Production Language French
Country of Origin France
Description With words as exquisite as they are chilling, Sarah Kane’s heartrending 4.48 Psychosis is a breathtakingly visceral rollercoaster ride through the playwright’s private hell. Infamous at just 23 for Blasted, an explosive depiction of the Bosnian War’s barbarism, and a few years later for the equally controversial Crave and Skin, Kane’s anarchistic and highly literate voice has been favorably compared to those of Beckett, Pinter, and Artaud.
Performed in French with English titles, and directed at an unerring fever pitch by renowned French director Claude Régy, 4.48 Psychose represents Kane at her most experimental. Completed just prior to her suicide in 1999, the work triumphs as an unsparing and astonishingly brave artistic endeavor laying bare a brilliant mind on the verge of psychological collapse. The incomparable film actress Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, I ♥ Huckabees, Entre Nous) makes her American stage debut in a performance so acute, so unnerving in its translucence, that we believe she is Kane incarnate. Régy’s ingenious staging transforms the multilayered text, which contains no conventionally defined characters, into a quasi-monologue (offset by occasional exchanges with a therapist played by Gérard Watkins)—what is said, and how Huppert embodies it, compels us to listen with our hearts as well as our ears.
Identifier 2005f.00036
