4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

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Psychosis was the astonishing final work of the radical British playwright Sarah Kane, first performed posthumously in 2000. Detailing the experience of clinical depression, the play harrowingly reveals, through poetry, anger and dark humour, an individual’s struggle to come to terms with their own psychosis, the numbers in the title referring to the time in the early morning when clarity and bleak despair strike together. Steven Barfield, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, will conduct post-show panel discussions. Previous guests on panels for Tangram Theatre’s production of 4.48 Psychosis have included Alex Sirz, author of “In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today”, and Graham Saunders, author of “Love me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the theatre of the Extremes”.

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. 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. Suicide note? 4.48 is much more than that, and Tangram’s production gives new resonance to one of the 1990s’ most strongly poetic theatrical voicesAs a piece of theatre, 4.48 Psychosis is grave and haunt ing. James Macdonald directs it with meticulous precison; Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter perform it with unsparing honesty. Philip made his Royal Opera debut in 2016 with 4.48 Psychosis, based on the text by Sarah Kane, and the first ever permitted adaptation of her work. The opera (dir. Ted Huffman) was critically acclaimed at its premiere and again at its 2018 revival: “extraordinarily accomplished and imaginative writing” (The Stage); “a score ranging guilelessly from motoric arrhythmia to wispy renaissance” (The Independent); “A new brand of opera” (The Times) “4.48 Psychosis opera is rawly powerful and laceratingly honest” (The Telegraph); “he ambushes and refreshes an old art form.” (The Observer) “Experimentation in the service of absolute emotional precision: Venables’ economical work is one of the most exhilarating operas in years, even while it gives voice to some of the darkest thoughts imaginable.” (The Spectator). The opera won the 2016 UK Theatre Award for Opera, the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Large-scale Composition and the 2017 British Composer Award for Stage Work, and was nominated for an Olivier Award and Sky Arts South Bank Award. Deafinitely Theatre and New Diorama Theatre present Sarah Kane’s lyrical and haunting play about mental health. ★★★★ Time Out, ★★★★ The Guadian, ★★★★ Theatre Weekly, ★★★★★ West End Wilma For six weeks in late spring 2000, they hunkered down at the Royal Court rehearsal rooms, trying to find answers. Simon Kane joined them, perched on a mattress in the corner. All three actors set about learning the text in its entirety; every moment would be rehearsed, but in keeping with the script’s freeform feel, it was decided that some sections should be left to the moment – if one person started a speech, the lines would be theirs for that performance. Designer Jeremy Herbert created a setting that was as stark as the text, a single large mirror suspended at a 45-degree angle over a plain white floor – visually elegant, but also a metaphor for the script’s prism of multiplying personalities. 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.’”

Frommy pointof view, as a hearing person who doesn’t understand BSL, both the beauty and the difficulty of BSL in this play is the way it can become mime, even dance. When it works, it shines, but when it doesn’t, it looks confusingly like charades. Though not every movement is abstracted language; about halfway through the 80-minuteperformance there is an anarchic dance sequence and the change of movement from expression to suppression is chilling. gets its name from the time she found herself waking up every day during the last episode) and the final Philip Venables’ (Composer) music is often concerned with violence, politics and speech within concert music and opera. He is described as “one of the finest composers around” (Guardian) and his work as “brutally effective” (Times), “original and intelligent in both form and content… reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle” (Exeunt Magazine) and “brilliant, extreme work that grips like a vice and won’t let go” (Guardian). The six female singers in rehearsal for 4.48 Psychosis. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey/Royal Opera HousePsychosis is Sarah Kane’s brutal and poetic exploration of a mind preparing to shut itself down. Spiked with gallows humour, Sarah Kane’s fifth and final play charts the journey of mind and body; from darkness into light, from pain into love, from life into death. Sarah Kane’s life and career came to an abrupt end, when the playwright hanged herself at a London hospital in February 1999. When 4.48 Psychosis premiered one month after her suicide, the connection between the playwright and her work was apparent to all. As one character puts it, "I dreamt I went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the f**king waiting room half an hour." Kane was 28 years old.

Aheartfelt look at what it feels like to live with a profound disability, and just how isolating that can be." Pip Donaghy and Kate Ashfield in Blasted at the Royal Court in 1995. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Improv: The play has no stage directions or characters so the director has the freedom to do what they wish.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. Kane wrote 4.48 Psychosis shortly before she killed herself, and ever since its posthumous staging a few months later, it has been crudely characterised as a suicide note. It is not an unreasonable assumption. The story – such as it is, in a very free form in which the script provides no indication of cast or which character is speaking at any one time – apparently takes in someone waking up in the early hours of the morning and realising they need psychiatric help, being diagnosed with depression, undergoing drugs and ECT treatment, neither of which provide long-term solutions, entering a brief period of remission and moments of sanity before suffering a relapse and making a decision not to continue living. It felt like we had a responsibility to give breath and life to this amazing thing that Sarah had created’ … Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter in 4.48 Psychosis at the Royal Court in 2000. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

But the play is as much a literary as a theatrical event. Like Sylvia Plath's Edge, it is a rare example of the writer recording the act she is about to perform. An operatic adaptation of 4.48 Psychosis, commissioned by Royal Opera and written by British composer Philip Venables, was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2016. The first such adaptation of Kane's works, the production was approved by Sarah Kane's brother, and received critical acclaim. [7] [8] [9] References to the play [ edit ] Since there is no direction, productions vary; some have multiple characters, or may just be a solo monologue. There is an opeatic adaptation written by Philip Venables, which was well-received by critics as well as Kane's brother. Therefore it was the composer that decided what parts of the text were to be musicalized; which were to be sung and how, which were spoken, or which to be projected. As a result of the various ways in which text was utilised, the resulting dramaturgy could be considered as one that was stratified with the text woven between instrumentalists, singers, and the scenography.

Summary

This award winning play gets the Deafinitely treatment, combining British Sign Language, visual storytelling and the spoken word. ★★★★★ The Upcoming, ★★★★ The Guardian ,★★★★ WhatsOnStage, ★★★★ The Stage 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. Given the discussion above about the freedom from ‘who says what’ characterisation in 4.48 Psychosis, our general casting concept was to create a ‘hive mind’ of similar voices. Using an ensemble of voices in this way enabled flexibility in terms of who sings what. No single cast member would take on a truly fixed role, with the exception, perhaps, of one person carrying some of the solo arias on behalf of the main character (the patient). The whole ensemble would at times represent the main character, at other times they would step out to play the roles of doctors, lovers, carers. The polyphonic inner voices could be mapped into real vocal polyphony, solo arias or speeches could be distributed between the cast, some parts could be left open in the score and allocated in the rehearsal room, leaving the director more flexibility with staging. And, with this fluidity of character representation, the dream-like state between reality, memory and prophecy could be better explored.