Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4:48’s inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Instead, Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).