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"4:48 Psychosis".
 "I like the idea that the audience shouldn't be able to remove themselves," confesses Geordie Brookman, director of '4:48 Psychosis', Brink Theatre's offering for this edition of the Fringe Festival. It's not a new play; Brookman directed Brink's previous outing with this confronting piece by Sarah Kane, and the company thought it important to bring it back after an absence of a year and a half.
'4;48...' is a difficult play, mainly because it is performed by four characters who are all facets of the same troubled woman, confronting her most fearful thoughts. The audience is in close to the action, the actors perform in a small square of loam which becomes persistently muckier in misting rain... the play pushes itself upon you.
This time around, Brink are staging their performance in a side room at the Queens Theatre, it's a fair bit more claustrophobic, and suits its purpose - as an arena for conflict of the soul.
"Sand and rain, these are sensory things which impose themselves on the audience, the rain for me is such a simple device..." purrs Brookman.
As you might expect in the lead up to the opening of their Fringe season, Brookman confirms the cast and crew have been pretty flat out for the last two weeks - he points out with three new cast members there's a lot to be relearned. "It's the sort of play that rewards new input into it," he says when I ask him about Brink's decision to remount this searingly effective play.
"There was such a strong reaction the first time, and we never got to see the play develop - it had a really short season so that growth was missing to some extent. The other thing is we had space restrictions so only small audiences got to see it. That, and because it's a progressive piece of theatre, and I think it's an important one."
Having directed Brink Theatre's first production of '4:48 Psychosis', Brookman feels an intensely personal connection to the show, as he admits.
"And I find there's about 200 different ways of doing it... but to the it outside eye won't differ hugely. '4:48...' is just such a wonderful play to approach, but we'll be tweaking a few new scenes.
"It's a really confronting play for the audience, it's almost visceral... sort of an emotional depth charge, and I think it should be reacted to on a more primal level [than most theatre]," he suggests.
Hanging over the whole performance as it is played out before in the span of an hour and a half is the spectre of its playwright, English woman Sarah Kane, who committed suicide some years after writing '4:48 Psychosis'.
"You can't ignore it," Brookman answers simply. He employs a very logical analysis to his assessment of what seems a most important aspect, but is in reality a bit of a red herring. Despite the fate of the playwright, the play remains one of the most powerful dissections of medical science and its reality for the mentally ill.
"At the same time there's a number of intervening years, and if you follow the progression of her writing it's the logical next step. But her death wasn't inevitable: bipolar disorder and manic depression... her death shouldn't be the making or unmaking of the play.
"It's best described in something I read some time ago which called the play 'a collection of bewildered fragments'. That's it exactly. There's a wonderful dark humour, and she's taking the piss out of situations. At the same time there's so many ways to view the play; I mostly think it's a discussion of what it takes to live consciously."
Alex Wheaton
 | Brink Theatre present '4:48 Psychosis' at the Queens Theatre Stables from Sat 25 Feb proudly presented by dB Magazine |
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