4.48 Psychosis: Play Analysis

After the scintillating sun has melted the snow, the fluffy coats are at last hanged, and classes have come to conclusion, there is no doubt that summer has arrived and everybody appears to have a distinct plan of how to spend their summer. It always varies from travel plans, to a summer job, an internship, etc. For assistant professor of Theater Arts, Dmitry Troyanovsky ‘98, an opportunity presented itself from the other side of globe, the Eastern hemisphere.
The opportunity entailed for Dmitry Troyanovsky to combine travel with work, directing this past summer the last play Sarah Kane wrote, titled 4.48 Psychosis, at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre in Shanghai, China. Troyanovky said this was not the first time he has worked in China, “I’ve been collaborating with Chinese artists and theater educators since 2011… People from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre were aware of my work, so they …show more content…
After the play was performed for the first time in the year 2000, a year after Kane’s death, the play drew polarizing reviews. The drama critic, Michael Billington, described the play as the, “75-minute suicide note,” however, this is not the approach Troyanovsky took when it came to stage his own production of the play. When asked Troyanovsky about whether he thought the audience still enters into the theater with the exact same perception, that the play is all Kane herself, he said, “I think it actually robbed the play of its theatrical core because it you treat the play as her biographic text you are forgetting that Sarah Kane didn’t wrote plays about herself, she put herself into her plays, but that’s different… I think we open to the possibilities of the play when we stop treating it that way.” He added that the main character of the play, “is another character who may be inspired by Sarah Kane; who may be similar to Sarah Kane, but it is another