Sarah Kane’s World of Depression

The Emergence and Experience of Mental Illness in 4.48 Psychosis

British playwright Sarah Kane (1971–1999) described her last works of fiction as “texts for performance”[2]. In them, she moved towards a form of expression in which the materiality of the text, language and (inter)textuality had more and more significance over events and plot. This development reaches its peak in her last play, 4.48 Psychosis,[3] which focuses on the experiences of a person who suffers from psychotic depression[4]. The narrating I constructed in the play cites feelings of overwhelming sadness, […]