Ewan Patel takes Gould at Trinity

Many congratulations to Ewan Patel who has won the Gould Prize for English Literature, awarded by Trinity College, Cambridge. This is a tremendous achievement. Trinity College remains the intellectual powerhouse of the university, topping the Tompkins academic “League Table” of Cambridge Colleges. Ewan hopes to go up to Cambridge next year to read English (his OMT brother Callum, Class of 2013, also read English at Caius) and he has been offered a place at Emmanuel College for the 2016 entry. Well done, Ewan!

Inspired by some words of the German author Peter Handke about actors in his work, Offending the Audience (‘our bloodcurdling screams don’t pretend to be another’s bloodcurdling screams. We don’t step out of our roles. We have no roles. We are ourselves’) Ewan compared Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. 4.48 Psychosis concerns a person with clinical depression, a disorder from which Sarah Kane herself suffered. She killed herself in 1999, after the play had been written, but before its premiere at the Royal Court. In this (slightly redacted) passage from his essay, Ewan reflects on the relationship between life and art. “4.48 Psychosis is essentially an exposition of the brutality of depression, medication, unrequited love and communication, and psychosis. It is in the striking honesty of the play’s internal violence, manifested in the way in which the often vulgar (but still beautifully crafted) language strips the text of any sense of pretence, that Kane opens up and examines the space in the relationships between the playwright, the speaker, the actor and the audience. The speaker of the play resembles the author Sarah Kane to such a degree that, as Ken Urban states, “it is hard to read the play outside of biography”, and yet, David Grieg’s caution against the “pointlessly forensic act” of trying to interpret the text – and Kane’s life – as products of one another is hard to ignore. Both Kane and the speaker suffer from depression, which manifests by waking them at precisely 4:48 a.m. in spells of crippling anxiety, and so differentiating between the two is often problematic. This dilemma presents itself perhaps most clearly in the sophistication of the writing style of the play. "Hatch opens Stark light the television talks full of eyes the spirits of sight and now I am so afraid". This passage is inescapably poetically written. Kane offers first an image of hopefulness, an image of an open hatch. However, she tempers this hope with the adjective “stark”, suggesting painfully bright light, an unwelcome purge of darkness.

The personification of the television, evoking a strange alternative to conventional fears about modern surveillance society, suggests a paranoia that is rooted both in the speaker’s immediate surroundings (her television) and in the speaker’s sense of a spiritual world. The passage ends with a fear that feels isolating and lonely, which Kane enhances by physically isolating the phrase on the page. The way in which the play’s voice deftly moves through such intense emotions and themes is indicative of the sophistication of the writing here, and it is here that the problem arises: whose ‘sophistication’ are we seeing? It makes little sense to force an attribution either to Kane or to her speaker, and so we are left to conclude that this is some kind of shared process.

The speaker is in the midst of some sort of mental and emotional collapse, in a “struggle to remain intact”, and the content of the writing reflects the pain and fear of falling apart. However, the form, the aesthetic beauty, seems unlikely to stem from so unstable an identity: this seems instead a product of Kane the playwright; the fragmentation of the speaker is enveloped in the poetry of Sarah Kane. The similarities between the speaker and the playwright, and the often ambiguous nature of speech within the play (that is, it can be difficult to identify who is saying which lines, and to whom they are addressed) result in a speaker who seems to be acutely self-aware: just as one might say that the suicidal sentiments expressed in the play inform those of Kane herself, so one could claim that Kane’s authorial awareness bleeds into the speaker’s voice. The words “you have no choice / the choice comes after” take on a new meaning in the light of this self-awareness. The second person pronoun could denote the speaker addressing someone in particular, or could instead be used in place of the pronoun “one”, to suggest that this lack of choice is a universal claim. Considering the performance timespace, it seems possible that these words could thus be part of a kind of conversation between the speaker and the actor. This potential relationship is explored more fully in the following passage: Okay, let’s do it, let’s do the drugs, let’s do the chemical lobotomy, let’s shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I’ll be a bit more ******* capable of living.

The speaker is in conversation with a psychiatrist, who is asking her to take medication that numbs her higher order brain functions, lamenting that she ultimately has no power over what she says and does, and neither does the actor, because these have all been prescribed by the playwright. The result of this is startling: Kane creates a speaker who seems to have an identity separate from Kane, and they appear as two different entities communicating with each other. However, the speaker is inevitably aware that she is a part of Kane’s creation, inextricably tied to the playwright. As a consequence, the speaker’s words resonate deeply within the speaker-actor relationship”.

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