Sarah Kane. Isabelle Huppert. Two powerful voices of human pain in an uneasy world. Two artists whose work serves purposely to disturb. The enfant terrible of London theater in the late 1990s and the French tragedian famous for her portrayals of women on the edge come together this month in Claude Régy’s production of Kane’s final opus, “4.48 Psychosis.” The pairing up of these two free radicals makes for volatile chemistry, and the results on stage promise to be highly explosive.
It was only seven years ago that the theater critic of London’s Daily Mail famously claimed the moral high ground over an unknown 23-year-old writer whose play “Blasted,” depicting scenes of sodomy and cannibalism in a tale of Bosnian war atrocities, he denounced as “a disgusting feast of filth.” Since Sarah Kane’s suicide in 1999 however, her brief œuvre of five plays has received apologetic critical acclaim in England for its bold writing and unconventional forms denouncing the violence and inhumanity that never cease to infect our “civilized” Western society and chronicling the despair and isolation of the individuals who live in it. If the visionaries of reunified Germany’s theater scene were the first to find in Kane a kindred spirit, her gallows humor, loss of faith, atmospheric menace and psychological pain à la Beckett and Pinter fell on sympathetic consciences in France — though production of her work has suffered more frequently than not here from naturalistic treatments and grandiloquent speechifying.
Régy’s production therefore offers reason to stand up and take notice, opening the door to some greatly missed essentials: namely, the stark beauty of Kane’s tortured soul, as perceived through the text’s spare writing, but mostly as interpreted by the incomparable Huppert. Considering the almost palpable suffering the play projects by taking an exacting look at mental illness as it is clinically treated (or not), it would be facetious to hail the combination of Kane and Huppert as something akin to a “match made in heaven.” Still, the choice of Huppert in the role of a psychotic depressive seems tailor-made for an actress who has slain her children in a fit of mad passion (“Médée”), cold-heartedly plotted the murder of family and friends from behind the gentle demeanor of a Swiss cocoa princess (“Merci pour le chocolat”) and indulged in brutal sado-masochistic games as a sexually repressed Viennese piano teacher (“La pianiste”). Yet, what is most interesting in this production of the play which Kane penned shortly before her death at age 28, is Régy’s decision to stage “4.48 Psychosis” as a quasi-monologue, casting Huppert as the central voice of what is in fact a polyphonic text. For those who have read the play as the author’s suicide note at the end of a long fight with depression, Régy provides concurring evidence.
“4.48 Psychosis” is named, according to Kane, as a reference to that deepest hour of the night when the human mind is at its most coherent and so most subject to suicidal fantasies. Its frequent cries of “No hope” resonate from the dark, long after the curtain comes down. The task remains — for we who survive her — to find through her work reasons for formulating a more constructive response to life’s madness.
Oct 1 to Nov 9, Tue-Fri, 8:30pm, Sat 4-8:30pm, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37bis bd de la Chapelle, 10e, M&Mac251; La Chapelle, tel: 01 46 07 34 50, 8-24.50E
