‘It put me in a fever dream’: Philip Venables on turning Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis into a shocking opera

Source: www.theguardian.com · Section: entertainment-sports · Bias: Center-Left · Published: Wed, 14 Oct 2026 05:00:47 GMT

A decade after the premiere of his work setting Kane’s hard-hitting play, it’s returning to the Royal Opera House. The composer remembers its fevered beginnings, the sweat and tears shed along the way, and how it changed his life foreverIn January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around. Continue reading...

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