Sarah Kane

A Synopsis

The play is set in an expensive hotel room in Leeds. Ian, a foul-mouthed middle-aged tabloid journalist has brought a young woman, Cate, to the room for the night. Cate is much younger than Ian, and emotionally fragile. Throughout Scene 1, Ian tries to seduce Cate into sleeping with him, but she resists. All the while, Ian proudly parades his misogyny, racism and homophobia. The scene ends with the sound of spring rain.

Scene 2 begins the next morning. Ian has raped Cate during the night. She attacks him and then escapes out of the bathroom window. Then, unexpectedly, a soldier enters the room in full battle dress. Then hotel room is then struck by a mortar bomb, and the scene ends with the sound of summer rain.

In Scene 3, the hotel room is in ruins; the bomb has blasted a whole in the wall. The soldier and Ian begin to talk, and it is gradually revealed that England is in the midst of war. The soldier tells Ian about appalling atrocities that he has witnessed and taken part in, involving rape, torture and genocide, and says he has done everything as an act of revenge for the murder of his girlfriend. He then rapes Ian, and sucks out his eyes. The scene ends with the sound of autumn rain.

In Scene 4, Ian lies blinded next to the soldier, who has committed suicide. Cate returns, describing the city being overrun by soldiers, and bringing with her a baby that she has rescued. The baby is dead, however, so she buries it in a hole in the floorboards and leaves.

Scene 5 consists of a series of brief images, showing Ian crying, masturbating and even hugging the dead soldier for comfort as he starves in the ruined room. Eventually, he crawls into the hole with the dead baby and eats it. The stage direction then reads that Ian dies. It starts raining, and Ian says "Shit". Cate returns, bringing a sausage that she has paid for by having sex with a soldier.





Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000, at the Royal Court, directed by James Macdonald. This, Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work, dispenses with plot and character, and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play (in Macdonald's production, two women and one man performed the work). Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression, it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Greig as having as its subject the "psychotic mind."

The play is written from the point of view of someone with severe clinical depression. A repeated motif in the play is "serial sevens": counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory. According to her friend and fellow-playwright David Greig, the title of the play derives from the time -- 4.48 am -- when Kane, in her depressed state often woke. Greig considered the play to be 'perhaps uniquely painful in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously.' Some critics have had difficulty in distinguishing the play from the reality of Kane's life. Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How do you review a 75-minute suicide note?"