4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

Product Information

Sarah Kane’s life and career came to an abrupt end, when the playwright hanged herself at a London hospital in February 1999.

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. A Bangalore Little Theatre (BLT) production, the play is directed by Srinivas Beesetty, with Naman Roy as the assistant director, who has also acted in the play. In the years since, the myth has only hardened – Kane the tortured martyr, driven to put her own psyche on stage. For six weeks in late spring 2000, they hunkered down at the Royal Court rehearsal rooms, trying to find answers. The controversy began over Blasted, Kane’s first play presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1995.

Stage productions of the play vary greatly, therefore, with between one and several actors in performance; the original production featured three actors. Contemplation and discussion of suicide are prominent and while there is no strict narrative or timeline, certain issues and events are clearly dealt with: deciding whether to take medication to treat depression, the desires of the depressed mind, the effects and effectiveness of medication, self-harm, suicide and the possible causes of depression.

Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? 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. Psychosis is composed of twenty-four sections which have no specified setting, characters or stage directions.Echoing similar thoughts, Shatarupa says, “There were days when I would have to take a break after the rehearsals and probably engage in some mundane and mindless things just to take my attention off the script. It has been chosen as one of the best operas of 2019 by The New Yorker Magazine, and was highlighted as one of the most groundbreaking operas of the decade by The Times Literary Supplement. Psychosis is a ‘choreopoem’ that follows the upheavals of a girl’s psyche, who really wanted to live but was never in love with life.