28/05/2018
4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane
NATIONAL OPERA HOUSE
THU 21 - SAT 23 JUNE
NOW BOOKING
Incandescent Theatre
Sarah Kane - the most controversial playwright of the last twenty years?
Riff Raff Theatre – from ‘Equus’ to ‘The Kill God’ – no-holds-barred independent professional fringe theatre – 38 years of breaking fresh ground here in Ireland – here in Wexford.
Leading critics like Michael Billington of the Guardian momentarily thrown by the uncompromising violence and explicit sexuality of Sarah Kane’s work.
When it came to 4.48 Psychosis, negative reviews ran off the scale and it is only since that first production on the 23rd June 2000 that reviews began to honour this most perfectly poetic of plays.
(Riff Raff’s last performance here in the Opera House on the 23rd June is the 18th anniversary of the play’s first performance)
4.48 Psychosis is not extreme in the explicit and violently literal way Sarah Kane’s earlier plays were - there is a measured beat and breath to this, her last play.
The play explodes with anger, passion, fear and loathing. It implodes spectacularly with a simple life affirmation which lies buried somewhere in its heart and soul.
Sarah Kane rocks. To and fro. Cockroaches. A lover's yearn. Disgust.
Riff Raff Theatre is a long-established independent professional fringe theatre company which emerged from the Theatre Workshop, set up here in Wexford by Irene Wright, Leo Meehan, Gerard Hanton and Michael Way in 1980.
The Workshop story began with bringing new work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe then creating a Theatre Workshop in a derelict Grain Store as a model fringe theatre that ran daily, six days a week, all year round and where for a number of years premiere after premiere was given life and was, occasionally, toured.
Brecht, Becket, O’Casey, Wilson, Littlewood woven through all the work
The company has always been a pioneering, ground-breaking, frontline influence around these parts, with work by Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett, Joe Orton, Peter Shaffer, William Mastrosimone, Tennessee Williams, Frank McGuinness, Steven Berkoff, Dario Fo leading the charge alongside original work by Michael Way, Gerard Hanton, Victor Merriman and many other theatre creatives.
Satirical comedy revues and educational work filled in gaps together with theatrical and commercial services like stage lighting, costume design and hire, set design and construction, traditional and illustrated sign-writing and original comedy, drama and film for conferences incoming to Wexford.
4.48 Psychosis, in process at this time of writing, is opening out like a flower.
Riff Raff Theatre's ensemble workshop process is an entirely organic engagement with the text of a play, but do not expect a garden full of roses. Sarah Kane is a wild flower. A very wild tangle of a flower.
4.48 Psychosis is beautifully written, beautifully expressed and stunningly interpreted with an entire world generated out of those magical words-on-a-page.
If you have seen 4.48 Psychosis before, drop everything to come and revisit Sarah Kane's glittering, white-hot diamond.
You will be amazed.
You will not be disappointed.
Incandescent theatre at its most illuminating.
Explosive theatre at its most destructive.
