4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

Product Information

Elsewhere, a single voice pulsates with anxiety, and another records sardonic clinical notes: “Lofepramine and Citalopram discontinued after patient got pissed off with side effects and lack of obvious improvement.

In fact, there have been instances in the past when audiences have requested to open the curtains while watching it.The play changes some of the images – but all artists do that to bring the ancient imagery, changed and unchanged, into the focus of their age. A great deal of ink has been spilled on Kane’s too-short life and death, and not nearly enough on the story of the play itself. There were a few who left the play in the beginning itself, because it was just too much to cope with it mentally. Narrating stories of depression and anxiety on stage can be difficult, especially if the storyline sounds more like a ‘suicide note’ than the script of a play.

Experiential theatre," she said, "purposes to make the audience feel as though they have experienced what was presented before them onstage.One 2009 revival even featured an actor who, with her boyish features and close-cropped hair, looked unnervingly like Kane herself: it was theatre as raw autobiography, a Sylvia Plath-like howl into the abyss. This dilemma is possibly one of the reasons that over the years theatremakers around the world have avoided staging British playwright-director Sarah Kane’s enigmatic yet distressing plays.

The interpretations and responses that we have received so far have not been very pleasant, of course, with many even seeing it as an example of ‘theatre of cruelty’. 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. Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? It was crucial to Kane to show depression with all the accuracy she could summon, he adds: “Mental illness is so often sentimentalised, or portrayed as madness – I hate that word.For six weeks in late spring 2000, they hunkered down at the Royal Court rehearsal rooms, trying to find answers.