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But when he protagonist says 'This is not a world in which I want to live', it is not clear if this is due to one individual's clinical depression or a wider social malaise.
One of the intriguing aspects of this work is that the text does not specify any stage directions or characters. The original production at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2000 featured three actors, while others have used bigger casts. Here, French director Christian Benedetti makes the piece a monologue, performed by Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca on a bare stage, sharpening the focus unremittingly on one person's determination to end her life.
This uncompromising production begins confrontationally. Emerging from the back through one of two doorways suffused with blank white light, Marinca walks down nearly to the front of the slightly raked stage and eyeballs individual members of the audience for several minutes without speaking. Very slim, with cropped, spiky hair and wearing jeans and a T-shirt, she cuts a vulnerable, rather androgynous figure as stays in the same spot and proceeds over the next 75 minutes to bare her soul with unblinking concentration.
4:48 a.m. is the time she awakes, when her mind is at its most lucid (or most extreme) and when she intends to kill herself. The exact causes of her depression are ambivalent but it is clear that it has gone on for so long that she is now almost drained of emotion and just wants closure. There are moments of mordant humour – such as describing the inept attempts of the psychiatric system to treat her condition with drugs – but the overall tone is relentlessly sombre.
Benedetti has certainly achieved an impressive intensity and clarity of vision in the intimate Maria studio at the Young Vic, though arguably at the cost of social context, as we see only the isolated protagonist voicing the words of others.
Marinca gives a powerful performance, brave and direct, holding our attention throughout, with no problem in delivering the nuances of this sometimes elliptical prose poem. But she is perhaps too controlled to give an entirely convincing portrait of someone who has reached the ultimate point of desperation, and she shows the anger more than the passivity of depression. However, her final broad smile of relief just before darkness falls makes a big impact.
Benedetti, who specializes in challenging, provocative theatre by the likes of Edward Bond and Mark Ravenhill as well as Kane, has previously directed Marinca (star of the gruelling TV drama Sex Traffic and Palme d'Or-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) in a Romanian production of 4:48 Psychosis. It is interesting that this play, like others by Kane, are much more frequently produced on the Continent than in the UK. Maybe Kane's search for psychological and political truth is too uncomfortably probing for the average reserved British audience to bear.
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