Creed stages final work of late UK playwright

Few plays offer as visceral an insight into the writer’s mind as ‘4.48 Psychosis’ by the late, great Sarah Kane.

The play is the final completed work by the acclaimed English playwright before she died aged 28 in 1999 and is interpreted by many as an expression of her battle with depression.

With no real narrative to speak of, no named characters, and no stage directions from Kane whatsoever, so productions of the play have varied wildly over the years.

From 6 to 8 August, celebrated Cork theatre artist Tom Creed will bring his spare and raw new staging of ‘4.48 Psychosis’ to the Cork Arts Theatre.

Radical, intimate, and darkly funny, the play is considered a masterpiece by many and remains “a work of extraordinary beauty” (The New York Times) in its unflinching confrontation of despair, lucidity, survival, and death with devastating clarity.

This new version sees director Tom Creed and performer, Belfast native Marty Rea, bring extraordinary precision and emotional intensity to one of the most influential plays of the last thirty years, in a rare opportunity for Irish audiences to encounter the work of one of the most challenging and controversial playwrights of the 20th century.

Sarah Kane was born in Essex in 1971 and was known for her highly influential, though often controversial, contributions to contemporary theatre, becoming a major figure of the ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre movement of the ‘90s in the UK.

Her works often used graphic imagery to challenge the world she saw around her, focusing on disturbing themes and unfiltered human emotion.

Kane focused mainly on theatre, with the exception of ‘Skin’, a short film written for Channel 4 depicting a violent relationship between a black woman and a racist skinhead.

Though she never received any major literary awards in her lifetime, Kane’s work has left behind a legacy that to this day continues to provoke discussion around important and often overlooked subjects in society.

In an interview with English dramatist and academic, Dan Rebellato at Royal Holloway University of London in 1998, Kane was asked by an audience member, “Who do you write for?”.

In her response, she said: “I have only every written in order to escape from hell and it’s never worked. But at the other end of it, when you sit there and watch something and think well, that's the most perfect expression of the hell that I felt, then maybe it was worth it.”

Tom Creed’s staging of ‘4.48 Psychosis’ by Sarah Kane was funded by The Arts Council with development support from Cork Theatre Collective.