4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

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take place within the mind of the protagonist. Projections onto a mirror helped create a Rorschach-like effect. As evidence that the play encourages a wide variety of

Figure 11: An excerpt from Scene 24 from 4.48 Psychosis, the final scene, showing antiphonal verse. 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.’” Loving a Shadow: The narration/lead laments that they are forever doomed to never truly love or know their true love; it is ambiguous as to if this is a real person, an idea/concept that will never live up to reality, or even the doctor that interacts the most with the lead/one of the characters in the narrative. Always interested in finding new forms of theatre, Kane’s work took a significant turn with Crave. Where her prior plays had been full of on-stage, physical brutality and violence, here she was focused on emotional states as played out through the music of voices. Concerned that the play's reception would be affected by her notoriety, Crave premiered in 1998 under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon. Critics described Crave as the most hopeful of her plays, though Kane found that characterization odd; she said she wrote it “at a time when [she] had lost faith in love” and considered it to be her most despairing work to date. This award winning play gets the Deafinitely treatment, combining British Sign Language, visual storytelling and the spoken word. ★★★★★ The Upcoming, ★★★★ The Guardian ,★★★★ WhatsOnStage, ★★★★ The StageIt's beautiful, it's dark, it's funny, it's tragic, it's morbid, it's complex, it's to-the-point, it's hopeful, it's hopeless, it's logical, it's chaotic, it's there, in your face, it's the truth. Suicide by Pills: The play has a list of the medication Sarah was possibly given, however she finds the pills numbing and is unable to be creative. However the character feeling the same instead tries to overdose, then succeeds. Of note is that Sarah survived at least one overdose attempt.

Madeleine Potter in 4.48 Psychosis, staged at the Royal Court in 2000, a year after Sarah Kane’s death. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian 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. At other moments Kane seems be taking her sly, posthumous revenge on her critics. "An expressionist nag," she calls herself, which is exactly the phrase used by one reviewer of Cleansed; but then she adds, in a typical Kane touch, "stalling between two fools." 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.Arts Council England, Autograph Sound Recording, Edwardian Hotels London, New Diorama Theatre, Old Diorama Arts Centre, Regents Place, Wellcome and Whitelight Ltd. Too Upset to Create: The lead is a writer, but depression has forced any attempts of writing to fail. Namedafter thetimeat which playwright Sarah Kane apparently would, in her depressed state, wake, ‘4.48 Psychosis’ is her last play. Kane doesn’t specify setting, stage directions or even characters in this, a textthat my companion (herself a writer and long-time Kane reader) describes as almost taking the form of a poem. The director chooses how many people appear on stage and who speaks which lines. Join Deafinitely Theatre on Saturday 23 September 2023 for a one-night special charity fundraiser performance of The Vagina Monologues!