Venables' 4.48 Psychosis Opera Revived at Linbury Theatre — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Philip Venables' opera adaptation of Sarah Kane's posthumous play "4.48 Psychosis," commissioned by the Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, debuted in 2016 and is now revived at the Linbury Theatre through 25 October.
- Ted Huffman's 10-year-old production returns with a subtly revised ending, staged within Hannah Clark's institutional white box set lit by DM Wood's stark lighting and amplified sound design.
- Chroma, a London-based 14-piece chamber orchestra featuring saxophones, piano synthesiser, and accordion, delivers Venables' score — described as mixing minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop, and baroque nods — from above the action.
- Six female singers — Jacquelyn Stucker, Hannah Edmunds, Sophia Burgos, Veena Akama-Makia, Lauren Young, and Marta Fontanals-Simmons — perform identically costumed to suggest fragments of one fractured personality, with Stucker singled out as a searingly honest protagonist.
- Projected text is paired with unconventional percussion — bass drums, a carpenter's saw, and a shop-counter bell — to punctuate patient-doctor exchanges, with Catherine Ring and Delia Stevens "attacking" their instruments with sticks and hands.
- Conductor Naomi Woo brings immediacy to Venables' complex score, though the review finds the six-part polyphonic chorus occasionally prescribes emotional temperature, tethering Kane's text's interpretive freedom.
Why it matters: A decade after its premiere, the Royal Opera is still programming Venables' chamber-scale adaptation, signaling sustained institutional confidence in staging confrontational post-1990s British drama in operatic form. For audiences who only know Kane from the page, this production tests whether music can carry her non-linear, experiential writing — and the consensus review finds it does, even as the polyphonic structure sometimes smooths Kane's fury.
Ask SkimNews
