Englishness and Humanity: The Revival of 4.48 Psychosis
Tomoko Seki*
Revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis at the Royal Court Theatre, London, UK. Directed by James Macdonald. Set, Costume and Video designed by Jeremy Herbert. Performed by Daniel Evans, Madeleine Potter and Jo McInnes. Premiered June 12th 2025.
My first encounter with Sarah Kane’s work was in Tokyo, 2009, when I saw 4.48 Psychosis directed by Norimizu Ameya. For over fifteen years afterwards, I looked for other Kane productions whenever I could. Yet I never imagined that I would have the chance to see 4.48 Psychosis performed in the same theatre, under the same direction, and with the same actors as its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The excitement that filled the Royal Court’s 380-seat studio theatre, the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, on the night of the performance was not just a result of the summer heat, but also from the anticipation of revisiting a play that has become a key work in late twentieth-century British drama. This revival struck me as deeply English and deeply human, in comparison to other productions of Kane’s plays.
4.48 Psychosis is Kane’s final work, emblematic of Britain’s radical dramaturgy in the 1990s. While Kane is often positioned within Aleks Sierz’s taxonomy of “In-yer-face theatre,” this play diverges dramatically from conventional dramaturgical structures. In its refusal of linear plot, stable characters or determinate setting, 4.48 represents the postdramatic tendency. The text specifies no location, provides no stable character list and withholds the conventional markers of identity such as age, gender, social status or physical description. This radical openness has made the play a fertile site for experimentation by directors across Europe and beyond, including Claude Régy, Johan Simons, Thomas Ostermeier and Katie Mitchell. In Japan as well, numerous directors—including Ameya, Takeshi Kawamura, Hatsumi Abe, Yuta Hagiwara and Tomoko Kawaguchi—have explored Kane’s text in diverse stagings.
The 2025 revival at the Royal Court restaged James Macdonald’s original 2000 production with the original actors. Although I had not seen the world premiere, the reviews and archival photographs suggest the fidelity of this remounting. The oblique mirror above the acting space, the simple table and chairs, and the intermittent projections were all present in this revival, echoing earlier documentation.
What unfolded on stage was not a mimetic representation of a story but the presentation of a mind in torment. The self-fragmented, logic collapsed, perception was distorted, and the subject withdrew from external reality. The mirror, angled across the stage, constantly destabilized the spectator’s sense of vision. At moments, the reflection appeared more “real” than the physical actor, particularly when their writing on the table or their arm appeared legible only in its mirrored form. Projected images of windows and landscapes were visible more clearly in reflection, producing a hall of mirrors in which referent and representation reversed their places. The staging thus enacted a semiotic destabilization: substance and shadow, signifier and signified, were inverted, and the audience was made to doubt the reliability of their own sights.
What most distinguished this revival from other 4.48 productions I saw was its overt Englishness and, through that, its humanity. Central to this Englishness was the presence of laughter. In most stagings I have seen—whether in Japan or other European countries—laughter was almost entirely absent. Kane’s text, after all, is a meditation on depression and suicidal desire, and the notion of laughing at such materials may appear inappropriate or even offensive. Yet in this production, particularly in its first half, the audience repeatedly responded with gentle, sympathetic laughter.
The laughter, of course, was neither cruel nor derisive. It was warm, lightly ironic and empathetic. Much of it arose during the dialogue parts—exchanges between the patient and the doctor—that contained moments of dry wit, playful invective or sardonic observation. Even the recurrence of the f-word elicited knowing chuckles. These were, however, the “gallows humour spoken in the voice from the newly-dug grave,” as the text itself suggests—jokes that demand proximity, intimacy and a willingness to align oneself with the speaker’s desperation. For such laughter to occur, the audience had to share a psychological closeness with the speaker akin to that of the doctor figure within the play.
