- I won't be able to think. I won't be able to work.

- Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide.

(Silence)

- I dreamt that I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour.

(A long silence)

- Okay, let's do it, let's do the drugs, let's do the chemical lobotomy....

Let's do it.”

Kane’s dramatic masterpiece about what it means to suffer from clinical depression and be terrorised by the voices in your own mind. Placing this unique play in one of the oldest and most fascinating locations in Vienna, the vaulted halls beneath the Freyung. A work of theatre art directed by 2 times Nestroy Prize winner Michael Smulik.

The play was written during a period of deep depression in Kane’s life, an achievement Greig calls “positively heroic…an act of generosity” but he cautions against looking for clues to someone’s personal history based on the drifting and artificial evidence of a play. The very word play implies something in motion or imagined, like games and pretending. Other authors such as Ken Urban, have pointed out the difficulty, if not impossibility, of separating Kane’s personal life from the themes explored in 4:48 and that in this final play the author and the work are structurally intertwined. Reflecting on comments made by Kane’s literary agent, Mel Kenyon, Urban writes, “Because it is the play that, Kane joked, ‘killed’ her to write, at this particular historical moment, it is hard to read the play outside of biography. Mel Kenyon recently said in an interview, ‘I pretend that [4:48 Psychosis] isn’t a suicide note but it is. It is both a suicide note and something greater than that.’” (Urban 6) [3].

 „4:48 Psychosis" may be as close as world literature has ever come to receiving a dispatch from a dead soul. ...To read it is to feel the dizzying rush of a mind succumbing to the terrible seduction of nonexistence" NY Times

"Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend" Theatre Desk, UK