Sarah Kane’s fifth and final work for the stage isn’t a play in the conventional sense but a collage of feelings about despair, futile love, clinical depression and suicidal intent. It’s a hard, harsh watch illuminated by flashes of poetic clarity and bleak wit. It’s returned to the Royal Court (in a co-production with the RSC) with the same cast and creative team who premiered it here in 2000, a year after Kane took her own life aged 28. You can’t help but view it as a reflection of her state of mind.
The script is 43 pages of broken-up text, angry or futile speeches alternating with lists of numbers and types of medication, repetition (“flicker punch slash dab”), word association (“irrelevant, irreverent”) and lines that wind down the page like concrete poetry. There are four references to 4.48am as the waking time when despondency, clarity or sleep arrive.
