The devastating debut of 4:48 Psychosis (the opera) stands high in 2016’s best

That was in late May, and I’ve held off posting a review until now – when the opera is making many “best of the year ” lists in the U.K. Even though I’m not sure I can do justice to the piece, which surpassed all of my expectations within the first 15 minutes, I want to be part of the consensus. In the same trip, I saw Royal Opera’s production of Georges Enescu’s rarely heard 1936 Oedipe with his beautifully upholstered orchestration and imaginative portrayal of the Sphinx. A day trip on the EuroStar allowed me to catch Aribert Reimann’s 1978 Lear (originally written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) at the Paris Opera with searingly dissonant harmonies so appropriate to the darkness of the Shakespeare original.

4:48 Psychosis can’t really be compared to those individualistic but nonetheless traditional works. They come from such different worlds. But there is the issue of dramatic honesty. Enescu has an early 20th century stylization; Reimann was presented in a modern dress production that reveled in lurid gothicism and felt like Grand Guignol.  In contrast, Venables effortlessly inhabits the Sarah Kane psyche without the encumbrances of operatic artifice. It has narrative but no plot. It has personalities but designated characters are fleeting and fluid.

The original play arrived posthumously in 2000, a year after the author’s suicide at age 28, the last in a steady output of works that are classed in a movement referred to as “in-yer-face theater.” With the onset of mental illness and trying numerous medical treatments, she simply couldn’t live in the world in her condition and decided to leave it. One could easily assume the play, which takes its title from the early-morning time when she awoke, is a suicide note. I would disagree. It’s a deeply poetic exploration of a life that’s no longer worth living. The writing is often breathtaking in its penetrating vision. Kane’s closest literary cousin here is the late poet Anne Sexton who suffered from mental illness and compared taking medication as “planting bombs inside of myself.” Kane goes even further – referring to “a chemical lobotomy” – in a play that has no characters, no inciting incident but a variety of voices that open the play with repeated assurance: “You have many friends…This is not your fault.”

What unfolds from there is a series of images, not necessarily linear, with accounts of exterior incidents, such as trying to leave a psyche ward on her own and being physically detained. Prescription drugs are listed with their side effects and no appreciable benefits.  The sketch of the author’s personality emerges – strong willed and somewhat impulsive – but even that recedes into the realm of pure emotion. It’s not even gender specific. And though the play has been interpreted as having lesbian undercurrents I’ve never picked up on that. Possibly the depression crisis that happened before the play starts was precipitated by a romantic breakup, but soon, the story expands into larger sense of how much illness and treatment set you apart from the rest of society. Nobody seems to understand you. True or not, it becomes a self-alienating prophecy. Nothing wears out friends like mental illness, which makes its victims say and do things they don’t mean.

The 90-minute opera maintains most of the play’s highly distilled text. The composer opted for six female singers with a 12-piece ensemble. Words are spoken as often as they’re sung but often simultaneously in varying combinations. Voices might chant the words while a lone singer adds a vocalise – not unlike Schoenberg’s portrayal of the burning bush in the first scene of Moses und Aron. Dialogue was sometimes voiceless: Words appeared on the screen accompanied by antiphonal percussion instruments creating a kind of call and response. One pairing had snare and bass drums in dialogue, the bass accompanying, in rhythm, the more intractable realities expressed in text and projected onto the bare walls of the clinical set. This heightened the protagonist/author’s sense of alienation. She was speaking in her own code.

One passage was like a traditional aria though with a lot of spoken interference. J.S. Bach makes a cameo appearance near the end: Was it the cantata “Ich habe genug” quoted amid string writing suggesting the viol consorts of Renaissance England? Another important influence was Michael Nyman’s machine-tooled minimalism and metallic-plated sonorities. One section of the piece is punctuated by an interrupting blasts of sound and a bright – white light coming through the window that suggests, but only suggests, shock therapy. One of the most unexpected instrumental effects is periodic blasts from an organ, in moments where the author/protagonist is screaming back at friends and physicians in response to truths that are so well known to her she can’t imagine that those around her are only now figuring it out.

The 37-year-old Venables, whose works are “concerned with violence, politics and speech ” (according to his website), generally exhibited a large, original vocabulary and not a single false step. Okay, the last ten minutes drag a bit but perhaps the performers didn’t want the piece to end, even though the opera (like the play) isn’t at all sentimental, and never even asks for pity. I’m deeply sorry that a a writer as brilliant as Kane was silenced by her own hand. But the cast headed by Gweneth Ann Rand made you care about the protagonist in a way that made you grateful for her being in a safer, less-tortured place. You can’t love her art without wishing her repose.

The instrumental ensemble directed by Ted Huffman was positioned in back of the set, leaving a clear stage that maximizing theatrical impact, the theater being a 125-year Victorian structure that has a new hip shell built around it. Though Lyric Hammersmith used to be a theatrical backwater, it’s now a multi-space recreation center with hipster-ish patrons. But I wondered how much they knew what they were getting into. Kane has gathered posthumous momentum over the past year, partly with her 1996 Phaedra’s Love being the best part of a world tour of Phaedra(s) starring Isabelle Huppert. But Kane has nothing resembling mainstream fame. One man brought his teenage daughter. Would she be traumatized? You could tell who got the piece by those who stayed in their seats after the curtain call, which was maybe half the main floor. But look out world, 4:48 Psychosis has an operatic future and is probably making its way to a festival near you.

Postscript: 4:48 Psychosis was co-commissioned by the Royal Opera House and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The above photo of the production at the Lyric Hammersmith is by Stephen Cummiskey.