4.48 Psychosis: ADC Theatre, Cambridge

Art In Macro is back with a minor redesign (a template) and some new content. Some of the old content has been axed too. Yes, because it was rubbish. There will be more frequent updates that are shorter as well as an approximately quarterly piece that threatens to stretch beneath the southern boundary of you screen

Today’s review is of the performance of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge. What immediately follows is a brief interpolation about why, in spite of minimal theatre-going experience, Art In Macro is reviewing plays. Skip the next bit text to get to the review.
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In sentient adult life I have been to fewer than a dozen plays. Why? I am exactly the sort of person who should go to the theatre. It plays to my respective enjoyment of acting, literature, immediacy, and art. So why is the sum total of my theatre-going experience as an undergraduate a performance of Waiting For Godot with Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper (David Neilson) as Lucky?

Primarily it is about expense. The days of subsidized troupes and theatres are disappearing. You have to be a particularly hardened and embattled soul if you are to regularly stump up £10+ to see something that you can’t own later, that might not be good, that could potentially offend and challenge your understanding of previously cherished text. At least the similarly-priced record and DVD have a repeatability clause built-in. And at least the large touring rock band allows the opportunity for the audience member to come alive, be semi-interactive, and to consume several flagons of draught.

There were never any regrets about those few times I did pay the requisite for a play. And whilst I don’t have the experience to fully separate what makes a production first-rate from one to hate, the weary cynicism of the post-modern/late-capitalist voracious culture-consumer with a mouthpiece (e.g. this blog) is a transposable mode. I am writing as a dilettante to speed my passage into understanding; trying to make sense of things I do not fully understand without recourse to textbooks, theoreticians, and naysayers. Anyway: on with the show.

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4.48 Psychosis – Cambridge ADC Theatre
23rd October 2010

Pitched somewhere between Beckett (formal abstraction, the decomposition of semantics, an almost percussive dialogue) and Plath (despair expressed through snakish – almost primal – monologuing, depression as anger) is 4.48 Psychosis. The director’s notes claim it is not ‘a play purely about depression’ but ‘a cry for love and human connection’. All very well and noble, but ultimately begging a question about why the protagonist (The Lover) hates everyone, including those who attempt to love her?

The Lover is depressed beyond tears, a tiger set loose to live with humans, occasionally benign and self-concerned but mostly filled with incomprehension and an inability to communicate terms which might assuage her. Nothing is ever good enough. The Partner tries anger, calmness, aping The Lover’s rhetorical devices, and just about everything he understands within his power but comes up short. The Doctor attempts to retain a professional impassivity, treating The Lover like a problem rather than a human. The Lover sees this as impersonal and dehumanizing, herself as vehicle for pharmaceutical neutralizing. The Doctor does care; when she takes off the professional mask to reveal herself, The Lover understands the necessity of the object/subject relationship, how social and professional boundaries cannot be transcended. It kills her.

The acting is good throughout. Hannah Wildsmith is perhaps too young, unravaged, and restrained to be The Lover, giving some of the angrier moments the same kind of forearm-to-forehead tendency of the period drama rather than the modernist nerve-jangler. Nonetheless, her smooth, clear-headed soliloquies highlight the patterns that repeat and fold in on themselves later, crushing her under her own rhetoric (appropriate, considering her fate). Archie Preston is similarly fine as The Partner, requiring the greatest range, attempting a light (“RSVP? ASAP?”) that contrasts jarringly with the near treacle-black of the denouement. Best of all, or at least the most convincing, is Nikki Moss as The Doctor. She is a blank page, phlegmatic in that way doctors have to be to preserve their own sanity (irony probably unintentional from Kane). Clipped and distant, yet her notes grant her omnipresence.

The direction is surefooted throughout, with minimal stage set-up to let the actors act and the words breathe. Sound and lights offer subtle tonal shifts; the overriding impression leaves you with no doubt that all concerned have extracted all they can from this play.

All said, it is the play itself that is the most problematic aspect of the production. Endless debate could be devoted to this topic, though to cut a long story short, it appears to valorize the plight of the depressed and somewhat elevate their status to nihilist-visionary. The Lover (difficult not to read as an allegory for Sarah Kane herself, in light of her suicide before this play reached the stage) laments pills and medication as curtailing the higher functions of her brain, when it is pretty clear to see that the higher functions of her brain are misfiring, her synapses prone to influencing angry, awkward bursts of dialogue that make living and supporting a person in that state totally fucking impossible to deal with. Of course, Kane attempts to pre-empt such readings, but these are the moments that feel the most forced.

