4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

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To me the heart of it is a love story – what does it mean to love, can we love, all those questions. in its small upstairs studio, the very same space where Blasted had premiered five years earlier, but even when tickets rapidly sold out, many in the building remained nervous. The other two stages — “realising that her depression is more serious than what it looks like” and “worried about figuring out how to get through it” — are essayed by actors Durga Venkatesan and Yeshaswini Channaiah respectively. A sequence of elliptical fragments, fractured and emotionally lacerating, it apparently portrayed a mind in the throes of breakdown, raging against doctors who do not (or will not) understand.

So, the name comes from that idea, that you can’t pin a person down to a certain idea, to a way of thinking, because human beings are just a lot more complicated than that. The play changes some of the images – but all artists do that to bring the ancient imagery, changed and unchanged, into the focus of their age. The creative team decided to invite groups of actors to read through the text, to plot out how many voices were needed, who might speak where. The vivid and raw nature of the text made it difficult for us to detach from it when not at rehearsals, let alone taking artistic liberties during its making,” says actor Shatarupa Bhattacharyya, who portrays a state of Sarah’s mind, in which she has already gone through a lot in life, and has now “accepted and made peace with the fact that death is her final destination”.Its language varies between dialogues, confessions and contemplative poetic monologues reminiscent of schizophasia. Much like her disturbed mind at the time of writing this play — jostling in her room to make drafts at wee hours, which is also precisely why the play is titled so — the script is disjointed, non-linear and clustered, making it very difficult for anyone to understand it in the first go.

Indian director Arvind Gaur performed this play as a one-woman show with British actress Ruth Sheard in 2005. We were very worried about creating the right context,” remembers Ian Rickson, then artistic director. If Kane is not exactly part of the establishment – the thought would probably have amused and horrified her – she is now a canonical figure, celebrated in many countries worldwide.Other themes that run throughout the script, in addition to depression, are those of isolation, dependency, relationships, and love. Psychosis itself is coming up for two decades old; this month, an operatic adaptation by composer Philip Venables will open at the Royal Opera House, the first of its kind.

It was her last work, first staged at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 23 June 2000, directed by James Macdonald, nearly one and a half years after Kane's death on 20 February 1999.The controversy began over Blasted, Kane’s first play presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1995. In the years since, the myth has only hardened – Kane the tortured martyr, driven to put her own psyche on stage.

She understands theatre at such a deep level; in some ways I don’t think we’ve caught up with her yet. Her plays continue to be translated and performed throughout the world today, with a growing awareness of this troubled playwright and her troubling brand of theater. View image in fullscreen Alan Williams, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Ingrid Craigie and Paul Thomas Hickey in Crave at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in 1998. Narrating stories of depression and anxiety on stage can be difficult, especially if the storyline sounds more like a ‘suicide note’ than the script of a play.There’d been these tabloid frenzies over her early plays, and we wanted this play to be received as a play. In fact, there have been instances in the past when audiences have requested to open the curtains while watching it.