448 PSYCHOSIS

About the show

An unflinching portrait of fury and despair. Ted Huffman's stark and stripped-back staging of Philip Venables's opera makes its debut on the Linbury Stage. Conductor Naomi Woo draws out the moments of clarity, anguish and fleeting hope that colour the music, with the voices of six singers cutting to the heart of Sarah Kane’s text. A stream-of-consciousness cry of psychological anguish. Based on the devastating 2000 play by Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis charts the fragmented mind of a patient struggling with clinical depression and the often-violent clash between selfhood and psychiatric intervention. Pulsing with urgency, the opera’s elliptical text is underpinned by Philip Venables’s thrilling, and at times, startling, score.