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Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar: On the night shift
Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar: On the night shift

Irish Times

time6 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • Irish Times

Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar: On the night shift

Wolf Moon Author : Arifa Akbar ISBN-13 : 978-1399712859 Publisher : Sceptre Guideline Price : £16.99 Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar is a book I wanted to like. Its central question—'What does it mean to be a woman in the night?'— serves as a loose thread binding together memoir, cultural criticism and feminist theory. Akbar's experiences of menopausal insomnia lead into analyses of Louise Bourgeois's night drawings and Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. Visits to her father's care home are interwoven with eerie Pakistani folktales he once told her. She interviews night-shift workers, dancers in Lahore and security guards. She drifts through galleries, goes clubbing and attends late-night films. There's a perceptive reading of Henri Fuseli's The Nightmare, as well as some evocative descriptions of David Lynch scenes. The cultural references are obvious and a little self-consciously tasteful, but they are handled deftly. This is, unmistakably, a serious and intelligent book. Still, the cumulative effect is deadening. READ MORE The problem isn't the material, which is often fascinating, but Akbar's compulsive need to filter it through the dull strainer of introspective autotheory. Entire pages are padded with limp self-reflection—'I think back to' 'I felt' 'I wondered'—until the prose begins to sag under the weight of its own inwardness. The analytical intensity is often laughably disproportionate to the life being examined: 'I put a notebook beside my bed. I open it up the next morning. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more.' There's also a wearying performance of liberal empathy. When she encounters sex workers dancing in Amsterdam's red-light district, she rushes to ally herself with them, as though fending off imagined accusations. 'I feel horrified,' she declares at a Jack the Ripper tour. 'I was in awe of her fortitude,' she writes of a security guard at her theatre, then asks, 'How did Maria remain invisible to me?' I am naturally distrustful of anyone so easily scandalised. Again and again, moments that might have thrummed with tension are robbed of all charge. We don't just hear that she went to Berghain; we're told what Berghain is, then led through one of the tamest nights in club history. Not her fault, but it's hard to be invested in such a safe and orderly life. A book about night, yes, but drained of its Dionysian wildness.

'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s
'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s

