Philip Venables

4.48 Psychosis was the astonishing final work of the radical British playwright Sarah Kane, first performed posthumously in 2000. Detailing the experience of clinical depression, the play harrowingly reveals, through poetry, anger and dark humour, an individual’s struggle to come to terms with their own psychosis, the numbers in the title referring to the time in the early morning when clarity and bleak despair strike together.

This award-winning operatic adaptation of Kane’s play is the first ever permitted musical adaptation of any of her work.  The search for love and happiness and the struggle for identity are explored through a fusion of opera with spoken and visual text, bringing a new resonance to the last creative utterances of one of the most courageous young British writers of her generation.  The opera was first presented in 2016 by the Royal Opera in London, in a production by Ted Huffman, and has subsequently seen productions in London, New York City, Strasbourg, Dresden, Munich, Mainz and Paris.  The opera was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society for Best Large Scale Composition 2017, a British Composer Award for Best Stage Work 2017, a UK Theatre Award for Best Opera 2016 and it was shortlisted for an Olivier Award for Best Opera in 2017 and a Southbank Award for Best Opera in 2017.  It has been chosen as one of the best operas of 2019 by The New Yorker Magazine, and was highlighted as one of the most groundbreaking operas of the decade by The Times Literary Supplement.

Details

4.48 Psychosis was written as part of the Doctoral Composer in Residence programme between the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.

Text: Sarah Kane
Duration: 90 minutes, no interval, in 24 short scenes.
Text is in english, but foreign-language versions can be prepared (French, Italian).  A German version is available from the publisher.
Cast: 3 sopranos, 3 mezzo-sopranos
Ensemble, 12 players: alto flute + picc, 3 saxes (all sop+bar), piano+synth with organ pedalboard, accordion, 2 percussion (female solo roles, some playing from memory), vln+vla, 2 vla, bass.
Percussion: two bass drums, woodsaw & wood, other standard orchestral percussion.
Sound dispersion: All singers and ensemble amplified.  1 stage speaker (central), surround sound in auditorium, click tracks to ensemble.
Projection, single projector required.
A significant amount of pre-recorded material must be recorded with the cast.

Archive video available on request.

Published by Ricordi Musikverlag GmbH

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Press

The Independent.  
“Where this first-ever operatic setting by Royal Opera House Guildhall composer-in-residence Philip Venables succeeds is through simple honesty. With a score ranging guilelessly from motoric arrhythmia to wispy renaissance, director Ted Huffman and team attempt neither dramatic adornment nor explanation but allow the text to breathe within a kaleidoscope of inner-outer conflict.  […]  Duelling percussionists parley in a doctor-patient morse code. A tapestry of strings, accordion and saxes evoke polyphonies of yearning, while tenderly but inexorably we encounter hopeless recesses of the mind. Knowledge of Kane’s suicide shortly after writing the play can only make this humane and understated piece the more compelling.”

The Telegraph. 
4.48 Psychosis opera is rawly powerful and laceratingly honest.  “Venables’s high-pitched score is a soundscape that imaginatively penetrates and dramatises the heart of this darkness. Ferocious peremptory drum beats mingle ironically with cocktail-hour smooch broadcast from the radio; the vocal writing veers between monotonous chant and shrieking anguish; and there are even moments of melancholy beauty, when the women harmonise laments for a lost life of beauty, friendship, value.  […]  This is an urgent message from black-dog hell, and it should not go unheeded.”

The Guardian. 
Philip Venables proves he’s one of the finest composers around with an intricate score inspired by Kane’s very personal story of clinical depression.  “But the yearning, intricate vocal writing – Monteverdian in its timelessness – poignantly reminds us that depression is also the absence of love. Even in despair, Kane could be a savage ironist, and brassy, postmodern toccatas accompany the endless prescriptions of anti-depressants. The word “silence” was her only stage direction; Venables fills those pauses with distant muzak, among the most unnerving sounds in the work.  […] above all, it confirms Philip Venables’s reputation as one of the finest of the younger generation of composers working today.”

