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298 / Performance Review
European touring productions to Ireland as well as
inventive productions of canonical texts, began his
Playboy with an onstage reading of Synge’s intro-
duction by a clownish figure replete with cymbals,
comically short pants, and red-and-white-striped
stockings. His appearance at first evoked the famil-
iar, red-nosed stage Irishman of Boucicault, yet his
slowly choreographed entrances and intermittent
clanging of cymbals also suggested a Brechtian
distanced presentation of a signified “Irish” product.
The set design inventively realized this presenta-
tion, featuring a faithfully grimy representation of
a Mayo cottage split in half, the two walls arranged
approximately forty feet apart. After the clown’s
cymbalic punctuation, the walls rotated ninety de-
grees to form one long upstage wall. The stylized
movement of the set served the director’s purpose
to highlight the decrepit and thoroughly familiar
Mayo cottage as an artificial construction easily
dismantled. The brace supports for the stage walls
were left visible to the audience and a gaping,
back-lit scrim suggested a bleak emptiness beyond
the cottage door. A patterned frame surrounding
the scrim suggested a forced proscenium perspec-
tive, wholly artificial and decidedly cinematic.
In the play Christy Mahon confesses his crime to
the lonely villagers, only to have their surprising
fascination transform him into a confident, swag-
gering playboy. Despite Synge’s text defining
Christy as a coward, the role of the playboy is more
often acted by a hopelessly attractive and strong
actor. Tom Vaughan Lawlor marked a departure as
Christy, his small frame and slight, soft-bellied
physique making his tale of murdering his father
with one blow to the head if not unlikely, then
nearly impossible when compared to the com-
manding physical presence of his father, played by
Maeliosa Stafford. Yet Lawlor’s animal-like ap-
pearance in the play’s beginning, his body twisted
from walking for eleven days, his face and arms
nearly black with dirt and coal, served to highlight
the villagers’ desperation for any sort of romantic
escape, no matter what form it takes.
Additional casting decisions were inspired. An-
drew Bennet’s Shawn Keogh, normally a lily-livered
caricature, was played against type as a man as
opportunistic and conniving as Christy Mahon or
the Widow Quinn. Cathy Belton (Pegeen Mike)
and Olwen Fouere (Widow Quinn) made interest-
ing contrasts, as the actresses are near enough in
age to suggest very clearly what Pegeen Mike’s life
will be if she does not marry.
The town’s eventual rejection and attempted
execution of Christy provided the production with
its darkest elements. Barnes staged the execution
with Christy tethered to a horse harness, thrashing
around on the stage floor, the other characters
restricting his movement with ropes. To aid this
inventive sequence, the shebeen’s walls rotated
back again to their original position, expanding the
production’s broad performance space.
The innovative production received only luke-
warm reviews from the New York press in general,
and a harsh one from the New York Times. While
the stylized, avant-garde staging of the highly
commercial, canonical work didn’t always suc-
ceed, the Abbey Playboy was notable for its attempt
to re-infuse the canonical play with attention to its
much darker elements, thus reinvigorating it with
some of its original controversy.
Lynne Parker, Artistic Director and founder of
Rough Magic theatre company, spoke at the Janu-
ary talks of the precarious balancing act a public
institution like the Abbey must perform, weighing
public service against the sense of mischief that
theatre making has to have. The Abbey Theatre’s
2004 production had elements of both, but spoke
more clearly to the theatre company’s attempt to
use a defining, canonical text to redefine Irish
theatre as it looks forward.
DEIRDRE O’LEARY
CUNY Graduate Center
4:48 PSYCHOSIS. By Sarah Kane. Directed by
James Macdonald. Royal Court Theatre, pre-
sented by UCLAlive at the Freud Playhouse,
UCLA Campus, Westwood, California. 4 No-
vember 2004.
For the past three years UCLAlive has brought
Los Angeles audiences a number of important
international performances, including Robert Wil-
son and Tom Wait’s Woyzeck, The Globe Theater’s
Twelfth Night, and the Berliner Volksbühne produc-
tion of Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured.
The 2004 International Theatre Series at UCLA
featured a number of notable productions, such as
Cheek by Jowl’s Othello, a series of choreographed
works from Lyon Opera Ballet, Matthew Bourne’s
The Nutcracker and the Royal Court Theatre’s pro-
duction of Sarah Kane’s final work, 4:48 Psychosis.
This “authentic” staging of 4:48 Psychosis, featuring
the original cast and production team, was brought
to the United States by the Royal Court in an effort
to expose American audiences to Kane’s work and
to the type of new drama the company has been
producing for over fifty years.
 PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 299

Cast members Jason Hughes, Marin Ireland, and Jo McInnes in Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis.
Photo: Dan Merlo, courtesy of Royal Court Theatre.

Though Kane’s work is seldom produced in the
United States, her plays have been prominently
featured in major state theatres of Germany and
Eastern Europe since her death in February 1999.
