4.48 Psychosis
The Other Place
Playing until 27 July
This mesmerising play makes for compelling viewing. The RSC’s production has three actors and plays for 70 minutes without an interval, as did the original at the Royal Court in June 2000, the year after playwright Sarah Kane died from suicide at the age of twenty-eight. The 2025 cast is the same: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeliene Potter as is the director James McDonald.
The text is an interesting one. In a splendid interview with Dan Reballato (readily available on the internet) she explains how the play has a zig-zag structure where a plot runs through the zigzags but we witness the zigzags. The RSC has followed the Royal Court’s original practice of selling the text as part of the programme (or vice versa) though not at the reduced price that the Royal Court did. Kane does not specify how many performers there should be. There are no scenes but she includes dashes where there is more than one speaker (sometimes a conversation) and the sign of five dashes in the centre of the page to show where one brief section begins and ends. She also leaves spaces to show where there are significant pauses.
The audience at The Other Place is similar to that of the 2000 production – predominantly young, spellbound and predominantly unconventional. What is different, however, is the tone of the piece. Whereas the original audience was shocked and horrified, the 2025 audience, perhaps more accustomed to black humour, was more willing to laugh at the bleak jokes. In 2000 it was very much a play about the angst and hopelessness of young people on the eve of the millennium. Now it is much more the despair of the middle aged having lost their youth but having nothing meaningful to look forward to.
4.48 Psychosis is usually seen not only as the suicidal feelings of a generation but also an autobiographically inspired piece exploring the feelings and outlook of someone about to commit suicide at, we learn in the play, 4.48.
The characters’ emptiness is reflected in the simple white square, the rectangular table and two chairs, just one with arms, and the mirrored backdrop, essential for the audience to see the faces of the actors on the many occasions they were on their backs lying on the ground. Reflected in the mirrored backdrop were also the two front rows of the audience, reminding us not only that we were watching a play but also that we are passive observers of the nature of hopelessness and despair. There were moments when the stage and backdrop were bombarded by abstract blobs: a perfect symbol of what happens when one’s brain is overloaded.
We are not seeing a Huis Clos bubble though. We are reminded of the world outside by a variety of projections: not just the moving street scene but also a moment when people are seen walking across the set reflected on the back wall. The symbols of autistic obsessiveness characterised by the repeated utterance of a sequence of random numbers are written on the table and then later partly obliterated by the shape of a human body.
We are invited to think about why there are three actors. Are they facets of the same character? Are they a representation of the different voices of a schizophrenic? Is the apparent random zigzag sequencing part of a psychotic’s consciousness or unconsciousness?
Kane makes sure that her play, although unconventionally presented, is firmly in a dramatic literary tradition. A character cuts her arm while incanting YES/NO, reminding us of Beckett’s ‘Yes or no. The eternal tautology’ and this is returned to later in the play with the black and white video of Yes and No. The presentation of the paradoxical nature of mental illness is clear when a character says they are ‘taking on board the insanity of the sane’.
There are also elements expected of a subject presenting mental illness. There is a sequence detailing anti-psychotic drugs, another giving reasons for receiving treatment. Another involves a discussion between patient and psychiatrist when the table become turned.
In a sense after 70 minutes the play gets nowhere. In the last ten minutes we become alert to the fact that words and phrases we have heard earlier are repeated in an apparently random order that maybe continue to represent psychotic thought patterns.
The ending of the play is a deliberate surprise. The actors take the furniture away and there is a black and white film clip of Yes or No. The evening we went the audience didn’t know whether it had ended or not. Perfect for the material.
I haven’t said anything about the acting performances. They were perfect and took us inside our own brains and emotions.
This is a production with a short run where there are few tickets left. It has clearly caught the imagination of the younger theatre going public. Rightly so.