{"id":595,"date":"2025-11-17T18:33:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T18:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/?p=595"},"modified":"2025-12-21T10:00:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T10:00:50","slug":"englishness-and-humanity-the-revival-of-4-48-psychosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/englishness-and-humanity-the-revival-of-4-48-psychosis\/","title":{"rendered":"Englishness and Humanity: The Revival of 4.48 Psychosis<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tomoko Seki<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revival of Sarah Kane\u2019s 4.48 Psychosis<\/em> 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<\/sup> 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first encounter with Sarah Kane’s work was\u00a0in Tokyo, 2009,\u00a0when I saw 4.48 Psychosis<\/em> 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<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s plays.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeline Potter. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

4.48 Psychosis<\/em> is Kane\u2019s final work, emblematic of Britain\u2019s radical dramaturgy in the 1990s. While Kane is often positioned within Aleks Sierz\u2019s taxonomy of \u201cIn-yer-face theatre,\u201d this play diverges dramatically from conventional dramaturgical structures. In its refusal of linear plot, stable characters or determinate setting, 4.48 <\/em>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 R\u00e9gy, Johan Simons, Thomas Ostermeier and Katie Mitchell. In Japan as well, numerous directors\u2014including Ameya, Takeshi Kawamura, Hatsumi Abe, Yuta Hagiwara and Tomoko Kawaguchi\u2014have explored Kane\u2019s text in diverse stagings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2025 revival at the Royal Court restaged James Macdonald\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s sense of vision. At moments, the reflection appeared more \u201creal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Madeline Potter and Daniel Evans. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

What most distinguished this revival from other 4.48 <\/em>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\u2014whether in Japan or other European countries\u2014laughter was almost entirely absent. Kane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Madeline Potter and Daniel Evans. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The laughter, of course, was neither cruel nor derisive. It was warm, lightly ironic and empathetic. Much of it arose during the dialogue parts\u2014exchanges between the patient and the doctor\u2014that contained moments of dry wit, playful invective or sardonic observation. Even the recurrence of the f-word elicited knowing chuckles. These were, however, the \u201cgallows humour spoken in the voice from the newly-dug grave,\u201d as the text itself suggests\u2014jokes that demand proximity, intimacy and a willingness to align oneself with the speaker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Jo McInnes and Madeline Potter. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Language itself also reinforced this sense of Englishness. English-speaking is marked by lightness, especially in the words of writers like Kane\u2014short sentences, clipped rhythms and poetic images\u2014that 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Daniel Evans. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Such laughter and lightness reminded me of something often overlooked: Kane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Daniel Evans. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This Englishness, in turn, underscored the production\u2019s 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\u2014multiplicity without erasure\u2014emphasizing 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Jo McInnes. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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\u2014something 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Jo McInnes. Photo: Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The 2025 Royal Court revival of 4.48 <\/em>thus reaffirmed both the Englishness and the humanity of Kane\u2019s work. Through laughter, linguistic lightness and cultural atonement, the production highlighted the play\u2019s 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\u2014literal and metaphorical\u2014on to the shared human condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final moments of the production crystallized this dynamic. On the line \u201cplease open the curtains,\u201d the actors left the acting space and opened the theatre\u2019s windows. The summer air of London entered the room. The fading evening light\u2014gentle, quotidian, utterly human\u2014streamed into the theatre. This light was nothing like the \u201cstark light\u201d 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. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Tomoko Seki<\/strong> (\u95dc\u667a\u5b50) 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<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2025 Tomoko Seki
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em>, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Creative<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":597,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performance-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/33\/2025\/11\/image2-11.jpeg?fit=800%2C532&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}