When Sarah Kane committed suicide on February 20, 1999, she left behind a fifth and final play, completed a few weeks earlier and entitled 4.48 Psychosis. It took her just four years to make her mark on the theater scene, not only in Britain but worldwide. When she took her own life, just a few weeks after her 28th birthday, she was already famous, but this act elevated her to almost iconic status.
4.48 Psychosis recounts the struggle of a protagonist, referred to only by the letter S., against depression and perhaps also psychosis. In a multifaceted text, S. recounts her struggle to bring her body and mind into harmony, to find love (but perhaps above all to love herself). The play recounts her exchanges with medical staff, her search for balance in psychotropic drugs, but above all in the act of writing, and suicide as the only possible response to the insurmountable difficulty of living.
With Marie Burkhardt, Axel Arnault
