{"id":196758,"date":"2025-06-19T09:15:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/196758\/"},"modified":"2025-06-19T09:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:15:10","slug":"sarah-kanes-4-48-psychosis-still-feels-startlingly-original-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/196758\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Kane\u2019s 4.48 Psychosis still feels startlingly original \u2014 review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sing without hope on the boundary,\u201d says a voice in 4.48 Psychosis. Sarah Kane\u2019s play is a missive from that boundary: an unflinching account of severe depression. It\u2019s painfully frank, exquisitely wrought and shot through with dark humour. Twenty-five years after its premiere, it still feels startlingly original \u2014 a unique and shattering piece of work.<\/p>\n

This revival (a co-production with the RSC) is particularly highly charged, reuniting the actors and creative team that first staged it in 2000. The person who can\u2019t be here is Kane herself: she died by suicide not long after writing the piece. That desolate fact gnaws at your experience of the play.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s important to recognise \u2014 and perhaps easier to see now \u2014 the radical aesthetic intent driving the drama. Kane sought to express truth through innovation, splintering form to reflect a broken world. 4.48 Psychosis has striking integrity and ambition: it is a profound, lyrical reflection on mortality and consciousness and on the human need for love, hope and forgiveness. There\u2019s a generosity to that impulse. It\u2019s perhaps closest to Beckett in its staunch honesty and clarity of vision.<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Key to this is the fragmented, polyphonic structure, which matches form to content, inviting us into the surging mind of its unnamed protagonist and blurring outer and inner worlds. The script floats on the page \u2014 no setting, no plot, no timescale \u2014 and jackknifes through moods. There are monologues, dialogues and spoken choral passages, but none of them are assigned to any character or characters. It\u2019s down to the director to fathom a route through and sculpt it into tangible form.<\/p>\n

\"TwoDaniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter reflected in a giant mirror on the set of \u20184.48 Psychosis\u2019 \u00a9 Marc Brenner<\/p>\n

Some have responded by shaping the narrative, presenting us with a patient, doctors and friends. This quietly brilliant production by James Macdonald, still definitive in my view, is less literal and embraces the musicality of the piece. It also simply and succinctly draws us into a state of disorientation. Taking a cue from the text \u2014 \u201cHere am I and there is my body\u201d \u2014 Jeremy Herbert\u2019s set is dominated by a huge slanting mirror, so the audience has a double-perspective throughout.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the three actors move around the set, sprawl in a chair, curl up on the floor or lie spreadeagled on the table, we watch them and their mirrored selves, forming patterns above like letters on a page. It could be an expression of dissociation; it could be a reflection on the act of translating raw emotion into scripted art. Nigel Edwards\u2019 lighting flicks without warning between a soft blue twilight to a jumpy, pixilated state to stark clinical white.<\/p>\n

That splintering of identity and porousness of self is key to the emotional intensity and political import of the piece: the protagonist feels weighted by, and responsible for, the human atrocities in the world. The actors \u2014 Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter \u2014 convey this beautifully, shifting nimbly through the registers, from sardonic humour to bitter anger to perplexed grief to quiet reflection. They are separate yet a unit as they adopt the concerned tone of medics, rattle off lists of medication and side-effects, or rage at injustice. That they are returning to the piece in their older bodies lends it a further bittersweet quality, particularly as they respond to the final cathartic instruction \u2014 \u201cPlease open the curtains\u201d \u2014 and let the light in.<\/p>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n

To July 5, royalcourttheatre.com<\/a>, then The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon July 10-27, rsc.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-196758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114709274589517990","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}