4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

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The creative team decided to invite groups of actors to read through the text, to plot out how many voices were needed, who might speak where. Macdonald eventually settled on a cast of three: Daniel Evans, who had worked with Kane on Cleansed, and fellow actors Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter. McInnes, who now works as a director, admits that at first she wasn’t sure: “I remember reading it on the train home, I couldn’t get a handle on it. But it got to me. By the lunchtime, I said to James, ‘I’ve got to be in this.’” Psychosis, a Royal Opera House production, is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, from 24 to 28 May. Box office: 020-8741 6850. The overall structure of 4.48 Psychosis is patchwork, episodic and formalized. Some tableaux return periodically, some are grouped around thematic content, and from the patchwork emerges a structural arc, leading towards the final scene, suicide. Most importantly, because the prose is free, the structure non-linear and without fixed characterisation, Kane’s text offers a rare thing for theatre-makers: a dramaturgy that does not depend on who says what. As director Ted Huffman said “ Sarah Kane’s text has a lot of room in it. She leaves room for the director. It’s almost a challenge she lays down, she says ‘here is this text, what will you do with it?‘” (in an interview with Samira Ahmed on Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 24th May 2016). In the early hours of 17 February 1999, Kane in her Brixton flat attempted suicide by taking 50 sleeping pills and over 150 antidepressant tablets. [10] Her flatmate, David Gibson, awoke and found a suicide note from her, stating that he was not to enter her room. Ignoring this request, Gibson entered Kane's room where he found her to be unconscious. [11]

Psychosis has divided critical opinions. Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?" [5] Charles Spencer of the Telegraph said "it is impossible not to view it as a deeply personal howl of pain.” [6] David Greig considered the play to be "perhaps uniquely painful in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously." [1] Opera [ edit ] Six female singers were chosen, three sopranos and three mezzo-sopranos. They were all auditioned with spoken text excerpts as well as song, and therefore the cast were chosen with both skills in mind. They became our ‘hive-mind’, led by Gweneth Ann Rand who became the ‘lead’ of the group, carrying more of the solo arias, including in the final scene. In the absence of a character name, this commentary refers to the roles according to the first names of the cast, and these will be retained as a tribute to them in the published score: Gwen, Jen, Suzy, Clare, Emily, Lucy. Improv: The play has no stage directions or characters so the director has the freedom to do what they wish. impulses, and follow her moods from dark humor to despair to hopefulness. Indeed, the last line of the play, “PleaseIn 1998, Kane was included in the Evening Standard 's list of 'London's Top 100 women', which was a list of "The most influential women in the capital". [38] In the same year she was also featured in the newspaper's list of "London's fifty brightest young things". [39] Kane’s early plays were sweeping investigations of power, like the aforementioned Blasted. They include Phaedra’s Love, based on Seneca’s classic story of a scheming mother and son, and a later play, Cleansed, which centered on the survival of love amongst a group of inmates in a futuristic concentration camp. As Kane continued to write, her work grew increasingly personal, as evidenced by Crave, an intimate piece on interpersonal power dynamics, which finally achieved broader recognition for the young writer.

Don't You Dare Pity Me!: When an doctor enters the character feels that they are beyond saving and loathes the way the doctors treat them like a child. In 2000 Bond wrote that "Her suicide has to be understood. She was the most gifted dramatist of her generation. It is said that she killed herself because she was clinically depressed. What does that mean of a writer? Not that her death had a cause, but that her life had no inducement. She saw no future for theatre and so none for herself. But it is possible to see such a future for theatre. Her plays present the need for such a theatre." [22] In 2021 Bond wrote "[Kane] had personal problems but she was destroyed by the theatre industry. Drama had been her umbilical lifeline but the theatre industry tuned it into the rope with which she hanged herself." [23] Works [ edit ] Straight from the Royal Opera’s sold-out production, PROTOTYPE presents the US premiere of the contemporary opera that has the entire world buzzing. Composed of 24 fragmented episodes, Sarah Kane’s chilling final play details the experience of clinical depression and reveals an individual’s struggle to come to terms with their own psychosis. Philip Venables’ greatly acclaimed operatic adaptation, directed by Ted Huffman and conducted by Richard Baker, explores the search for love and happiness and the struggle for identity through a fusion of opera and spoken text. 4.48 Psychosis brings a new resonance to the last creative utterances of one of the most courageous young British writers of her generation. I am not sure if you could quite say that of Sarah Kane: what this play proves is that her death was every bit as uncompromising as her creative life.Saunders, Graham (27 August 2009). "ACADEMIC GRAHAM SAUNDERS ASSESSES SARAH KANE" (Interview: Audio). Interviewed by Aleks Sierz. Dewynters, London . Retrieved 20 February 2021. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000, at the Royal Court, directed by James Macdonald. This, Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work, dispenses with plot and character, and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play. Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression, it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Greig as having as its subject the " psychotic mind". [6] According to Greig, the title derives from the time—4:48a.m.—when Kane, in her depressed state, frequently woke in the morning. Paulson, Michael (2 April 2015). "Robert Askins Brings 'Hand to God' to Broadway". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 November 2021. When he got the news that his sister had taken an overdose, Simon rushed to visit her in hospital, then went to her flat in Brixton to collect some belongings. There he found an envelope containing a note and a script. “It was the first time I’d seen it finished,” he says. Kane had also delivered a copy to her agent, Mel Kenyon. Gardner, Lyn (23 February 1999). "Of love and outrage: Sarah Kane obituary". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 February 2021.

In fact, the text’s “bewildered fragments” comprise short passages of fine writing, internal monologues, diary entries, dialogues between patient and doctor, examples of medical questionnaires, excerpts from self-help books, and religious visions. But all is not as bleak as it sounds: jokes jostle with despair; scepticism cohabits with belief. Admittedly, some of the text has a juvenile feel to it, even when it explores the sensibility of an agonised self-consciousness: “It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.” Audiences surely won’t need reminding that the best theatre action takes place inside their heads.Psychosis opera is rawly powerful and laceratingly honest - review". The Telegraph . Retrieved 28 May 2016. It is not a play in the familiar sense of the word. It is more, in the manner of Kane's penultimate work Crave, a dramatised poem. A piece for voices. But one in which the main voice has been stilled. "After 4.48," runs one prophetic line, "I shall not speak again."