Opera based on Sarah Kane’s last play gets U.S. premiere
Depression, rage, suicide: These are the dark ingredients of the last play written by Sarah Kane before she killed herself at age 28. Now an operatic version, as dazzling as it is disturbing, is having its U.S. premiere.
“4.48 Psychosis,” composed by Philip Venables and adapted from the play of the same title, premiered to critical and popular acclaim in London and will be performed here at the annual Prototype festival dedicated to promoting new work.
“I was immediately taken with the piece,” said Beth Morrison, one of the directors of Prototype. “Is it depressing? Of course it is. It’s sobering, difficult . ... But we look to works like this to express the human condition, and the things that we suffer with as humans and as a society.” Kane burst onto the scene in 1995 with her first play, “Blasted,” which shocked audiences because of its explicit sex and violence. “4.48 Psychosis” premiered in 2000, a year after Kane hanged herself. The play’s title seems to refer to the precise minute when the troubled playwright would spontaneously awaken and have a period of lucidity before needing her next dose of medication at 6 a.m. The play’s structure is unique: no list of characters, no indication who speaks which lines, no clear narrative, barely any stage directions.
For Venables, that provided enormous challenges but also a welcome freedom.
“It has this huge range of different text modes,” he said in an interview this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, where the opera opens Saturday for six performances. “So it’s not just monologue or dialogue. Some of it isn’t even verbal text. It’s doctors’ notes, or a list of numbers, not necessarily to be spoken.
“You can divide it how you like, which gives you amazing flexibility musically,” he said.
He chose to write it for six female singers, two of whom sometimes take on the roles of patient and therapist. “The text clearly has a polyphony of voices, like opposing voices in your head,” Venables said. “I wanted to render that into real musical polyphony. That’s why I chose to have six voices onstage.”
The orchestral score calls for saxophones, violas, an accordion, bass, flute and piccolo. There are also what Venables calls “bits and bobs” of percussion instruments - including a wood saw. Plus prerecorded sounds of static and “elevator music.”