Descent to hell through the convolutions of the brain

Alexander Zeldovich staged "4.48 Psychosis"

Premiere at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre: famous film director, author of the films "Moscow" and "Target", composer Dmitry Kurlyandsky, art group AES + F and 19 Moscow actresses teamed up to stage "4.48. Psychosis" by Sarah Kane - the famous British play of the end of the 20th century, a surreal and authentic chronicle of the author's depression and suicide. “This is Hamlet’s monologue “To be or not to be”, painted for female voices. But the author, unlike Hamlet, made a decision,” says Zeldovich, explaining the choice of the play.

Sarah Kane (1971-1999) belonged to the generation of the now famous Martin McDonagh and Mark Ravenhill. She was close to the circle of authors of the Royal Court Theatre, the cradle of the new British drama. Having created five plays, she committed suicide at the age of 28: clinical depression, absurd and sarcastic dialogues with doctors, kilotons of psychotropic drugs mentioned in Psychosis are not at all a figure of speech for interesting pallor, but real circumstances of fate.

Sarah Kane's last play, 4.48. Psychosis ”was staged after her death, went through the stages of Europe in flames and remains in the repertoire to this day. In 2016, the world premiere of Philip Venable's opera based on this play took place in the UK - London's Lyric Hammersmith Theater staged it in co-production with Covent Garden. In Moscow there was once on tour the famous performance of Grzegorz Jazhina and his TR Warszawa “4.48. Psychosis". The plays of Sarah Kane were highly appreciated and repeatedly staged on the stage by such a sensitive and intelligent director as Thomas Ostermeier, sensitive to the noise of the time.

"4.48" in the title of the play is the early morning time, when depression is most difficult to fight.

"Electrotheater Stanislavsky" grounded this terrible monologue. Precisely because in Zeldovich’s performance there is not one tragic actress playing the fight against madness for an aortic rupture, but 19. Under a gentle and very classic soundtrack (Kurlyandsky’s score is developed, modified, fragments of Brahms’ German Requiem shattered into glass dust) — video clips of the AES+F group play on high video screens: the descent into the pale gray cylindrical subway tunnel, into the bowels of personality, into the deep throat of madness. Red-and-gold insects pursue the heroine, either covering the white background of flesh with a nasty scarlet rash, or growing into dapper mechanical monsters, putting on a knight's shell and swelling with nuclear mushrooms.

White waves, cut by... mmm... bodily slits, rotate on the screens, while the heroine of Sarah Kane searches for her gender identity and lost love. Under extracts from the medical history, green and purple capsules of medicines explode. Psychedelically bright flocks of migratory false nails are circling over the world. Naive medieval images of cut off and bloody hands and feet of Christian martyrs add up to solar signs.

The chronicle of the proclaimed death of the heroine (and the author: "4.48 Psychosis" by Sarah Kane paid off at the highest price) Zeldovich's performance breaks into female polyphony. The 24 fragments of the play are diverse: the typical author's reading of an advanced poetess turns into a striptease session, Kane's sarcastic maxims become a roar of remarks in the chatter of ladies over coffee and cakes, IVs strangle the heroine - and fit nurses, the obvious heirs of Sister Ratched in Kesey's novel and Foreman's film, control them bestiary; small demons in purple uniforms of the SPA-salon sweetly ask the client: “Why do you cut your hands, dear?” - and get the answer: "Because it's cool!" ... Crescendo. The final. Suicide.

... There is no temptation to "follow the example" here. One viscous horror.

“Today's person is changing, ceases to be whole. It is not expressed, as before, in one voice. He is less often told about his own fate - he is often deprived of it. Instead of one “party”, it consists of many voices, it is “polyphonic” ... And in this sense, this play accurately tells the modern person - this is how he works, ”writes Alexander Zeldovich.

I do not think that this description of modern man is universal and exhaustive. But Kane's play, as it seems, is comprehended very accurately. A working hypothesis is proposed and implemented.