3rd year drama students, as the Axiom Theatre Company, produced Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis in Studio 2 on the College Road Campus this week. This is a challenging work, debuting posthumously after Kane’s suicide in 1999 and exploring the dark areas of the mind. The staging needs to be imaginative as Kane’s script provides us only with the lines of dialogue, leaving the director to establish who speaks and the context. The director chose to interpret the dialogue as shared between a doctor and a number of patients, each demonstrating different symptoms displayed by the lines in the text. The company’s imaginative construction of back-stories for their characters was an innovative dimension to the actual staging.

It was good to see English and CW students – some of whom will be studying Kane’s Blasted next term – supporting their drama peers.