For its Sarah Kane retrospective, Sheffield has chosen to give full stagings to her first succès de scandale Blasted and her final two plays Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. (Her other work is presented here in screening and semi-staged reading form.) By the latter pieces, Kane had moved beyond using horrific events as metaphors for her subject, and was addressing it directly: our inability to cope.

4.48 Psychosis, which premiered posthumously in 2000, immediately seemed like a direct, inescapable announcement of Kane’s imminent suicide. Its portrayal of acute clinical depression is the most unrestrained I know. The words, and the thoughts and feelings behind them, are all that matter: the script does not even specify a number of performers, never mind apportion lines between them. The quartet Crave (1998) at least goes that far, but it lacks character or action. Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me to be one of the purest examples of theatre: it is of the essence of the piece that we hear and see these words being delivered by people in the same time and space with us, sharing the moment of utterance.

It is trite to call Kane the Ian Curtis of theatre, although 4.48 Psychosis even seems to include an allusion to the film which Joy Division’s singer watched immediately before his own suicide in 1980. Yet there is a further similarity: as I gave myself over to the verbal music of Crave, it struck me that Kane’s words were wreaking the same effect as producer Martin Hannett’s soundscapes behind and beneath Joy Division’s songs. This language creates whole urban vistas at once packed with incident and empty of what their lonely inhabitants desperately seek. Christopher Shutt’s sound design may explicitly recognise the same association as it discreetly underscores a handful of moments in the play.

Charlotte Gwinner’s twin productions utilise the same team. Christopher Fulford, who has the stand-out “…and I want to…” speech in Crave, is absent from 4.48 Psychosis, leaving Tom Mothersdale as the embittered patient-in-treatment aspect of the play’s composite persona, Rakie Ayola as the most articulate voice of spiritual agonies, and Pearl Chanda whose performances across the pair of pieces is all the stronger for being less identifiable. The total playing time of the two is barely 80 minutes, but there is no need for more: there can be no more.
  
Written for the Financial Times.