And it happened to be you
A few months later, ”Crave” was performed in Edinburgh: a ’choral monologue’ of four different voices belonging to one and the same mind, fragmented and tormented, whose effect on the reader is utterly bewildering. In writing this play, Kane drew heavily from her history of mental issues, failed relationships, family conflicts, but also from the juvenile religious fervour she had rejected in her early twenties, the traces of which are to be found in the biblical images and quotes (Job, Psalms, the Gospels and even A. Crowley) that form the evanescent texture of this dialogue/soliloquy. It’s an unsettling, intensely poetic experience, messed up, chaotic and visceral as only the human mind can be.
You can only hope she was smiling while doing so, but you’ll never really know, nobody ever will
To crown it all, her posthumously performed masterpiece, ”4.48 Psychosis”. Strictly speaking, this one is not even a play, but rather a suicide letter, a poem, a desperate monologue with virtually no stage directions. It reads like a collection of diary entries written shortly before Kane surrendered to her inner demons and took her own life by hanging herself (with her shoe laces, which a patient whose suicidal tendencies were already well known wasn’t supposed to have at her disposal. But then again, she wasn’t supposed to be left alone for one hour and half, either). Hence the total lack of dramatic technicalities and genre conventions, to the point that it’s hard to even classify this marvelous text. Pure poetry, most definitely, but also a visionary, heartrending account of the suffering she went through as a psychiatric patient, more realistic and gutwrenching than Sylvia Plath’s and Anna Kavan’s. In fact one can’t help but wonder what a great poet she could have been. Fortsätt läsa ”Although it certainly reminds of Beckett, there’s none of his surreal humour here, but rather an overwhelming intensity”