4.48 Psychosis – Royal Court
‘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...
