4.48 Psychosis

Synopsis

'I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.' Sarah Kane is one of the most controversial playwrights of the 20th Century. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, is an immersion beneath a deeply troubled mind. Kane sees beyond depression as simply a mental illness and articulates the true implications of such a condition from the inside out. Its ravaging, hypnotic poetry and 'gallows humour' leave an indelible mark on the mind. This intense and vital experience delves deep in to the psyche, blurring the boundaries of sanity and insanity and shows us a heart-breakingly honest tragedy of consciousness.

Our Review:

10 May 2001

4.48 Psychosis was Sarah Kane's final play, before she took her own life, aged 29. It was first staged posthumously by the Royal Court last year at the Theatre Upstairs. Now revived in James Macdonald's masterly production, it has been moved downstairs, but to a completely reconfigured corner of the theatre that enhances the sense of dislocation that the play is about.

Entering through the stalls, we are in fact led onto the stage itself, upon which a seating bank has been installed facing out towards the auditorium, with the audience partly reflected in a huge, angled mirror positioned over the stage. The mirror also captures the actors, of course, and Macdonald's production, so superbly designed by Jeremy Herbert, is one of the most desolately beautiful I have ever witnessed.

In fact, this work – which has no plot and which, in script form, doesn't even ascribe its speeches to particular actors - is probably the closest I've seen a play mer...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 6 June 2001:

Three people talking incoherently. A great disappointment after having seen and liked 'Blasted' very much....

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