Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound of a clock’s hands as they move closer to 4.48am – a moment of terror and clarity, release and oblivion – is heard like the beat of a failing heart during Charlotte Gwinner’s revival of 4.48 Psychosis, part of Sheffield’s Sarah Kane season. Finally there is just silence and nothingness. This is theatre as a disappearing act in which time itself is obliterated.
It is paired with Kane’s penultimate play, Crave, and uses a shared cast and design. The two brief plays manoeuvre and shimmy around each other, both structurally and thematically, like reluctant dance partners. Sometimes they shyly come together and rub up against each other, and at other times they ambush and viciously trip each other up as they pull in opposing directions towards life and death, light and darkness, laughter and silence.
Posthumously produced at the Royal Court in London in 2000, 18 months after the playwright’s death, 4.48 Psychosis presents intriguing difficulties and possibilities. How do you perform a blank page? A series of numbers? A piece that is ambivalent about gender and character? A script that has too often been seen as a theatrical suicide note?
The latter emphasis can be side-stepped in the way the lines are assigned to the fragmented set of protagonists, and Gwinner does it neatly in a revival that may not have the searing spectral power of some European stagings such as Grzegorz Jarzyna’s for TR Warszawa, but which has a piercing clarity. It is performed with admirably restrained emotion by Rakie Ayola, Pearl Chanda and Tom Mothersdale.
What we get is not just a painfully funny play about one person’s struggle with mental illness, but also one that scratches at the scabs of inadequacy, failure and despair that we all bear. The clock ticks. The abstract blue scar that encircles the playing space tingles and convulses like an electric shock. Time runs out, as it does for all of us.
• Until March 21. Box office: 0114-249 6000. Details: sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
