{"id":638087,"date":"2026-09-28T01:58:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T01:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/638087\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T01:58:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T01:58:27","slug":"sarah-kanes-4-48-psychosis-its-not-for-everyone-but-i-feel-very-alive-when-i-watch-it-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/638087\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Kane\u2019s 4.48 Psychosis: \u2018It\u2019s not for everyone. But I feel very alive when I watch it\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the final play Sarah Kane wrote before she killed herself at the age of 28. A crafted work of art and a philosophical inquiry into suicide<\/a>, 4.48 Psychosis is like a bolt of lightning in its purity and intensity. At the same time, it\u2019s hard to get away from the idea it\u2019s a suicide note. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the only reason it\u2019s so challenging to put on. It has no named characters and no stage directions. Instead, Kane, who died in 1999, gives us a fragmented text out of which different voices seem to rise and recede, something like the shifting speakers of the TS Eliot poem The Waste Land.<\/p>\n

The germ of the idea for Tom Creed<\/a>\u2019s bold new staging, which stars Marty Rea<\/a>, came to him while watching a student production of 4.48 Psychosis at the Lir. Eight actors shared the text in a large ensemble production, with video, moving sets, blood and cutting. <\/p>\n

It was the first time Creed had sat with the play since directing it in 2005. <\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself thinking about the play again and thinking back to the work that I\u2019d done on it 20 years previously, and I just had a hunch to come back to it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first time he put it on with three actors \u2013 \u201cbecause I couldn\u2019t come up with a better idea,\u201d he says drily. There\u2019s good precedent for that approach: a note Kane left with the draft that said, \u201cRemember: victim, perpetrator, bystander\u201d, informed the use of three actors in the first London production.<\/p>\n

Subsequently that became something of a performance tradition. Other productions have used a single performer with a doctor, including a French production with Isabelle Huppert. <\/p>\n

Creed traces the approach back to a particularly 1990s strain of theatre, and works such as Martin Crimp\u2019s Attempts on Her Life, \u201cthe idea of a fragmented self being presented by multiple actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

This time around, though, another understanding of the play was revealed. \u201cThis is an expression of one consciousness,\u201d Creed says. \u201cWe should hear it from one person, and we should only be looking at one person on the stage.\u201d <\/p>\n

The empty space Kane leaves around the text, he wondered, might not be a postmodern invitation to fill the stage with video, scenography and action at all. \u201cWhat if we took it seriously that the idea of this play is just a text,\u201d he says, \u201cthen what we did was just present a text?<\/p>\n

\"SarahSarah Kane in September 1998. Photograph: Marianne Thiele\/ullstein bild via Getty <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you have just one person onstage speaking it, it\u2019s a conversation with a doctor and a conversation with a lover and a conversation with an audience and a conversation with critics and a conversation with public opinion, all at once. That\u2019s very like psychotic states, which are characterised by the busyness of your thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

That pared-back approach has made most of the rehearsal process extremely technical, involving close reading, \u201cworking on the particular emphasis of a word, or why a word is there rather than another, how it sets up the line to follow, what it means to have a line break. Our approach has been strict. It\u2019s about boiling the play down, trying to honour the precision of the writing. Every decision is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

One crucial early decision was to cast a man. Creed had Rea in mind: a performer around his own age, and someone he knew had an affinity with poetry after seeing recordings Rea made during the pandemic. Casting him was a way of pulling the play away from Kane\u2019s experience, away from the temptation to read every detail as autobiographical.<\/p>\n

A slipperiness around gender is already embedded in the text, Creed believes. On the first page the speaker calls themselves \u201cthe broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself alone\u201d, using an invented, almost Joycean nonbinary pronoun; elsewhere the gender of the lover seems to shift, or to encompass both male and female.<\/p>\n

The director is careful not to speculate about how Kane might identify today, but he regards aspects of the plays as having become more legible with time. Cleansed, for instance, can now be seen as a trans play in a way that wouldn\u2019t have been possible in its own day. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat conversation was not really being heard in the 1990s,\u201d Creed says. \u201cIt just wasn\u2019t.\u201d <\/p>\n

Questions of gender outside the binary were more often treated as the stuff of crass jokes or sensationalism.<\/p>\n

The decision to cast a man also seems to do something else: it brings the play sharply into the present, connecting it with conversations around the crisis in male suicide. Was that on his mind? \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d he says. At the time the project was taking shape Creed was collaborating with the visual artist Cecily Brennan, who was making work about men with psychosis. Much of that work informed his conversations with Rea.<\/p>\n

As the production evolved, they also sought out psychiatrists. They talked a lot about critical psychiatry, in particular the enormous power psychiatrists have to define what is wrong with someone, medicate them or even certify them against their will. Critical psychiatry asks where that authority comes from and whether the problem is always inside the person.<\/p>\n

Not so long ago homosexuality was treated as an illness; before that, even writing with your left hand was something to be corrected. <\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes the problem isn\u2019t the inside of someone\u2019s head,\u201d Creed says. \u201cThe problem is in the outside world.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"4.484.48 Psychosis: Marty Rea and Tom Creed. Photograph: Ste Murray <\/p>\n

