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Supporting Notes Section 2 - 4.48 Psychosis
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Section 3 of the Supporting Notes for Year 12/AS Drama and Theatre Studies Performance Exam, based on Sarah Kane's '4.48 Psychosis' and Antonin Artaud.
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Section 2Group Dramatic Intentions
As a group, our main intention is to make the audience aware of the complexity of
depression, by illustrating the inside of the ‘depressed mind’. We aim to shock and disturb
them, as a feature of Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. To help us achieve our aim, we intend to
invade as many of the audience’s senses as possible, to allow us to affect the audience
physically as well as mentally. This effect will allows us to turn our performance into a fully
immersive experience during which they should be forced to examine themselves as
Artaud intended, as 4.48 Psychosis focuses on severe mental illnesses, whilst also providing
a darker social commentary on the wrongdoings of society, particularly targeting medicinal
professions and the mistreatment of mental health patients.
Personal dramatic intentions
My main personal intention is to utilise an Artaudian acting style to allow me to portray the
complex dynamics of the emotions felt by those experiencing severe clinical depression. To
achieve this I will represent contrasts in emotion through movement, voice and other acting
skills, using these to create differences between ‘normal’ emotions and the ‘exaggerated’
emotions felt by Kane. I create development and progression of depression using
movement, facial expression and body language, portraying the calmer, quieter side of early
stages of depression at the beginning of the play. This contrasts to the final scenes of the
piece where I use exaggerated vocal tones and dynamics and rapid movement and gestures
to create violent and unpleasant visual imagery to show defeat of sanity by depression as it
destroys the mind in its severe stages. By using my acting skills, for example, rigid posture
including locked knees, lowered shoulders and a tight jaw as the doctor to create contrast in
the group’s emotional levels achieves my aim of being able to be show the unpredictability
of depression in a way that the audience will understand and empathise with; drawing links
to the element of ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ explored by Kane, using varying levels of
physical and vocal emotion and exaggeration, whilst utilising proxemics and spatial
awareness for contrasts in relationship and emotion.
Interpretation of the Script
With Kane’s writing style, 4.48 Psychosis involves no clear divisible characters, which can be
easily accessible to an Artaudian style. Artaud placed great emphasis on emotion in his
pieces, making it clear that they were more important than the actual characters
themselves. Due to this, we are able to divide characters based on the emotions felt
through each line, allocating each different emotion and set of lines to a different actor,
allowing us to represent depression in its many forms, adding a depth and complexity to
support the theme of complex clinical depression. In our initial read-through of the script,
the themes of depression, dependency and suicide were the most prominent; that it was
clear that Artaud should be our chosen practitioner.
Throughout our chosen extract, certain scenes heavily imply an ‘authoritative’ doctor or
psychiatrist character, allowing us to show contrasts between patient and doctor, true to
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