Theatre-making with Sarah Kane: '4.48 Psychosis' on the Italian stage

This essay situates itself within a wider research project on the reception and reproduction of Sarah Kane’s drama in Italy. Possibly as a consequence of the unhelpful scandal raised by her debut play Blasted, theatre practitioners in the UK initially showed some reluctance in bringing Kane’s work to the stage; but this was by no means the case across the Channel, where the writer’s sustained endeavour to break formal boundaries has been noticeably paralleled by the striking readiness shown by her plays to cross national boundaries. Though this is seldom acknowledged in the burgeoning critical literature, Italian theatre-makers have been at the forefront in driving the process whereby Kane’s oeuvre was quickly taken on by the European experimental scene as an iconic expression of the contemporary Zeitgeist. In this study I concentrate on 4.48 Psychosis, by far the most widely performed among Kane’s plays in Italy (and elsewhere). From 2001, when it was first presented to Italian audiences, up to the present day, Kane’s script has received over thirty professional productions – an extraordinary amount by all accounts, but particularly so in a country that has traditionally proved impervious to new writing and non-canonical voices. Perhaps even more than for its unrivalled popularity, however, 4.48 Psychosis stands out as a unique case because of the readiness with which it has been reworked and reshaped by Italian theatre practitioners, with adaptations, rewrites and even parodies following hard on the heels of the play’s first stagings. Undoubtedly instigated by the openness and flexibility of Kane’s script, the creative responses I will be examining are marked by a considerable variety of staging practices and dramaturgical approaches, and by a parallel desire to extend the theatrical vocabulary of performance by relying on a plurality of languages and media. The processual counterpart to this fluidity of forms is the frequent overlap between the figures of writers, directors and performers, and their respective roles and prerogatives, as they engage creatively with Kane’s writing. With their tendency to merge different forms and agents of creativity, the more innovative Italian performances of 4.48 Psychosis seem specifically designed to challenge the distinction between text-based and devised theatre and, more in general, to invite a perception of theatre-making as an all-inclusive collaborative endeavour.