BBC News

time22-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • BBC News

'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s

Thirty years ago, the late British writer's debut play Blasted was castigated as a "feast of filth". Now though, revivals of her work are showing she was ahead of her time. Blasted, the 1995 debut play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane, begins with a couple, Ian and Cate, entering a Leeds hotel room. Ian, a tabloid journalist, is unimpressed, and in the following moments he brandishes a revolver, utters a stream of racist slurs, and commits acts of sexual violence against Cate. It is easy to fixate on these details which set the tone for a play that only gets more harrowing, building to a truly sickening final scene. Warning: This article contains content that some may find disturbing or upsetting With its staging at London's Royal Court Upstairs, Blasted became the biggest theatrical cause célèbre in the UK for decades – and reviewers were scathing. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph called it a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and even suggested that Kane was mad. Jack Tinker from the Daily Mail's review was headed "This Disgusting Feast of Filth". Many of the press viewed Blasted as a grotesque waste of taxpayers' money, mindlessly squandered by a 23-year-old enfant terrible who was – shockingly – female. The critical tide later turned, with some of those reviewers apologising to Kane for misunderstanding Blasted. Thirty years on, Kane is part of the theatrical canon – a production of 4.48 Psychosis, the final play she wrote before taking her own life aged 28, is currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, while a revival of her 1998 work Cleansed is being staged by director Rebecca Frecknall at North London's Almeida Theatre next year. While revivals of Kane's plays are not universally appreciated, they always invite new responses and revelations in relation to contemporary conflict and oppression. But at the core of each work is an abstracted meditation on love. "No one play is the same as the other," Graham Saunders, Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC. "It would be difficult to believe that the writer of Blasted was the same person who wrote 4.48 Psychosis". Alongside playwrights including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, Kane was part of a movement in British theatre in the 1990s often described as "in-yer-face", a phrase defined in the New Oxford English Dictionary as "blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid". Yet that is what many of the critics who saw Blasted attempted to do – to run away from the confrontational aspect of the play by burying it with outrage. Midway through, a third character enters the play: a soldier who details war crimes he has witnessed, confronting the repulsive Ian with the realities of conflict. Kane does not merely gesture towards the then-contemporary horrors of the Balkans War, but rips the stage open and has them erupt into the theatre itself. Blasted removes the temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and trauma, forcing us to face the very worst of humanity. Kane's route to notoriety The daughter of a journalist, Kane was born in 1971 in Brentwood, Essex, and rejected her Christian suburban upbringing from the age of 17. In Ravenhill's obituary of Kane upon her death in 1999, he quotes her saying: "There is an attitude that certain things could not happen here. Yet there's the same amount of abuse and corruption in Essex as anywhere else, and that's what I want to blow open". She drew influences from her musical loves (including Joy Division, Pixies, and Radiohead), modern playwrights, (especially Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter), and classical drama. The latter influence was brought to the fore in Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, first performed at London's Gate theatre in 1996. Taking a story already given stage treatments by Seneca, Euripides, and Jean Racine, Kane's attention moves to Phaedra's stepson, Hippolytus, and dissects the taboos of incestuous desire. Phaedra's Love ends with an extreme act of mutilation. It is no wonder that Kane's plays are infrequently performed, not only for their challenging subjects, but because they pose enormous staging difficulties. Fellow writer and friend David Greig recalled that Kane said to him that the reason why she featured unstageable images in her plays was because "whatever they do they're going to have to do something interesting". In Cleansed, which premiered at the Royal Court Downstairs in 1998, Kane jokingly decided to "punish" the director, James Macdonald, for making her do a rewrite. After finding a dead rat in her cutlery drawer, Kane included the direction: "The rats carry Carl's feet away." Carl experiences some of Kane's most shocking violence, being subject to the most extreme of torture from a man called Tinker – the surname of the aforementioned Daily Mail journalist who whipped up the lambasting of Blasted in 1995. During the run of Katie Mitchell's staging of Cleansed at London's National Theatre in 2016, a press furore rose again as audience members fainted and walked out at the play's horror. But to focus on the violence is to miss the meaning of Kane's works. Cleansed is set in a university where Tinker leads an institution designed to rid society of its undesirables, while a group of inmates attempt to save themselves through love. Kane was inspired by A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes to compare extreme torture to the agony of being in love. Like Barthes, Kane finds the two experiences share the situation of panic, wherein there is no possibility of return. To fall in love is to be lost, forever. Cleansed is graphic, but it is heartachingly beautiful – the lovers Graham and Grace dance together, with her emulating him, until "she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time". A sunflower bursts through the floor. At another point a field of daffodils covers the entire stage. Light and beauty frequently shine through the most pitiless scenes. Ravenhill recalled that upon telling Kane that he thought Cleansed was brilliant, she smiled and replied, "Yeah, well, I'm in love". A couple of months later, when she directed Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the Gate, Kane removed the possibility of redemption for any of the characters. "Yeah, well, I fell out of love," Kane explained. As explored in her final two plays, 1998's Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, Kane had fallen out with the idea of love itself. She wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon to detach herself from the associations of her name, allowing her to explore a free-flowing poetic narrative through the voices of four characters called C, M, B, and A. The characters mostly exchange single lines, until A bursts into a long monologue about all the little romantic things she wants to do with her lover. The stream of consciousness twists and turns between anger and love in the manner which defines Kane's worldview. Her death and legacy Later, A says, "Death is my lover and he wants to move in". This chimes with the emotions of her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, which explores a state of mind "at 4.48 / when desperation visits". The work comprises 24 sections, without directions or indication of setting, not even of how many actors should perform it. The revival currently running is directed, as it was first time around, by Macdonald, and features the three original actors: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. "It's a play about being a human being," Potter says. "The circumstances might have to do with depression and suicidal despair and psychosis. But the journey is a recognisable, human journey – the search for connection and the longing is universal." Evans reflects that, while Kane took the play form to a different place, "it's almost like we haven't gone beyond that yet – no one has discovered what the next stage is." McInnes adds: "Hopefully this production might have helped inspire new writers to come forward." More like this:• The Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint• Why Requiem for a Dream is still so divisive• Why Gen Z is nostalgia about 'indie sleaze' The Guardian critic Michael Billington dubbed it "a 75-minute suicide note" in his 2000 review. Kane struggled with severe depression and tried to kill herself once before she did so in 1999. But while 4.48 Psychosis might be its artist's cri de coeur, it is as reductive to call it a suicide note as it is to say the same of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems. After her death, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon said: "I don't think she was depressed, I think it was deeper than that. I think she felt something more like existential despair which is what makes many artists tick." However, in a letter to the Guardian, playwright Anthony Neilson retorted that, "No one in despair 'ticks'", and that, "Truth didn't kill her, lies did: the lies of worthlessness and futility whispered by an afflicted brain." Far more important in terms of Kane's legacy is to focus on the ways in which she played with theatrical form. Reflecting on the power of Kane's work today, Graham Saunders observes that they "respond to #MeToo and issues of coercive control and sexual violence in ways that weren't even recognised or acknowledged when they were first written". Other themes which also come through strongly now include mental health, which is a subject now discussed more openly than when Kane was alive, and body and gender dysmorphia. Imagery recurs in Kane's poetic writing. The emergent flowers in Cleansed recall the end of the first scene of Blasted. Ian and Cate discuss why she came to the hotel with him, ending with him saying, "I love you", and her saying, "I don't love you". Ian picks up a bouquet of flowers and holds them out to Cate. At the start of the second scene the flowers are ripped apart and scattered around the room. Love and beauty have never been shown to be more fragile than in the fraught theatre of Sarah Kane. 4.48 Psychosis is at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 27 July; Cleansed is at London's Almeida Theatre from 21 July until 22 August 2026. * Details of organisations offering information and support for anyone affected by mental health issues and sexual abuse or violence are available at -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.

