Madeleine Potter Archives - North West End UK

‘At 4.48 when depression visits, I shall hang myself to my lover’s breathing’. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis contains many lines like the one above that simply go through you. The play is a beautiful and terrifying exploration of the pain, anguish, despair, boredom and paralysis that accompany someone thinking of killing themselves. The work has an obvious resonance because it is Kane’s last before her own suicide, but the quality of the writing is such that it would be wrong to say that this is why the play is so impactful. Kane mixes honest, brutal statements with poetic, even biblical passages; lucid descriptions of a prescription with strange lists of numbers and staccato strings of words ‘flicker, punch, slash, dab, wring, press, burn, slash’. It is a startling piece of writing, w...

Bookish brilliance! The new Dead Poets Society. Nominated for six Tony Awards, this UK premiere of Adam Rapp’s spellbinding play stars Merchant Ivory’s Madeleine Potter and The Kite Runner’s (Broadway) Eric Sirakian. From director of Psychodrama Matt Wilkinson. Beverley Baird is the unmarried and childless, cat lady, Yale creative writing professor, who tells her students to write with economy and let the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting. Writing that your character has the ‘eyes of a star-faced mole’, or ‘a mean mouth, like a half-healed axe scar’, will tell your reader more than a page and a half full of flowery description. In reality, she is resigned to the fact that creative writing is all but dead and that her students are more interested in social media than Dostoe...

Tag: Madeleine Potter

4.48 Psychosis – Royal Court

The Sound Inside – Traverse Theatre