The Stage

4.48 Psychosis, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 2000

It was 2000 and I was at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. During the Easter vacation I got a phone call on the landline at home in Manchester from the casting director Lisa Makin, saying they wanted me to audition for a play at the Royal Court. The next day. I remember my mum ironed my jeans for me and I got the train to London. I arrived and Lisa asked me what I thought of the play and I said I hadn’t read it – this was before email – so I read the play while the director Dominic Cooke had his lunch.

It was Fireface by Marius von Mayenburg and I ended up being cast that day. During the run, we would warm-up in the room where they were rehearsing 4.48 Psychosis. It was just two huge mirrors and a diagonal and I thought: ‘What is this?’ I had no idea who Sarah Kane was: I knew nothing.

It sold out immediately and I didn’t have a ticket, but I remember queuing outside and was the last person to get in that night. The ticket was part of a scheme and cost 10p.

It was almost cataclysmic, as if this light was coming down on me

Watching it, I felt like my brain exploded. I’d never seen anything like it. I just remember the feeling, as if my mind was being stretched and my eyes were being widened. And my heart was pounding.

I cannot put it into words. It sounds silly, but I sat there on my own but felt like we were all together going through some kind of ritual. The simplicity of it. We were part of something that felt extremely precious.

There was something in the alchemy in that tiny upstairs theatre. The last line is “Please open the curtains” and then the window opened and you could hear everything from outside on the King’s Road filling the silence and I was overcome with this massive emotion.

I don’t think it was much to do with Sarah Kane herself and the fact that she’d died the year before. I was seeing something I’d simply never seen before and experiencing something I will never forget. It was almost cataclysmic, as if this light was coming down on me. I was so excited.

It was revived with the same cast and director last year and I really thought I wanted to go and see it again, but then I thought: ‘Wait: it was so much about that time, the age I was, being there, just starting my career, being introduced to these incredible playwrights and unbelievable actors like Gillian Hanna and Ian Gelder who were in Fireface with me.’ I realised I didn’t want to tarnish my memory of it.
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Analysis – David Benedict

It is no exaggeration to say that Sarah Kane burst on to the scene in 1995 with her debut play Blasted. Painstakingly written – she took it through umpteen drafts – it was a studied examination of violence, cruelty and responsibility that caused the Daily Mail critic Jack Tinker to consciously whip up a media frenzy with an outraged review headlined: “This disgusting feast of filth”.

Kane later rather drily told me she thought it was “rather hopeful”. It was meticulously directed by new writing expert James Macdonald who went on to direct her third play Cleansed and then, a little over a year after Kane took her own life, her fifth and final play 4.48 Psychosis.

Although often wrongly considered autobiographical, a kind of theatrical suicide note, the play was widely considered to be a report from the front line of clinical depression, a disorder that Kane was open about suffering from.

On Jeremy Herbert’s abstract set, Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter shared the lines of the play which are guided by absolutely no stage directions and which are not ascribed to any specific character. It’s one reason why, at her memorial, Harold Pinter took to the stage to say just four words in her memory: “She was a poet.”

A form-breaking, freewheeling, completely non-linear meditation on life, depression, rage, retribution, holding on, free will, the things that govern the choices one makes and the importance of hope, 4.48 Psychosis and its mesmerisingly distilled production held audiences spellbound. The opening performance was met with a shared astonishment that no one was willing to break.

As Daniel Evans recalled: “No one applauded. We bowed in silence.” It has since been seen in countless productions around the world, including an opera commissioned by the Royal Opera, which premiered in 2016.

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