A Play About a Breakdown Was a 2000 Hit. What Do Audiences Say Today?
A Play About a Breakdown Was a 2000 Hit. What Do Audiences Say Today?

New York Times

time25-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • New York Times

A Play About a Breakdown Was a 2000 Hit. What Do Audiences Say Today?

When the British playwright Sarah Kane died by suicide in 1999, at age 28, she left behind the manuscript for an unperformed work. 'Just remember, writing it killed me,' Kane wrote in an accompanying note, according to Mel Kenyon, the playwright's long-term agent. Just over a year later, when the Royal Court Theater in London premiered the piece — a one-act play called '4:48 Psychosis' that puts the audience inside the mind of somebody having a breakdown — it received rave reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf said it was 'arguably Kane's best play' and compared it to the work of Samuel Beckett. Yet despite the praise, a question hung over the production: Was it possible to honestly critique a play about depression so soon after Kane's tragic death? The headline on an article by the Guardian theater critic Michael Billington suggested a challenge: 'How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?' Now, 25 years later, theatergoers are getting a chance to look at the original production of '4:48 Psychosis' afresh, and see if passing time brings a change in perspective. The show's cast and creative team is reviving the production at the Royal Court, where it runs through July 5, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Other Place Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it will run from July 10-27. This time around, critical reception has been mixed. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, praised the production and said the play 'still feels raw,' but Clive Davis, in The Times of London, argued that ''4:48 Psychosis' isn't a play at all, rather the random agonized reflections of a mind that has passed beyond breaking point.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

4.48 Psychosis: A blistering return for the most shocking play of 1989
4.48 Psychosis: A blistering return for the most shocking play of 1989

