4:48 Psychosis

4:48 Psychosis was Sarah Kane's last work, seemingly meant to be produced posthumously. The play has no explicit characters or stage directions and at times on the page appears more similar to an E. E. Cummings' poem than a performance piece.

The play is written from the point of view of someone with severe bipolar disorder, a disorder which Sarah Kane herself suffered from. A repeated motif in the play is 'serial 7s': counting down from one hundred by sevens, a diagnostic test used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration in psychotic delirium. The title of the play refers to the hour of nighttime, around which suffering people use to wake up, feeling themselvess very clear and cold whilst – for outsiders – they suffer the deepest delirium.