Initial Research 

4.48 Psychosis Notes:

- It was the final play by British playwright Sarah Kane. It was her last work, first stages at the Royal Court’s theatre on 23rd June 2000. The subject of the play is Clinical Depression, dissociation, disappearing from existence.

- The contemplation and discussion of suicide is prominent and while there is not strict narrative, there are certain issues such as whether to take medication to treat her depression or not.

- Themes of the effects and the effectiveness of medication, self-harm, suicide, and the possible cause of depression.

- Other themes are depression, isolation, dependency, relationships, and love, but they become aggressive and then powerless.

- Composed of monologues and dialogues whose content includes exchanges between patients and therapists, notes about grief, mental anguish and pyschological distress, caustic accounts of the therapeutic use of drugs and diary entries. 

- The sections with numbers confused readers because they didn't know whether it was dialogue, stage directions, something your supposed to say or something about pace or rhythm. 

- People did think that it was too 'raw' to look at or work out. You almost need to read it in two sections because of how deep and dark this play can get at some stages. 

- The effect is of a mind full of competing voices, a mix of poetic images, idiomatic snatches of conversation and repetitive rhythms. 

- Coveys the experience of psychological crisis, when the barriers between reality and different forms of imagination disappear. 

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Depression:

- Depression is not just simply feeling unhappy or fed up with a few days. Depression is feeling consistently sad for weeks or months, rather than just a few days.

- Some people think that it is trivial and not a genuine health condition. It is an illness with symptoms that doesn’t show a sign of weakness or something you can ‘snap out of’ by ‘pulling yourself together’.

- People with depression can be treated and can have a set of treatments that can help to cure this mental illness.

- Some symptoms can last from a long feeling of unhappiness and hopelessness, to losing interest in the things that you used to enjoy and feeling very tearful. Many people also have the symptom of anxiety.

- There can be physical symptoms of feeling constantly tired, sleeping badly, having no appetite or sex drive, and various aches or pains.

- People can either suffer from these symptoms severely or rarely at all. Minimum symptoms are you may just feel low or severe is you could think life is no longer worth living.

- Most people experience signs of stress, anxiety, or low mood during difficult times. A low mood may improve after a short period of time, rather than being a sign of depression.

- There can be a trigger for depression. Life changing events, such as bereavement, losing your job or giving birth.

- People that have a family history of depression are more likely to experience it themselves, but you can become depressed for no obvious reason.

- Treatment for depression can involve a combination of lifestyle changes, talking therapies and medicine. These treatments can depend on whether you have mild, moderate, or severe depression.

- Many people with depression benefit by making lifestyle changes, such as getting more exercise, cutting down on alcohol, giving up smoking and eating healthy.

- Reading a self help book or joining a support group has also proven to be a beneficial way to help with depression.

 

Further 4.48 Psychosis Notes:

- Theatre used to be where plays were written about upper class people.

- In the 80’s there was a Priminister called Margret Thatcher, and she changed plays to become less about upper class people and more about council flats and real-life issues (more of a message).

- In the 90’s, became more of a new form of theatre.

- 4.48 was thought to be Sarah Kane’s suicide note and this was thought by the public, but her family didn’t believe that this was the case.

- Carol Churchill was another writer whose plays didn’t make sense.

                     -  Sarah Kane found a non-linear way to write (play and scenes wasn’t in order)

                     -  Punctuation of Sarah’s play is untraditional way of writing.

- Some people thought full stops where a representation of a heartbeat or a hospital machine beeping.

- Some people say it is autobiographical, but it was never proven.

                    - Different interpretations

                    - Doesn’t use traditional theatre form, this makes it almost like a psychotic episode

- Doesn’t talk about gender

- Doesn’t state how many people there are or their ages.

- No stage directions apart from the direction ‘Silence’.

- No setting or time frame, or individuals being named.

- There is a scene where she does almost suggest she had an affair with her doctor/therapist.

- Multitude of voices and there is no idea of how Sarah Kane wanted it to be staged or placed.

4.48 uses a lot of metaphors in the play. Could be a bibliographical time, known to be the time that people killed themselves

- Some parts are like a ‘stream of consciousness’ and like parts didn’t make sense which is like her sleeping.

- Poetic (some scenes use onomatopoeia – which are sounds like Bash, Smash)

- These scenes that use numbers are supposed to relate to when therapists or helpers ask patients to count down in sevens. If they could then it meant that they were ‘sane’ and if they couldn’t it means that they were having a psychotic episode.

- It is written to be disturbing, but not scary like a horror film

- Don’t think about acting a scene out, think about interpretating it and the feeling it gives you and what you want to portray to the audience.

 

Sarah Kane Notes:

- Sarah Kane was born in 1971 and died in 1999 from committing suicide.

- She was the name of ‘IN-YA-FACE’ theatre, which was violent and an attack on modern society. She attempted to attack

whole issues which were metaphysical.

- She was 28 when she died and, in her time, she only was able to write 6 plays. She tried to commit suicide multiple times.

1st Time by taking 150 anti – depressants which was 2 weeks before she died.

2nd Time she was in a hospital, and she went to the toilet and took her shoelaces, tied them to the door and hung herself.

This is what killed her.

- She wrote another play called Cleanse and it talked about her not liking University and referring to them being like

concentration camps.

- Critics didn’t like her work and they affected her mental illness more. They wrote an extract on the front of the daily mail where the critics hated on her for her works.

