Anamaria Marinca interview for 4.48 Psychosis

When I meet Anamaria Marinca in a north London café, on a sweltering afternoon, she can’t stop smiling. The acclaimed Romanian actress slurps her beetroot and carrot juice, then grins sweetly; slurps, then grins. It’s a bit disconcerting, and comes as something of a surprise given that the subject matter of her work is so relentlessly grim.

In 2005, she won a Bafta for her performance as a woman sold into sexual slavery in the Channel 4 drama Sex Traffic. She followed that up in 2007 by playing the lead in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a Cannes prize-winner about an illegal abortion in Romania. It’s not exactly laugh-a-minute stuff.

This month, 31-year-old Marinca, who moved to England in 2004, takes to the stage of London’s Young Vic theatre for yet another gruelling drama, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. It is 10 years since Kane committed suicide at the age of 28 and the British playwright’s posthumously produced last play is all about mental collapse. When it premiered in 2000, some critics saw it as a suicide note.

What on earth attracted Marinca to such a gloomy piece? “I don’t look for these extreme projects,” she says, with another smile, “they just happen. There is some darkness in me, but no more than in any other person. And I sometimes want to confront it.” She argues that 4.48 Psychosis is much more than a suicide note. “Firstly, it’s about a time of night, 4.48am, a dark moment which paradoxically leads to clarity in the mind of its author,” she says. “And it’s not just about a personal illness but it’s a metaphor about the sickness of humankind.”

Marinca is waiflike, petite, and clearly has an affinity with Kane. She describes the play as “a very poetical text” and points out that it doesn’t specify how many actors are needed (the original production had three and others have used as many as nine). At the Young Vic, Marinca takes up the challenge of performing it as a solo monologue.

She’ll be helped by the piece’s director, Christian Benedetti, who is well known in his native France for his explorations of tough contemporary plays by writers such as Edward Bond and Mark Ravenhill. He has, in fact, directed Marinca in the same play before, in Romania, in a translation written by Marinca and a friend.

“The text always feels very dangerous - in a very good way,” she says. “You have to be completely vulnerable, and that is a very difficult thing.”

Marinca certainly has the training to tackle difficult material. She studied at the George Enescu University of Fine Arts, Music and Drama in her home town of Iasi in north-eastern Romania, where her most important acting teacher was her father. “He was very tough with me,” she says. “We could argue, we could discuss and we could express our feelings. At an age when usually kids leave home, I got closer to my father, and got to know him as an artist. He’s my hero.”

She met director Benedetti in 2001. He had been invited to Romania for an international festival, and brought with him a production of Blasted, Kane’s 1995 shocker which touches on racism, misogyny and the horrors of war. It was Marinca’s introduction to the playwright, whose work is habitually violent and sexually explicit.

“I remember reading Blasted in less than an hour,” she says, “It was profoundly shocking. It blew me away.”

She makes a connection between the lead female character in Blasted, who at one point buries a dead baby on stage, and her character in 4 months…, who has to walk around Bucharest with an aborted foetus in a plastic bag. “I was thinking, what kind of prayer can you say for a life that hasn’t been lived? Where would this tiny unformed soul be going?”

Marinca follows this dark thought with a final puzzling smile, then, to help me understand the contrast between her sunny disposition and the darkness of the roles she plays, says, “I’m more of a chameleon in life than on stage.” Then she adds, enigmatically, “What you see is not always what you get.”

'4.48 Psychosis’ is at the Young Vic, London SE1 from July 21 (www.youngvic.org)