abstract
Sarah Kane's 1999 play 4.48 Psychosis uses unconventional techniques and a fragmented style to represent the experience of clinical depression from the point of view of the depressed individual. The play includes descriptions of both suicidal feelings and at least one suicide attempt. Kane herself committed suicide shortly after the play's completion, and the fact that she experienced the mental illness dramatized in the play has influenced the ways that actors, stage directors, and audiences have responded to the work. For some critics, Kane's identity as a mentally ill person supercedes her authority as a playwright experimenting with dramatic form, with one critic going so far as to call the play a "45-minute suicide note." Some artists with other types of disabilities have complained that similar disrespect from critics and peers arises when their work is branded as "disability art," or worse, "identity politics."
In this paper, I explore the boundaries and shape of Kane's "authority" as it was understood in the rehearsal process of a professional company of actors preparing to perform 4.48 Psychosis. The company used dramaturgical and biographical information about Sarah Kane to consider, evaluate, and often resist the "easy" interpretations of 4.48 Psychosis that Kane's life and death offers. The director encouraged the actors to balance a respect for Kane's artistic process as a playwright with an awareness of her unique access to experience of mental illness-- in other words, to let her "speak as" both a writer and a disabled person. In the process, the director positioned himself with the authority to "speak for" Kane in her absence, although he was not apparently disabled himself. Although it was meant to result in a richer, more complex understanding of Kane's identity and authority, a non-disabled person speaking on behalf of a person with a disabilities can be demeaning and patronizing. To what extent was the company's response to Kane's mental illness constructive for other artists with disabilities, and to what extent was it presumptuous or exploitative?