have caught my eye this week. The 4K restoration of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is coming to cinemas on July 4. I’ve never seen it, but it feels like a good opportunity – it’s a meticulous behind-the-scenes look at the making of Apocalypse Now, documented by the director Francis Ford Coppola’s wife, Eleanor Coppola.
Her footage was revisited in 1991 by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, who also filmed new interviews with cast and crew, resulting in what was described as “the best film about a film ever made”. I think seeing the carnage of the shoot on the big screen will be almost as epic as seeing the film itself. I’d like it if someone did a double bill.
Elsewhere, Barbican Cinema’s Hidden Figures programme, which celebrates brilliant filmmakers neglected by the canon, returns at the end of July with a celebration of the rarely seen work of the American independent filmmaker Stephanie Rothman, known for subverting the genre of ‘exploitation’ films by introducing her own take on social issues while including the requisite amount of sex and violence.
From July 29 to August 14 the Barbican is showing five of her 13 films, two of which, Terminal Island (1973), a biting commentary on the US prison system, and Group Marriage (1972), a sex comedy that explores gay life, polyamory and privacy way before any of it was fashionable, are screening as UK restoration premieres.
There’s also The Student Nurses (US 1970), in which four nursing students navigate the political and social turmoil of a turbulent 1970s LA, The Velvet Vampire (US 1971), probably the first truly feminist vampire film (I mean, there aren’t that many), and The Working Girls (US 1974), Rothman’s final film as a director, exploring female friendship and utopian socialism.
Further ahead
A reminder that Little Simz is playing the O2 on October 17, in support of her eviscerating new album Lotus, which excavates the complete destruction of her relationship with her childhood friend and former producer Inflo.
On home turf and with Simz riding high on the reception for the album (and having just done her Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre), it’s going to be electric.
I’m also genuinely excited to see the new hour by comedian Chloe Petts, who was the best thing I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe last year by a country mile. The new show, Big Naturals, which is all about sex, apparently, will be there this year, before kicking off a massive tour in 2026 with three weeks at the Soho Theatre from January 2-17. Honestly she’s so, so funny. I can’t wait.
I have no idea really what I think about the news that Logan Roy, aka the actor Brian Cox, is going to embark on his first ever one-man show tour this autumn. Brian Cox: It’s All About Me! culminates in a final show at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand on November 4. Tickets went on sale yesterday, here.
It’s basically another one of those carefully curated evenings of ‘this was my life’ with ‘hilarious’ stories etc that generate mildly naughty but not career-ending newslines. I imagine it will do very, very well.
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