The Times. 
Every self-harming syllable of Sarah Kane’s angry play is clear as Philip Venables finds a musical vocabulary for the drugs that treat depression.  “Chroma’s strings, saxophones, accordion and synthesizer smear and blur in parallel to the drugs, sometimes delicately, sometimes violently. Click here for more info. Every self-harming syllable of the text is clear. There are neon-bright salutes to Bartók’s Bluebeard (a blast of Door Five C major), and a lament derived from the Agnus Dei of Bach’s B minor Mass.”

The Observer. 
Philip Venables makes Sarah Kane’s final work sing.  “The revelation is how Venables has enriched her play through music. He challenges the conventions of opera. Via an array of resources he ambushes and refreshes an old art form. His technique is that of a collagist. Text is variously spoken, projected, amplified, conveyed rhythmically with percussion and sung, often in aria-like lament or chorale outburst. Snatches of Purcell – a mini viola fantasia arrests the action for several moments – and Bach coexist with high-energy funk reminiscent of the late Steve Martland.  On reading later that Martland was Venables’s teacher, I can hear that element as a tribute rather than an imitation. I need to know more of Venables’s music to find his own musical identity: my task, not his.”

The Financial Times. 
‘Unhinged and chilling’.  “Kane’s text is spoken, sung and projected on screens: it seems to emanate from everywhere. But Venables’ achievement is bigger than that. He manages to enhance Kane’s groundbreaking format with his own unbuttoned imagination. His score lurches between chattering polyphony, sounds of sawing wood, and post-romantic arias, spiced up with eerie violin shrieks. In the exchanges between patient and therapist, two percussionists thrash out rhythmic speech patterns as the text appears on screens beneath them. Then, when the din fades away, we’re left with the indifferent tinkle of elevator music. It’s unhinged and chilling, albeit laced with Kane’s trademark humour. Most of all, it is dizzyingly colourful.”

The Arts Desk. 
A musical dramatisation of Sarah Kane’s classic play finds both pain and consolation.  “Picking his way through the chattering textual landscape with infinite care and understanding, cutting little text and adding none, Venables groups the material into genres. The structure that emerges is something like a sketch show; musical and dramatic tropes or textures return again and again, gaining weight and significance cumulatively through repetition and juxtaposition.  […] Set against these fixed musical landmarks, stand-alone episodes make far greater impact. An exquisite aria for Clare Presland, sung over a synthesised accompaniment, is equal parts Purcell and pop song, a musical memory that offers a sustained moment of stillness, refusing to give way to the assault of other words and sounds.  […] Venables’s orchestration (light on strings, heavy on saxophones and keyboards textures) is spare but telling, cultivating a mechanistic quality even when combining purely acoustic instruments that refuses to sentimentalise the outpourings of Kane’s speakers. Paired with the heady, giddy texture of so many upper voices, the result feels dangerously unanchored, unmoored from bass certainty and support.”

The Spectator.
“Experimentation in the service of absolute emotional precision: Venables’ economical work is one of the most exhilarating operas in years, even while it gives voice to some of the darkest thoughts imaginable.”

Tempo Journal
“I cannot recall having been as powerfully moved by an opera as this, much of it watched with my hand clasped over my mouth.”

Times Literary Supplement
“It has been wonderful to follow the success of Philip Venables’s 2016 adaptation of Sarah Kane’s final play, 4:48 Psychosis. This opera, which dispenses with pretty much every standard operatic precept, except the basic ones of artistic means – sung characters on stage and an orchestra playing with them – has played to audiences in Britain, Germany, France and most recently New York, opening our eyes to what musical theatre is capable of, if you forget pretty much everything you associate with the terms ‘opera’ or ‘musical theatre’.” 

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Productions of 4.48 Psychosis

2024/25 — Staatstheater Mainz

2023/24 — Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding, Munich

2021/22 — Philharmonie de Paris / Festival d’Automne / Ensemble Intercontemporain

2019/20 — Opéra National du Rhin

2018/19 — Semperoper Dresden, revivals in 2019/20 and 2022/23

2018/19 — Prototype Festival New York City

2016/17 — The Royal Opera at Lyric Hammersmith, revival in 2017/18.

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