4.48 Psychosis (Methuen Modern Plays)

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For six weeks in late spring 2000, they hunkered down at the Royal Court rehearsal rooms, trying to find answers.

Everyone I spoke to remembers a moment at the very end of the performance, where after the play’s haunting final line, “please open the curtains”, Evans and McInnes opened a window in the roof of the theatre, allowing the June night to flood into the silence. Some portions appear to be dialogue, perhaps between a patient and a dictatorial clinician (“ Oh dear, what’s happened to your arm? Mental health issues are still a stigma in our society, so telling such an account is bound to have repercussions.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. She points to Kane’s formal experimentalism, the startling urgency and precision of her language, the way the play itself invites the audience to experience a form of psychosis, in which reality dissolves even as it appears. Psychosis, which was performed for the first time at the Royal Court in 2000, that causes discomfort to the hilt. They include Phaedra’s Love, based on Seneca’s classic story of a scheming mother and son, and a later play, Cleansed, which centered on the survival of love amongst a group of inmates in a futuristic concentration camp.

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.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. View image in fullscreen Alan Williams, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Ingrid Craigie and Paul Thomas Hickey in Crave at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in 1998. In the midst of that critical firestorm, several noted British playwrights quickly came to Kane’s defense, including Caryl Churchill ( Cloud Nine), Harold Pinter ( Betrayal) and Edward Bond ( Saved). The interpretations and responses that we have received so far have not been very pleasant, of course, with many even seeing it as an example of ‘theatre of cruelty’.