Telegraph

time19-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Telegraph

4.48 Psychosis: A blistering return for the most shocking play of 1989

This is a must-see revival of the searing last play by Sarah Kane – in which the most distinctive voice of the 1990s young playwriting wave experimentally explored the subject of suicide via a stream of utterances that combined stark declaration with cryptic lyricism. It's not just any revival, though – but one that replicates the premiere 2000 production that was staged a year after she took her own life, aged just 28. It's at the same venue – the Royal Court Upstairs (the scene too of the brutal 1995 debut, Blasted, which made her name). And the same actors – Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, Madeleine Potter. There's even the same approach to staging by James Macdonald, down to the final climactic grace-filled coup de theatre in which natural evening light from outside is allowed into the space. Here again, as if we were picking up after a brief hiatus, are the mirrored panels slanting over the action, causing the casually dressed trio of actors to be duplicated. It remains a magical effect – someone lying on the ground can seem to float in mid-air – but also a terrifying one, as if these were souls in free-fall. I saw it – awed – the first time. A generation later and there's no sense of it having become a museum-piece. Despite the cast being visibly older, and perhaps even because of that, it still feels raw. This is a play about the pain of being alive and mortality – the difference today is that one appreciates the staying-power of the piece, as well as its saving mordant wit. Back in 2000, there was an inevitable attendant mood of mourning; the shock of Kane 's death remained palpable. Some critics even described the piece as a suicide note, tempted by its determined articulation of a death-wish. 'At 4.48 [am] when desperation visits I shall hang myself to the sound of my lover's breathing,' runs one early line. But re-watching Macdonald's interpretation, I'm struck by how little the bleak circumstances of the work's creation now impinge. Whether Kane had died or not, this hour-long wrestling with despair would have endured. Her stroke of artistic ingenuity was to take us inside a psychotic breakdown – so that the boundaries between external and internal worlds collapse. What might be remarks made by a psychiatrist, say, also sound like an internal conversation. She catches the chaos of disintegration, but also applies dramatic control. If not every line rings true, that's partly because the writing can get overwrought, partly because the delivery here can sound too off-hand and slick. But the quiet investment of the actors holds good: there's a wintry melancholy to Potter's demeanour that haunts us in its own way, while McInnes has the hopeless air of someone only just coping. Evans, now the co-artistic director of the RSC (where the production will move), brings a warm mellifluousness to the language that, of course, makes you think of Shakespeare, Hamlet, and 'To be or not to be'. Is this in that league? No – but nothing quite like it, or Kane, has come along these past 25 years.

4.48 Psychosis review – bared anguish and delicate detail in Sarah Kane's final play
4.48 Psychosis review – bared anguish and delicate detail in Sarah Kane's final play

The Guardian

time19-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • The Guardian

4.48 Psychosis review – bared anguish and delicate detail in Sarah Kane's final play

What must it have felt like to watch Sarah Kane's final play, whose depressed protagonist plots imminent suicide, knowing that the playwright killed herself the previous year? First staged in 2000, under the shadow of Kane's death in 1999, it is back now with the original creative team, including director James Macdonald and its fine three-strong cast of Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter. They play a divided self, it seems, reflecting on illness, shame, self-loathing, love, betrayal, medication culture and – importantly – the prospect of ending it all at exactly 4.48am. Co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play is again staged in the upstairs theatre at the Royal Court (after which it will travel to Stratford-upon-Avon). It is variously abstruse and lucid in its arguments on life, death and suicide, and still original in form. But this production feels like the reconstruction of a seminal performance rather than a seminal performance for today. Maybe this is because Kane's position has changed in the intervening decades: she sits firmly in the canon. So this replica-like revival has the strange effect of a museum piece in this 'new writing' space, posthumous and reverential. Jeremy Herbert's set is a white square with functional table, chairs and an overhanging mirror that reflects the audience and the protagonist's selves which acquire more fractured counterparts in shadow. Light alters in this room, glowing sharp or soporific, like the setting and rising of the sun (beautifully designed lighting by Nigel Edwards). There are bursts of disturbance within, reminiscent of the grey fuzz of an old TV set, which becomes an inspired visual analogy for the dismal brain fog of depression. The protagonist variously lies prone, circles the stage or sits in antagonistic conversation with a psychiatrist (another inner voice). There are deep, startlingly lyrical passages ('the cold black pond of myself') alongside bathos and grim humour; the script is an exemplar of Kane's perceptive and emotionally unswerving gifts as a writer. But dramatically it is sedate. You wish for something messier, louder, angrier. There are flickers of this – a stunning moment when the protagonist (McInnes) shouts as she lies on the table, enraged at life – yet it then returns to blankness. Maybe this non-mood is the point – a depression that leaves meaningful emotion quashed – but it evokes a kind of vacancy in the air nonetheless. There is still value in its staging and poignancy, too. It is beautifully performed with moments of bared anguish and delicate detail. The opening of the stage windows, a countervailing gesture to the reflection of a closed window on stage, is a haunting, yet exhilarating, final image. At the Royal Court theatre, London, until 5 July. Then at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, 10-27 July. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at

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