Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter in 4.48 Psychosis [Marc Brenner]

SARA Kane’s seminal drama 4.48 Psychosis, about the debilitating effects of clinical depression, returns to the Royal Court Upstairs – the space where it premiered 25 years ago. A co-production with the RSC, the revival reunites the original cast and creative team.

Kane took her own life in February 1999, aged just 28. Her blistering final play was produced posthumously.

In James Macdonald’s evocative production, Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter embody the fractured self and submerge us in the mind of an unnamed protagonist grappling with suicidal thoughts.

The three actors sit, stand, lie on the ground or sprawl across a table as they reflect on their character’s inner turmoil and strained interactions with doctors, counsellors and friends.

This is an intense, profound meditation on existential pain. 4:48am was the time when Kane’s mental state was at its most extreme. She meticulously conveys what it is like to lose oneself – to “gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling”.

Kane’s poetic, bitter, angry, and despairing reveries are echoed in Macdonald’s staging and Paul Arditti’s sound.

The play unfolds in Jeremy Herbert’s stark white room (a table, two chairs) with Nigel J Edwards’s lighting shifting from blinding brightness to a flickering visual static, signifying the fluctuations of an unmoored mind.

An enormous angled mirror reflects the front rows of the audience, the performers’ movements, and a film of London traffic projected onto the table – reminding us that the world outside keeps turning.

4.48 Psychosis may sound bleak, and parts of it are, but there is also Beckettian humour. The cast respond to Kane’s final line – “Please open the curtains” – by releasing the shutters, letting in the sounds and light of summer and ending on an unexpected note of hope.

Until July 5
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