"An opera version of Sarah Kane" already sounds like a punchline--a description in the abstract of the sort of thing Guardian readers go to. And, judging by the audience, not an inaccurate description. This was one of those things you go to and everyone in the audience looks like Someone--like, a distinguished textile historian, or a hat designer who stumped for Jeremy Corbyn. (I mean I assume most of England was at home watching a reality series about meat pies, so my social indexing is still a bit off.)
4:48 Psychosis is already one of those things that barely stands as a play: were Sarah Kane not a defining playwright of her era, I'm curious if this would be performed. It reads, as I think Michael Billington noted, like a suicide note, which to many intents and purposes it was. Clean typography and a Methuen edition do as much to make this a play, I fear, as dramatic content. How many such notes, I wonder, exist all around us, lacking this sort of audience and production?
That evocation of wider sympathy is just the sort of thing this material lacks. More so even than Kane's other plays, this piece exists nearly on a flat grid of extreme, if narcissistic, pain. There aren't characters in Kane's play; this production decides to make one actress a sort of central stand-in for Kane's personality, splitting her out into a chorus of I believe six other women. This led to some effective moments: I recall particularly an attending doctor overwhelmed on stage by these six women giving force to the central figure's urge towards self-destruction. I admired the actors more than I liked their performances: their ability to commit to this material, and to its collective presentation, was in its way a refutation of the play's interior hopelessness.
For the most part, though, this was not great theatre--it never really came together. I cede to my colleague Liz the entirely apt observation that this was far too reverent of Kane's text, such as this text even exists. Everyone was dressed in dark khakis and cardigans, as in the world's saddest Gap commercial, and there was a great deal of wailing over irresolute music. Worse, the decision to recreate some of Kane's words as drumming added little to what script there was. Many bog-standard contemporary opera tropes were present: amplification, parodic snippets of circus and religious music giving ironic commentary so rote it could be wrapped in plastic and sold on Virgin trains. A day on I'm struggling to remember anything else about the music, which was not so much bad as uninteresting--at its best sounding like one of those orchestras that do improved live accompaniments to silent films. There were random curlicues of odd noise-making--a sawed log, a little binging bell for projected question marks--but these we're just little binging distractions amidst the underwhelming gloom. I'm not exaggerating or trying to be clever in the least when I said that I spent a solid two minutes thinking about Jimmy Buffet, sucking on parrothead solace. I don't know where I developed this kind of shit-culture defence mechanism--Buffet, ZZ Top, Ludacris, the goofiest Springsteen--but it springs out at moments like this in England, when a seemingly hopeless day (I'm writing a manuscript introduction at approximately the pace that lizards evolve) is brought to an end by an evening of life-denying culture.
Oh, and the idiot next to me kept laughing at what I think he imagined as little world-weary jokes. In its way, this weird ironic drama of London up-its-assness, of someone finding this suicide dirge kind of lifelessly giggly, was more interesting than anything on stage.
To that end: having a drink at the bar afterwards, I found myself listening to the opening-night thank-yous, blander and more witless than the platitudes offered onstage by Kane's doctors. This felt like a blacker joke even than those in the play. If there is an afterlife, I hope she didn't have to watch the lame opera of her suicide note being described as "powerful" by someone whose name, unless I am grievously mistaken, was Hansel. Sarah, dear: it's five o'clock somewhere.
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