Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” premiered to rave reviews shortly after the playwright killed herself. A quarter-century later, the original cast is reviving the production.
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.”
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