Philip Venables's operatic adaptation of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis comes to the Linbury Theatre, 17 to 25 October 2026.
Sarah Kane wrote 4.48 Psychosis and then killed herself, in February 1999, at twenty-eight. It was staged at the Royal Court sixteen months later. The text has no characters, no setting and no stage directions in the ordinary sense — it is a series of fragments about clinical depression, dissociation and the decision to die, printed on the page in a way that leaves every choice about who is speaking to the company performing it. The title is the hour of the morning at which the writing says clarity arrives.
Philip Venables set it as an opera in 2016, for six sopranos and twelve instruments, using recorded speech and percussion where a conventional score would put melody, and it has been staged repeatedly across Europe since. Kane wrote five plays in six years and every one of them was received as an assault before it was received as writing, which is a pattern the intervening thirty years have entirely reversed.
Ted Huffman directs it in the Linbury Theatre from Saturday 17 to Sunday 25 October 2026, with Naomi Woo conducting. It is the work’s Linbury debut, and nine days is the whole run. The Linbury is the smaller of the Royal Opera House’s two auditoriums and seats around four hundred, which for this piece is not a limitation but the correct room.