"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" - 4.48 Psychosis
How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre - as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.
Glenn D Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).
