4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

Product Information

Figure 11: An excerpt from Scene 24 from 4.48 Psychosis, the final scene, showing antiphonal verse.

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. Sarah Kane ( Writer) was born in 1971 and died in 1999. Her first play, Blasted, was produced at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 1995. Her second play, Phaedra’s Love, was produced at the Gate Theatre in 1996. In April 1998, Cleansed was produced at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs and in September 1998, Paines Plough and Bright Ltd produced Kane’s fourth play, Crave, at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was given its premiere at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in June 2000. Her short film, Skin, produced by British Screen/Channel 4, was first broadcast on Channel 4 in June 1997. Sarah Kane’s plays continue to be regularly performed around the world, particularly in Europe, Australia and South America. Notable productions include the Royal Court Theatre’s revivals of Blasted, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis in 2001, the New York premiere of Blasted at SoHo Rep in 2008, and Sean Holmes’s revival of Blasted at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2010. More recently, in 2015, Sheffield Theatres mounted a Sarah Kane Season with full productions of Blasted, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis and semi-staged readings of Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed. In February 2016, Katie Mitchell directed a new production of Cleansed, marking Kane’s debut at the National Theatre. At the new play, a sombre, poetic and subjective meditation on suicide, the audience watches in near-silence: lovers clutch each other for comfort, someone quietly weeps, and, at the end, one person incongruously rises to applaud the cast.Tangram Theatre Company and Jana Manekshaw are proud to inaugurate the Arcola’s new studio space with this critically acclaimed production that sold out at the Old Red Lion this March.

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). A Tennessee Williams character says that we are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins. For Kane, a poetic metaphor became a literal truth. And it is her own tragic isolation she so fiercely articulates: "My life is caught in a web of reason spun by a doctor to augment the sane." It is a ruthlessly self-analytical theatrical poem. But within it there is evidence of Kane's gallows-humour. Philip Venables’ award-winning operatic adaptation of Kane’s play is the first ever permitted adaptation of any of her work. The search for love and happiness and the struggle for identity are explored through a fusion of opera with spoken and visual text, bringing a new resonance to the last creative utterances of one of the most courageous young British writers of her generation. The opera was first presented in 2016 by the Royal Opera in London, in a production by Ted Huffman, and has subsequently seen productions in London, New York City, Strasbourg and Dresden. The opera was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society for Best Large Scale Composition 2017, a British Composer Award for Best Stage Work 2017, a UK Theatre Award for Best Opera 2016 and it was shortlisted for an Olivier Award for Best Opera in 2017 and a Southbank Award for Best Opera in 2017. It has been chosen as one of the best operas of 2019 by The New Yorker Magazine, and was highlighted as one of the most groundbreaking operas of the decade by The Times Literary Supplement. Dimensions Before it went on show to the critics and the public, 4.48 played in front of an invited audience – family and friends, colleagues, and fellow playwrights, among them Harold Pinter and Joe Penhall. “It was tough, that preview,” says Evans. “It was such a peculiar evening. The sense of loss was in the room. Everyone was in mourning.” McInnes concurs: “It was strange, but it was also potent. It felt like we had a responsibility to give breath and life to this amazing thing that Sarah had created.”

Latest

Kane gives no indication as to the required number of performers, or whether her dialogues are actual or internalised in a single consciousness. Venables sets the text for a group of eight: three sopranos and three mezzos, often singing in close polyphony, along with two percussionists from the ensemble Chroma, positioned above Hannah Clark’s consulting room set. They duel and duet above the singers’ heads as unsung passages are streamed across its walls. 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 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.

Childline - 24-hour support for individuals under 19: Via BSL: https://childline.signvideo.net/ | www.childline.org.uk or call 0800 1111 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.’” Normally going to see Sarah Kane’s 4.48 psychosis on a Saturday evening would not fill one with the joys of life. But this production does.

Psychosis opera is rawly powerful and laceratingly honest - review". The Telegraph . Retrieved 28 May 2016. Downer Ending: The lead dies and fades from existence while reciting (or even due to) the fragmented last lines. 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.

supposedly the time that those with depression wake up, and supposedly a time Sarah herself kept waking up at. 4.48 is variously referred to as something that gives her clarity and grief. 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 Significant choices regarding how the text was interpreted, utilised, and how it functioned and was incorporated within the mise en scène were all primarily the purview of the composer.

Reviews

Psychosis is the last play written by Sarah Kane, finished in 1999 and first performed in 2000. The play, much like Crave, has no setting and there are no characters. Instead, it is a series of dialogues with a jumble of words and quotes that could present several mindsets with the themes of depression, suicide and maybe vanishing from existence. The play is possibly Kane possibly presenting the viewer a subjective view of depression; its title came from the time (4:48 A.M.) when allegedly she awoke in her depressive state. She never saw the play, ending her life just as she finished it. The play was brought to life by Kane's brother and past collaborators. Aproductive insight into the problems of deaf mental health patients, forcing us to confront the fact that their experiences are rarely considered.” The Insomniac: The character can't sleep, regularly waking up and wanting nothing more than to sleep forever.