When the British playwright Sarah Kane died by suicide in 1999, at age 28, she left behind the manuscript for an unperformed work. “Just remember, writing it killed me,” Kane wrote in an accompanying note, according to Mel Kenyon, the playwright’s long-term agent.
Just over a year later, when the Royal Court Theater in London premiered the piece — a one-act play called “4:48 Psychosis” that puts the audience inside the mind of somebody having a breakdown — it received rave reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf said it was “arguably Kane’s best play” and compared it to the work of Samuel Beckett.
Yet despite the praise, a question hung over the production: Was it possible to honestly critique a play about depression so soon after Kane’s tragic death? The headline on an article by the Guardian theater critic Michael Billington suggested a challenge: “How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?”
Now, 25 years later, theatergoers are getting a chance to look at the original production of “4:48 Psychosis” afresh, and see if passing time brings a change in perspective. The show’s cast and creative team is reviving the production at the Royal Court, where it runs through July 5, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it will run from July 10-27.
This time around, critical reception has been mixed. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, praised the production and said the play “still feels raw,” but Clive Davis, in The Times of London, argued that “‘4:48 Psychosis’ isn’t a play at all, rather the random agonized reflections of a mind that has passed beyond breaking point.”
Those initial rave reviews came after an opening performance that had been “so charged,” recalled Madeleine Potter, one of three actors who perform the show’s unnamed roles. Kane’s brother was in the auditorium, as well as friends including the playwright Harold Pinter, and many were still grieving. “I felt sure everyone in the front row could hear my heart beating,” she said.
Whether the audience had a personal connection to Kane’s work or not, Potter said, she would have wanted the play “to be received as a work of art in its own right.”
During her brief career, Kane was one of Britain’s most well-known, and notorious, playwrights at a time when young writers, including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, were shaking up the theater scene with provocative plays like “Shopping and …” or “Closer.”
Aleks Sierz, the author of “In-Yer-Face Theatre,” a history of the era, said that when Kane emerged in 1995 with her debut, “Blasted,” she seemed typical of her contemporaries. “Blasted,” set during an imagined civil war, featured an onstage rape, cannibalism and an episode of eye gouging, and caused a media storm in Britain. The Daily Mail called it a “disgusting piece of filth.”
Kane seemed to enjoy provoking audiences, Sierz said, but she also wanted to play with theatrical form. The “4:48 Psychosis” text features no named characters and no stage directions, and parts of it read more like poetry or a diary than a play. Its meditative nature was very different from the violent action of Kane’s previous plays, Sierz said, and showed range. “If one playwright from the 1990s was a genius, it was Sarah Kane,” he added.
In a joint interview at the Royal Court, the play’s three cast members, Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Potter, said that discussions around mental health had moved on a lot since that time. When they were preparing for the premiere, they met with experts in depression and psychosis to fully understand the text.
Evans said that, even with greater awareness about mental health problems now, the play still felt vital, and he pointed out that suicide rates were growing in Britain. “There’s no sense we’re doing a museum piece,” he added.
With the actors now in middle age, McInnes said the cast’s performances were making it clear that depression isn’t just the preserve of the young. “Life doesn’t stop at 45,” McInnes said. “Tragedies, heartbreak, loneliness, depression, mental illness. Those things don’t stop.”
The cast members all said they hoped the play would still speak to young audiences, and after recent performances, attendees in their 20s and 30s had a range of views.
Ciara Southwood, 25, said that as much as she loved some of the writing, the production’s staging and style felt “out of date,” a “complete time capsule.”
Yazmin Kayani, 31, said that while watching the show, she had become annoyed that Kane’s death still dominated discussion of her work, and so obscured its quality. “It’s like rock stars who overdose,” Kayani said. “They were so much more than that, but it’s all people think about.”
For some audience members, though, the play would always be associated with the events of the time, whether Kane’s death or their own tragedies. Jane Warrington, 61, said she saw the original production in 2000 when she was trying to come to terms with her own mother’s suicide. “It was hugely valuable,” Warrington said. “It was like getting into the head of someone close to me.”
Watching again 25 years later, Warrington had been able to relax more “and just absorb the brilliance of the writing,” she said. “4:48 Psychosis” was “an enormous palette of despair, and humor, and catastrophe, and fury, and proper psychotic rage,” Warrington added. Having all those together in one short play, she said, was rare, then and now.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, and in the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. If you are in Britain, call the Samaritans on 116 123.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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