Philip Venables's operatic setting of Sarah Kane's fragmented last play about clinical depression makes its Linbury Theatre debut this October.
4.48 Psychosis, Philip Venables’s opera of Sarah Kane’s last play, opens in the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Saturday 17 October 2026. Ted Huffman directs, with Naomi Woo conducting.
Kane wrote five plays in six years. She finished 4.48 Psychosis and took her own life in February 1999, at 28, and the Royal Court staged it sixteen months later.
The text has no characters, no setting and no ordinary stage directions. It is a series of fragments about clinical depression, dissociation and the decision to die, and it leaves every choice about who is speaking to the company. The title is the hour of the morning at which the writing says clarity arrives.
Venables set it as an opera in 2016 for six sopranos and twelve instruments. He used recorded speech and percussion where a conventional score would put melody, and the work has been staged across Europe since.
This is its Linbury debut, in the smaller of the Royal Opera House’s two auditoriums. The run lasts nine days and closes on Sunday 25 October.