4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

Product Information

End of the day, theatre is a form of art and its aesthetics are crucial to keeping the audience’s attention.

is infinitely more than a suicide note: “People take her story on and then they infuse her work with that: I find that really frustrating. She points to Kane’s formal experimentalism, the startling urgency and precision of her language, the way the play itself invites the audience to experience a form of psychosis, in which reality dissolves even as it appears.So, the name comes from that idea, that you can’t pin a person down to a certain idea, to a way of thinking, because human beings are just a lot more complicated than that. Some of Chicago’s most talented theater artists have brought their unique points of view to our stages as part of the Visiting Company Initiative.

The first such adaptation of Kane's works, the production was approved by Sarah Kane's brother, and received critical acclaim. It was her last work, first staged at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 23 June 2000, directed by James Macdonald, nearly one and a half years after Kane's death on 20 February 1999. 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. The grotesquerie of Kane’s theater is not simply self-indulgent; it is meant, very directly, to shock the audience out of their comfort zone and into a more nightmarish reality. Psychosis is a ‘choreopoem’ that follows the upheavals of a girl’s psyche, who really wanted to live but was never in love with life.

Sarah Kane’s life and career came to an abrupt end, when the playwright hanged herself at a London hospital in February 1999. Psychosis at The Theatre Les Bouffes Du Nord in Paris (2005), Belarus Free Theatre in Minsk (2005), KUFER theatre in Croatia (2005. She was there to talk about her plays – Blasted, which had scandalised and horrified the critical establishment back in 1995, and her equally mould-breaking dramas Cleansed and Crave, both of which had opened earlier that year.

In fact, there have been instances in the past when audiences have requested to open the curtains while watching it. in its small upstairs studio, the very same space where Blasted had premiered five years earlier, but even when tickets rapidly sold out, many in the building remained nervous. Certain images are repeated within the script, particularly that of "hatch opens, stark light"; a repeated motif in the play is " serial sevens" which involves counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory. Her plays continue to be translated and performed throughout the world today, with a growing awareness of this troubled playwright and her troubling brand of theater. In 2003, there was a successful staging in Brazil, which played to a full house for six consecutive months in São Paulo, and also gained media attention for its defying gender aspect, as the role was performed by male actor Luiz Päetow.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.

Other themes that run throughout the script, in addition to depression, are those of isolation, dependency, relationships, and love. But Sarah did kill herself, and she was writing a play about what it feels like to be suicidally depressed. 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’. Psychosis was the astonishing final work of the radical British playwright Sarah Kane, first performed posthumously in 2000. Its language varies between dialogues, confessions and contemplative poetic monologues reminiscent of schizophasia.