4.48 Psychosis opera is rawly powerful and laceratingly honest - review

Previous Sarah Kane-sceptic Rupert Christiansen is impressed by this new operatic adaptation of her pitch-black signature work 

Incense rises from the altars of the cult of Sarah Kane, the playwright who hanged herself at the age of 28 in 1999. I’ve never been inclined to worship there, partly from my impatience with her conviction that only despair is emotionally authentic, and partly because I once got stuck next to her at a party and found her repellently surly and chippy. 

Yet Philip Venables’s one-act, 90-minute opera, drawn from 4.48 Psychosis - Kane’s last piece of theatrical writing - is so rawly powerful and laceratingly honest that I feel I should reconsider.

The text takes the form of 24 fragmentary episodes, divided without stage directions or named characters between an unspecified number of actors (the late work of Samuel Beckett is an obvious influence).

Vacillating between prose and poetry, sometimes violently paranoid, sometimes coldly analytical in tenour, it explores in zig-zag yet compulsive fashion the inner life of someone whose clinical depression has led to suicidal madness – the title referring to the daily moment of waking when sanity might or might not briefly reassert itself.

The opera uses six women singers, focusing on a central self-loathing, self-harming figure (Gweneth Ann Rand) who finally takes her own life as Kane did. We see her with her ineffectual psychiatrist, we hear a sickening catalogue of her meds and their side-effects, we feel the cockroaches crawling through her brain as she screams contempt for those who reach out to help her. Her solipsism is absolute: she has no remorse, no compassion, no self-respect or discipline. She wants only to stop her inner daemons, without having any desire for death.