Spardha brings ‘4.48 Montras’ on stage
The play takes a dark journey through the life of a tormented young woman as she encounters violence and heartbreak
Shedding light on the dilemma of "self" and "others", and subsequently stirring individual sensitivity against the backdrop of social absurdity and unacceptability, a critically acclaimed theatre production "4.48 Montras", directed by Syed Jamil Ahmed, premiered at Dr Nilima Ibrahim Auditorium of Bangladesh Mohila Samity on 18 December.
The play is being staged daily at the venue and will continue until December 31.
Adapted from the English playwright Sarah Kane's swansong "4.48 Psychosis", the play, translated into Bangla by Shahman Moishan and Sharif Siraj, is composed in a unique poetic style that abandons linear narrative to embrace a post-dramatic architecture, by fusing together monologues, stream-of-consciousness, soliloquies, daily-life dialogues, and narratives addressed directly to the spectators.
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Central to its content is depression leading to psychosis generated in a young writer because of violence she witnesses in society at large: rape, sexual assault, murder, torture unto death, religious intolerance, and chaotic uncertainty.
The play sees the ultimate narrowing of Sarah Kane's focus in her work.
The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of psychosis: the mind itself.
As a text, the masterpiece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their numbers are unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient.
The patient's struggle to communicate with her doctors and the audience says as much about life lived with a disability as it does about depression.
What it teaches us is the frustration of potential suicide at the way the rest of the world marches to a different, rational rhythm, and assumes there are cures and answers for a state of raging alienation.
It takes a dark journey through the life of a tormented young woman as she encounters violence and heartbreak.
An intensely personal play, written months before the playwright took her own life, the ominous title refers to the early morning moment when her afflicted mind was said to have assumed clarity.
Suffering from suicidal depression, Sarah Kane experienced her sharpest and most anguished clarity at 4.48am. Hence her visceral final play was titled as "4.48 Psychosis".
Her plays broadly deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form.
This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28.
Certain images are repeated within the performance, particularly that of "shade opens, stark light" and a repeated motif in the play is "serial sevens" which involves counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory.
Around the end of the play, the text becomes increasingly sparse, implying that the speaker is less committing suicide and more disappearing from existence.
Syed Jamil Ahmed has meticulously planned the entire production keeping the contemporary socio-political milieu in mind, and masterfully designed light, set and selected precise music scores to make it stand out.
In it, mental extremes are unflinchingly distilled. Wreathed in dark humour or bleak, lyrical beauty, words fragment and coalesce through angry pain and medicated stupor into skinless and terrible lucid freedom.
The production stars the protagonist Mohsina Akhter and features several other performers from the independent theatre collective "Spardha" in supporting roles.
The brilliant actor Mohsina, who also planned costumes, was the dramaturg of the production.
Md Sohel Rana is the assistant director, production manager and a cast member in the play.
