Review by Simon Jenner, June 30th 2025
“No suicide wants to die.” If able to time-travel to productions I’ve missed in my life, I’ve often put 4.48 Psychosis’ premiere at the top. Little did I know. Three days before she killed herself, Sarah Kane posted a script without directions or even characters. Four years before, critics screamed abuse at her debut Blasted. A year after her death people held each other and wept silently or burst into laughter as 4.48 Psychosis premiered in June 2000 at the Royal Court Upstairs, back where Kane had begun. Here it is again exactly 25 years on; with the same cast and creatives in the same space. James Macdonald directs at the Upstairs for a brief run till July 5th, when 4.48 Psychosis transfers to the RSC, its co-producers, from 10th-27th July.
Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter in ‘4.48 Psychosis’. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
The longest suicide-note in literature, and despite the blunting of 25 years, 4.48 will be played all over the world as long as drama lasts. Even as it fights its genre with a broke-open sprawl of poetry, stand-up lying comatose, litanic gallows rants. Inevitably something of the sacramental drifts down on this production. So many interpretations have intervened, it might return heavier – and duller – with the weight of where they’ve been. The truth of rediscovery, stripping-back to the original, echoes a simple shock.
Often still and seated, Jo McInnes rails at God and global horrors (as with Blasted). Paradoxically McInnes gifts the production with a treacherous anchor, tilted towards the stage’s edge. There’s rage and odd calm: McInnes embodies much of the text’s wry humour. Madeleine Potter, often prone, utters upwards some of the most poetic and farcical lines. Squatting on the table (uncomfortably like a razor’s edge) she orates slow lyrical furies, hypnotically concentrated.
Daniel Evans – now the RSC’s co-artistic director – is a quixotic mix. His cut-through baritone often mimics doctors or spars with them: confiding, line-crossing gingerly, flipping back. Like a distracted Oberon he cites clapped-out magical thinking. An additional glass edge to the voice discovers sportive cajoling: this illness can be addressed. Paul Arditti’s sound serrates a few scenes but otherwise this intimate space is hushed. Lit by Nigel Edwards, turquoise static floods the space: mirrored.
Jeremy Herbert’s set allows the white square of the stage, with table and two chairs, to be reflected like Yasmina Reza’s Art as a white abstract in a huge 45-degree mirror. It angles a complicit (and contained) audience, stage, cast. At moments the trio write numbers on the table. And Ben Walden’s video of the view from a London hospital window is projected down on that table so we see it in the mirror, amongst a ghost of numbers. Those numbers are often chanted by the cast: units of medication, of existential countdown. If a world’s coming through a window it’s seen reflected like ‘The Lady of Shallot’; and there’s a coup at the end that tells us exactly what happens when you cross the room and do what she did.
They’re a collection of moments from 4.48am, the time Kane awoke to absolute clarity and ability to write. It lasted 72 minutes: “after that I’m gone”. Waiting to die, terrified of doing so and visited with urges to live, she wrote this work in a glimmering sequence of such spaces (“dab.. slash… press burn flicker burn flash” also projected). “And my mind is the bewildered subject of these fragments.” With no directions whatsoever, only gaps showing the work’s in 24 sections, we might think so too.
Kane’s a dramatist though: and almost certain this work would be performed posthumously. With characteristic fluidity those she addresses seem sometimes doctors, absent lover, one not yet born. And the “I”. Kane’s not ultimately saying look at me, but look at you. There’s nothing like this in literature. Nor will there be.
Madeleine Potter and Daniel Evans in ‘4.48 Psychosis’.Photo: Credit Marc Brenner
Productions of 4.48 have moved away from straight rendition, exploring the poetry’s biblical reach, its almost operatic dimensions. Cue Philip Venables’ miraculous 2016 opera (revived 2018) at the Lyric Hammersmith. And as that score quotes Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Berg’s Violin Concerto at crucial moments enunciating “it is finished” this production revisits its roots with a deadly, deadpan pristine. Macdonald contrasts 4.48 with Kane’s previous work. There, the tough fragility of love flowers through cracks; literally in Cleansed. Here there’s mostly no hope and this production clears away humanising, relatable assaults on its invisible, yet adamantine walls.
Even now 4.48 unseats the settled complicity of a masterpiece. Even being on every drama syllabus hasn’t dimmed its way of looking at us. “Fuck you God, for making me love a person who doesn’t exist.” But then the ideal lover the protagonist, or fragment of one invoked, also doesn’t exist. If there are striking moments when God’s invoked: “… fuck you for rejecting me… fuck my father for fucking up my life”, it’s still Kane’s use of the psychiatrist as whipping-person which brooks intimacy.
And yet the impossible lover, the desire to be loved is shot through the whole of this biblically-inflected script, here delivered neat. Detailing a future suicide to their doctor with pills, slit wrists and hanging, Potter adds mordantly: “It couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.” Uneasy laughter echoes back. Indeed laughter erupts more than once.
“It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.” This can be a shattering experience. Evans, McInnes and Potter enact it like ministers from the beyond. But that last line: “Please open the curtains” even suggests Kane knew where this would be staged, what effect would follow. And what opening that symbolises for biblically-steeped souls like hers. Even teetering on oblivion Kane teases blackout away.
There’s been more interventionist, more inhabited readings. This is still the 4.48 production to see, in its 70 minutes enlarging the confines of Kane’s prison with new bars to a window, new terrors, even a new tenderness. It’s sold out at the Court (you might queue for returns), but worth any pilgrimage to Stratford for.
Casting Director Lisa Makin, Associate Director Stephen Bailey, Associate Lighting Director Alex Fernandes, Associate Sound designer Roly Bothe, Production Manager Zara Drohan, Costume Supervisor Isobel Pellow, Lighting Supervisor Lucinda Plummer, Lighting Programmer Lizzie Skellett, Company Manager Mica Taylor, Stage Supervisor Maddy Collins, Stage Manager Cat Buffrey, DSM Olivia Kerslake, Lead Producer Ralph Thompson, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson.
Daniel Evans in ‘4.48 Psychosis’. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