- Years after she died critics wrote a letter of apology to her about that extract and they wrote that she was the ‘playwright of the generation’.

- She studied classical people such as Shakespeare and went to the University of Birmingham to study playwrighting and the University of Bristol to study drama. In October 1989, she begins a BA Honours in Drama at Bristol University, where she acted and directs Macbeth, Top Girls, Rockaby and other plays. 

- Within this play she didn’t focus on characters and revealing them to the audience, she focused on feelings and the bigger picture.

- Her family was religious, and Sarah revealed that she was a born-again Christian in her late teens.

- As she got older Sarah despised Religion and beliefs, and there is a lot of references to John from the bible in this play.

- Sarah struggled with her sexuality and no one ever knew whether that was due to her mental illness. From this she uses a lot of Pronouns in her play and hardly ever references to herself as her.

- 'Staging the Unstageable' was a phrase that was used for most of her plays. 

- Sarah Kane's first play began in January 1995 with Blasted. This was a play that was quite graphic and had powerful images of rape, eye-gouging and cannibalism. The plays that followed this was Phaedra's love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) and 4.48 psychosis (1995).

- The content of her plays included extreme emotional content and theatrical innovation. 

- Since her death, there has been a lot of interest into her last play 4.48 psychosis and why it was not only written but what it was about. 

- Sarah Kane hated doing interviews, especially with her critics that wrote about her, but really shortly after the release of 4.48 psychosis she agreed to meet a critic about this play. 

- After Sarah Kane committed suicide, the was an inquest into her death and apparantly, between 2:30 and 3:30 (the time she died), she had no supervision. Her nurses were interviewed and they said that they didn't know they had to provide constant supervision and also they claimed to not know that she was mentally ill. 

 

Information about the scenes within 4.48 Psychosis:

Scene 1 – Play starts with ‘But you have friends. It’s about the feeling of having no friends or nobody to talk to. This is a repeated line in some scenes. Could be seen as people trying to help in a helplessness situation.

Scene 2 – It starts to reveal the torment in her mind that she is going through. No punctuation throughout the opening paragraph of this scene. There are images of cockroaches, broken hermaphrodite (confused about it).

Scene 3 – Refers to her brother and a male lover. It is a person that she is supposedly sleeping with, and they get more peace than she does, and she doesn’t get or like that.

Scene 4 – Numbers scene, and this is to test how lucid she is. She can’t do it in this scene which is shown by the mixture of numbers.

Scene 5 – This is a scene with bigger paragraphs, more descriptive. Almost in her own head there are questions building up that are big whole issues. She is possibly sane in this scene.

Scene 6 – More questions, and this could be seen as another voice such as a doctor or a therapist or even just a helper that tries to help her become more lucid and saner.

Scene 7 – Can research into the song body and soul. Images of weapons (words for penetrating the body). Symbolism of Dreams is a book that she relates to a lot in this scene. This is a scene that gives of an unknown feeling to the audience when it is read out.

Scene 8 – ‘RSVP ASAP’ – respond to be as soon as possible. This was seen to be a signal for her wanting answers, whether this was about her disease we are unsure and not told within her play.

Scene 9 – She is seen to be with someone else, maybe a lover. Repeated use of the stage direction (‘Silence’). There is almost this lasting feeling of despair in this scene.

Scene 10 – The helper – short sentences, not traditionally punctuated. There is a sense of shame of being picked on or picked out of a group. This is making her feel worse which is also affecting her illness.

Scene 11 – Gender has changed in this scene of the person. There is a lot of direct quotes from the bible, especially from Matthew 27:46.

Scene 12 – Descriptive

Scene 13 – ‘Drowning in a sea of logic’ which is a play on words. This could be drowning in all this realness that she is surrounded in. There are more references to the bible, Matthew 9. It is written almost like a thought process.

Scene 14 – Symptoms of the disease and the number of drugs she takes (very specific). This could be the thoughts of a doctor or case notes. They don’t always use professional language and this question is it the doctor or not.

Scene 15 – ‘Hatch opens’ is from a Greek story into purgatory. Repetition of questions.

Scene 16 – Talks about the Jews. Jews in that time were to be seen as hated for being different. She thinks people hated her for her illness. There is a sense of internal conflict in this scene.

Scene 17 – Bible references, Zacharia 14:6. Broken pieces and feelings. Images used behind the words and she can’t seem to rationalise her feelings.

Scene 18 – At 4:48, is the time known to be when people kill themselves. Doctors saying not sane at that time. Patient says she is sane. Does ‘sanity’ really visit. Takes lines from CS Lewis.

Scene 19 – Repeated scene of some of the lines from earlier in the play. Takes lines from a popular band song. Words of onomatopoeia in a paragraph, no punctuation. Metaphors for fixing herself.

Scene 20 – Numbers, counting down correctly in this scene and this could mean that the patient is sane.

Scene 21 – Sanity, feeling sane. Questions of ‘was she mad?’ comes to mind.

Scene 22 – Setting goals, she didn’t like that of people wanting to achieve something.

Scene 23 – Repetition from scene 1. Almost exposing yourself. This is like a conversation almost like question and answer.

Scene 24 – ‘fattened up’. Song references by a lady called Toya. Eating disorders is a subject that is mentioned. From her mental illness, it is ticking away at her. It is a longer scene of the play. There is metaphysical questions brought up in this scene.