Crystal Antlers / Mt. Eerie live

Not together. That would be weird, right? First update for a while, this coincides with the first gigs I've been to in a while and the first tumblr posts I made in a while and the first time I stepped outside to breathe oxygen that did curl back to my face and say "do your fucking dissertation you fuck". So I did. I make no apologies. Sorry.

In reverse chronological order, Crystal Antlers. Saw these dudes at Retro Bar about a year and a half ago early in their hype cycle. Lot of thin kids, pouters, fake glasses, the weird child-like dress sense. Blog readers, basically, hypists. Second time they played I couldn't afford it - £14! OK, you get Ariel Pink and Ponytail thrown in...still, doesn't mean I had the dollar. Heard that place was rammed.

It's pretty clear the hype and memory-purge has done for CA's momentum a bit. There were about as many people there as there were as the first time, and my friend and I were the only repeat offenders. Still, can't keep a good band down. Before the review, a picture that makes them look like just another bunch of dudes spanking their planks.

Shirtless drummer! Singing bass player! Incongruously hot keyboardist! Even a Bez figure! Lesser bands would embody these terrible clichés, even revel in them. Fortunately for Crystal Antlers, their talent is so high that they completely transcend these semiotic nightmares.

So, young rock fan, pick a decade and Crystal Antlers will pay homage. '50s? They have the blue-eyed pop nouse. '60s? Chaotic garage mayhem. '70s? A double-helping of California slack and Grand Funk bass. These guys obviously have heard the Dischord roster from the '80s, and throw the whole fat lot in with the healthy post-modernism of the '90s to now.



The sum of these influences is a brave band, willing to put three-minute reverb-crazy ballads like 'Andrew' next to the depraved psych trawl of 'Parting Song for the Torn Sky'. They largely ignore their own debut LP Tentacles, which was entirely brilliant, but got insulted on blogs owned by people with no taste anyway. Assholes.

It doesn't matter, because Crystal Antlers are survivors. The new stuff pops, the old stuff rocks, and even if Sound Control this evening is doomier and whiter than Edward Scissorhands' hiding place, you can't stop a band from doing it, not when they're this good.

Mt. Eerie then. This was a few weeks ago, I am afraid I cannot recall the date. Last time I saw Phil, he was cross-legged playing fey acoustic stuff, at a time when I didn't really want that kind of stuff. His fans aren't really my kind of people either; there's always this ultra-reverential atmosphere that I can barely resist farting throughout.

His last couple of releases have certainly been interesting, and I think I recognise in him what he's trying to do: get in touch with that 'wood spirit' that lies at the heart of 'black metal', rather than the corpse-paint and spikes and the blasphemy. There are certain chords that are deep and true and quite primal and it would be interesting to see if Mr. Elvrum, famed maker of melancholic acoustic albums, could successfully find his inner metal without resorting to hideous riffola and elven lore.

Not enough rock shows are funny. They're all ultra-serious, this-is-my-art kind of events, which is wholly appropriate for some, but some dudes could just do with treading on a rake once in a while.

Mt. Eerie are funny. Not in a way that makes them novelty, or silly, or make their music less pure, maaaaaan - but funny in a way that makes lead Eerie Phil Elvrum seem like more of a human and less of a phallus-toting rock bloke.

Before we discuss Mt. Eerie's humour, let us discuss No Kids, the support band AND backing band for Mt. Eerie. Sassy blue-eyed pop nuggets played by Games Workshop nerds, a twinkle in their eyes, they create the irresistible urge to dance. They're fun and sexy, but safe for pre-teens.



In their guise as axe-wielders for Mt. Eerie, they are transformed. Phil corpses. "We're going to play 10 to 11 rock songs. Have fun." Then the first chord hits. BAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMM. It's like being sideswiped by a Ford Cortina. The half-dozen or so cute, vegan, PETA-friendly, expensively dishevelled humans on stage launch into a skewed version of metal culled from the darkest forest in Norway. I laugh. My friend laughs. Many people look disheartened. Kaufman is alive! They keep this shtick up. It's brilliant. I want to mosh but there are people typing VERY HARD into their Blackberries.

They ease off the MetalZone pedals to play some gorgeous stuff, some from the Microphones days and some just as effortlessly good as he's always been, whatever the band name. This pleases all until one last ride to Valhalla, guitar raised uncynically aloft, crashing through the enchanted night. Hilarious, man. Brilliant.