That opened up a way of approaching Kane\u2019s play not as an expression of mental illness but as someone asking a genuine, if profoundly difficult, question: can someone be allowed to choose not to live?<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being in London at the time, in the mid-1990s, and everyone was talking about Sarah Kane. The way the media covered her, the way they talked about her, it was so extraordinary. So punitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her first play, Blasted, boldly drew a connection between the cruelty of an ordinary British man and the atrocities unfolding in Bosnia. Kane was making a point reminiscent of Hannah Arendt\u2019s about the banality of evil, but many critics instead dismissed her work as an exercise in cheap shock tactics. <\/p>\n

The response was often intensely hostile: people seemed scandalised by the play, as though Kane had deliberately set out to cause harm. In reality, her depiction of violence was less an attempt to provoke for its own sake than a lament for the brutality and ugliness she saw in the world around her. (A famous story goes that when a soldier first saw Guernica, he asked Picasso, \u201cDid you do that?\u201d, and the artist replied, \u201cNo, you did.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The headline on the Daily Mail\u2019s review of Blasted called it a \u201cdisgusting feast of filth\u201d. Kane named the torturer in Cleansed, her next play, after Jack Tinker, the journalist who wrote the review. \u201cIt\u2019s literary tradition to get your own back on a critic,\u201d Creed says. \u201cIt shows her as someone with a sense of humour. People forget: there are really funny bits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marty Rea agrees that it\u2019s easily forgotten. When people hear he\u2019s doing 4.48 Psychosis, their response is always the same, he says: \u201cAre you okay?\u201d They think of Blasted and Cleansed; they expect a procession of mutilations and rapes. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut I keep finding myself saying to people, I think it\u2019s beautiful. I think her poetry is really beautiful. Yes, it\u2019s grim, but Keats is grim. Shakespeare is grim. I think she\u2019s a romantic, which sometimes feels like such a basic thing to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creed adds: \u201cThis is a person who wrote a play in which a sunflower bursts out of the floor.\u201d <\/p>\n

Kane\u2019s characters have a void inside them, and they know that only love can fill it. So they chase after love, and at the same time they know it\u2019s not enough. \u201cStill, it\u2019s the only solution, and that involves living in a paradox.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rea says hope is the killer. \u201cIt hurts. The desire to be seen and heard is so stark in the text: \u2018Validate me, witness me, see me, love me.\u2019 It\u2019s the idea that, yes, I\u2019m going to die, but before I do I\u2019m going to put this thing out into the world in the hope that I can be seen and heard. I\u2019m always reminded of Waiting for Godot, where the boy goes, \u2018What am I to say to Godot?\u2019 \u2018Tell him you saw us. You did see us, didn\u2019t you?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Beckett keeps coming up, not just in the language but in the silences. There\u2019s a lot of white space in 4.48 Psychosis. \u201cWriters speak about the terror of sitting in front of the blank page,\u201d Rea says. \u201cThe fear of having to fill it and not being able to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SamuelSamuel Beckett working on a production of Waiting for Godot in Berlin in 1975. Photograph: Heuer\/Ullstein Bild via Getty <\/p>\n

Thinking about how to approach this white space, Rea was reminded of Beckett\u2019s guidance to actors on how to deal with his silences: act as if you are in a boat with a hole in it and the water is coming in and the boat is slowly sinking. When you speak, you\u2019re bailing water out of the boat. When you\u2019re silent, you\u2019re still, and the water is coming in. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo to make noise is to save your life,\u201d Rea says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not doing anything definitive,\u201d Creed says. \u201cWe\u2019re just staging an encounter with the text and transmitting something of that encounter to people who choose to come and see it. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not for everyone,\u201d he cautions. \u201cBut I feel very alive when I watch it. I\u2019m glad that we\u2019re in a world where it\u2019s possible for people to come to a small room and experience this. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a dispatch from the frontline of human experience. Somebody wrote this. They wanted to communicate that experience to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

4.48 Psychosis is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival<\/a>, from Wednesday, October 7th, until Saturday, October 17th, with a preview on Tuesday, October 6th; it then runs at the Mick Lally Theatre, Galway, from Wednesday, November 4th, until Saturday, November 7th<\/p>\n

Help is available if you are affected by any of the issues in this article. You can contact Samaritans<\/a>\u2019 free 24-hour helpline at 116123, by texting HELLO to 50808 or by emailing jo@samaritans.ie<\/a>. You can also call Pieta<\/a> on its free 24-hour helpline at 1800-247247 or text HELP to 51444<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the final play Sarah Kane wrote before she killed herself at the age of 28. A crafted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[271045,16955,93,271046,61,60,4829,271044,410,20688,57295,271042,14394,271043],"class_list":["post-638087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-cecily-brennan","tag-dublin-theatre-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lgbtq","tag-marty-rea","tag-mental-health","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-samuel-beckett","tag-sarah-kane","tag-suicide","tag-tom-creed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}