Completed just one week before the playwright’s
suicide, 4:48 Psychosis was originally presented at
the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in June
2000. The work is a fragmented view of Kane’s
presuicide world: a collage of thoughts, lists, con-
versations and other random bits of information.
Written in a free-form, stream-of-consciousness
style, the work contains a number of unspecified
characters, voices, and references that suggest the
playwright’s psychotic mental state and the unset-
tling memories of her existence. The title refers to
the time of the morning, 4:48 am, just before dawn
when the distress of a sleepless night yields to a
brief moment of clarity.
The Royal Court’s production brought together
Kane’s complex, multilayered text, strong ensemble
acting, and well-conceived staging and design
300 / Performance Review
choices. The design team of Jeremy Herbert (scen-
ery and stage properties), Nigel Edwards (light-
ing), and Paul Arditti (sound) created an environ-
ment that effectively communicated Kane’s
world—both the literal one of her hospital stays
and the abstract world of her “prison.” The stage
set consisted of a large mirrored surface suspended
from the stage at a 45-degree angle, allowing the
audience to see the action from both in front and
above. Onstage properties were those referenced in
the text: a table and two chairs, with the table
placed so that its reflected surface in the mirror
above became a window onto which video projec-
tions could occur. The production limited footage
to the recurring projection of a busy street some-
where in England, (presumably) outside the hospi-
tal. The table also doubled as the central character’s
hospital bed and as a writing desk onto which
random thoughts, lists, and numbers were written.
A few writing instruments and a pad of paper
completed the short list of physical stage properties.
Multiple projectors, reflections and severe light-
ing angles enhanced 4:48 Psychosis’s visual ele-
ments. The production gradually trained the audi-
ence to watch the action in the mirrored surface,
and through that visual dynamic the message be-
gan to function on multiple levels. Characters lying
on the floor appeared to be suspended midair,
hanging, floating, and watching from above. Hori-
zontal gaps in the mirrored surface created the effect
of a prison cell as shadows of four long “bars”
appeared from top to bottom of the stage surface.
Other effects included videotape of a distorted
aerial view of people walking on the street, a fuzzy
television screen, and the letters RSVP ASAP in a
font large enough to dominate the entire playing
area of the stage. All of these effects visually
manifested the fragmentation, random associations,
and internal blurriness of the psychotic mind.
Director James Macdonald’s staging choices were
precise, with all character actions, body positions,
and images contributing to the metaphor of the
prison/hospital room. Staging choices seemed as
random as the lines of the text, yet the absence of
clear patterns supported the internal exploration of
Kane’s desperate state of being. Physically the
actors engaged in frenetic walking patterns, rocked
back and forth silently, stared blankly at the ceil-
ing, and chain-smoked. The dominant physical
position of 4:48 Psychosis was supine—actors lying
either on their backs or face down in utter resigna-
tion. One stage composition found all three per-
formers lying on the floor as if hanging by “ropes”
created by the gaps in the mirrored surface, an-
other visual reference to the playwright, who was
discovered hanging by her shoelaces in a hospital
bathroom.
The absence of defined characters and situations
in 4:48 Psychosis permits a number of options with
regard to acting approach. Cast members Jason
Hughes, Marin Ireland, and Jo McInnes utilized
several tones in their delivery of the text; initial
sections of the play were spoken with a sardonic,
cynical rejecting quality, as if they were standing
outside the text and ridiculing it. The actors deliv-
ered much of the text without expression; a sense
of flat-line numbness pervaded much of the play,
though it may be argued that the nature of the text
was best served through that style of speaking. The
actors performed other sections of the text—sev-
eral of the extended monologues in particular—in
character, with a great depth of emotional inten-
sity. The interplay between the characters also
emerged as an important aspect of the production.
Patterns of speaking the text were varied; some-
times all three actors would speak a sentence si-
multaneously; at other times they would finish
each other’s sentences, build sentences together,
and answer one other’s questions.
Clearly, strong performances and inventive stag-
ing characterized the Royal Court production; how-
ever, the real power of 4:48 Psychosis rests within
the text itself. At the UCLA performance, audience
members vacillated between laughter (Kane’s fabled
gallows humor) and tears; a number of people
were visibly (and audibly) moved by the perform-
ance and after the production there was an inexpli-
cable sense of shock in the theatre. Artistic director
David Sefton and the staff of UCLAlive are to be
commended for their bold vision of bringing work
of this nature to Los Angeles.
STEVE EARNEST
California State University, San Bernardino
THE BAY AT NICE. By David Hare. Directed
by Michael Wilson. Hartford Stage, Hart-
ford, Connecticut. 15 October 2004.
A pattern exists in contemporary drama of peel-
ing back the layers of self until some unacknowl-
edged truth about the character is laid bare. Not so
for playwright Sir David Hare, who instead pur-
sues the ethical ramifications of personal choices
within specific social contexts: Chinese peasants
reacting to the cultural revolution (Fanshen), a