Even the monologic passages, often saturated with despair, produced occasional laughter. Sarcasm directed at misguided doctors, or moments of bleak self-deprecation, elicited muffled giggles of recognition. This laughter was never dismissive; instead, it signalled a momentary bridge between performer and audience, a gesture of solidarity in suffering. In this sense, laughter became an instrument of empathy.
Language itself also reinforced this sense of Englishness. English-speaking is marked by lightness, especially in the words of writers like Kane—short sentences, clipped rhythms and poetic images—that cannot easily be translated into heavier idioms, such as those found in other languages. Translations, particularly into Japanese, tend toward redundancy and tonal flatness, muting the rhythmic drive of the original. In English, however, Kane’s words pulse with a musicality that allows despair to be articulated with a paradoxical buoyancy. This production foregrounded precisely that lightness. The language and the cultural tendency to undercut solemnity with humour ensured that the play never became unbearably oppressive. This avoidance of ponderousness, this refusal to dwell exclusively in darkness, is itself deeply English.
Such laughter and lightness reminded me of something often overlooked: Kane’s plays are suffused with humour. Their excesses, their biting wit, their self-mocking irony and their mischievous cruelty all contain a distinctly English sensibility. I guess this humour must be especially legible for audiences in London, producing laughter not of distance but of recognition. This cultural tone, this shared disposition, exemplifies the Englishness that marked the revival. It is a matter of audience-play proximity, a capacity to inhabit the sensibility from which the text was written. Mental illness is hardly common in its manifestations, and its agony is notoriously difficult to share. Yet here, humour facilitated precisely such a moment of collective recognition.
This Englishness, in turn, underscored the production’s humanity. The actors, though never given life as particular characters, responded to each other in ways that suggested fragments of a soul. Lines were distributed across performers so that no one voice monopolized any particular passage. The result was a choral subjectivity—multiplicity without erasure—emphasizing the universality of the suffering depicted. Strikingly, the performers were deeply human, not stylized into posthuman figures as in some other productions. Here, they were recognizably human beings, vulnerable, proximate and empathetic.
This was especially evident in the dialogue sections, where the patient-doctor dialogues were played with a realism that avoided both sentimentality and abstraction. The pain was presented not as an aestheticized metaphor but as a simple fact of lived experience—something comprehensible even if not directly shared. The giant mirror, reflecting both actors and spectators, reinforced this reciprocity: the suffering subject on stage was also the spectator in the auditorium, collapsing the distinction between performer and witness. We were reminded that their pain was our pain, that their humanity was continuous with our own.
The 2025 Royal Court revival of 4.48 thus reaffirmed both the Englishness and the humanity of Kane’s work. Through laughter, linguistic lightness and cultural atonement, the production highlighted the play’s national specificity, situating it firmly within an English sensibility. Yet through its performances, staging and mirror effects, it also foregrounded the universality of psychic suffering and the possibility of recognition across difference. In doing so, it reminded us that even in the depths of despair, theatre can open windows—literal and metaphorical—on to the shared human condition.
The final moments of the production crystallized this dynamic. On the line “please open the curtains,” the actors left the acting space and opened the theatre’s windows. The summer air of London entered the room. The fading evening light—gentle, quotidian, utterly human—streamed into the theatre. This light was nothing like the “stark light” of 4:48 a.m. evoked in the text. It was not the illumination of crisis but of life continuing outside, of a city carrying on in its ordinariness. In that moment, the audience, who had suffered alongside the performers, exhaled a breath of relief. It was as though the play, after immersing us in psychic darkness, offered a glimpse of redemption through life.
*Tomoko Seki (關智子) is an adjunct researcher of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Japan. She is also a theatre critic and translator. Her interests include Contemporary European Theatre, British Drama and Theatre and Theory of Drama. She is also the author of Deviation and Violation: The Dramaturgy of Sarah Kane (Suisei-sha, 2023). In 2024, she was a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship, which allowed her to research the theatrical scene of New York City.
Copyright © 2025 Tomoko Seki
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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