Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis
[site-specific] Crypt (St Pancras Church), July & October 2015
Sarah Kane’s final play is a raw and sincere landscape of the psychotic mind. It is a story about someone who desperately wanted to communicate, to be understood; to be seen a person and not as an illness. 4.48 Psychosis allows us to observe the struggle of the self to remain intact and its inevitable fall.
Collide Theatre and director Emily Louizou are recreating an internal visual depiction of the human mind in turmoil. A barren space, and a mind which is full of potentiality at the same time. Exploring the fragmentation of self, the losing of borders that the psychotic mind experiences, the performance asks the audience to enter a subterranean labyrinth and encounter the complexity of the human memory, imagination and perception in all of its terror and beauty.
We have created a world open to its audience, a theatre of deconstruction which invites you to enter a region of the mind most of us would hope never to see. Enter our labyrinth.
Collide Theatre's Debut production
Director: Emily Louizou
Designers: Ileana Arnaoutou, Lily Has, Avra Alevropoulou
Music composer: David Denyer
Makeup design: Kira Amin
Assistant producer: Nicole Cyrier
Publicity assistant: Laura Warner
Performers:Miranda Teed, Alisha Iyer, Helena Gadelha, Cora Burridge, Clemence Roberts
Movement: Ioli Filippakopoulou, Indre Kaftaniukaite, Depi Gorgogianni
"I’d love it if people could leave the Crypt having understood something more about the terror and the beauty of the way the human mind thinks."
Read Emily's interview about Psychosis here.
What The Critics Said:
★★★★★
An incredibly powerful production which rises to Kane’s challenge
PlaysToSee
★★★★
I don’t think the written word is enough to convey the power of being in the crypt with the play going on around you.”
LondonTheatre1
★★★★
4.48 Psychosis plunges its audience into the psychotic mind of a clinical depressive. Directed by Emily Louizou, now surely one of UCL’s most accomplished student directors, and staged by theatrical group Collide Theatre, it is a gruelling and brilliant piece of immersive theatre.The attention to detail is staggering, testament to Louizou’s magisterial direction; the staging appeals to almost every sense. It is nothing if not a powerful piece of theatre, and one, whilst a challenge to stomach, that is entirely deserving of the upmost praise and reverence."
“I can’t really put into words everything that I felt as I climbed out of that Crypt, but I felt changed. Bravo.”
“There is no benchmark I can offer, no relevant experience to relate it to, but in terms of pure stagecraft it is an excellent envisioning of a very difficult play, and an experience worth undertaking, even if only because it is different from anything else out there.”
A Younger Theatre