‘It put me in a fever dream’: Philip Venables on turning Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis into a shocking opera
In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.
Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around.
I landed back home, back to real life, with a thud. That year turned out to be tough: a messy and protracted relationship breakup and a threat of bankruptcy and losing my house, a victim of rogue builders. I broke out in a bleeding stress rash, and, for the first time in my life, suffered insomnia. I was not composing. Time slipped by.
In late summer, I managed to pull myself together. I dusted off those notes from the flight, made some spreadsheets (always!), counted the days I had to write each scene and set to work. The opera was written at breakneck speed in six months, in something of a trance. My personal life remained fraught, but the opera, and Kane’s world, became a refuge, an escape, a joy. Writing flowed.
I followed my blueprint almost without deviation. I wrote the most straightforward scenes first, out of order, in their matching groups: the patient-doctor dialogues, the serial sevens, the positive and negative affirmations. Slowly, a patchwork opera emerged, until only the most challenging scenes remained. Then I returned to the text; it had an uncanny ability to reveal more ideas, more music, like layers peeled back successively. I reminded myself to follow my instincts. I held on to sage advice from fellow composer James Weeks: “You want people to come out afterwards and say ‘that wasn’t an opera’.”
Rehearsing the opera was demanding. I delivered the score late (something I’ve learned never to repeat) and I’d unwittingly written something that did not align with a standard production: swathes of complex ensemble singing that had to be learned together; lots of recorded material to be prepared; scenes requiring millisecond precision between light, sound and video. This was difficult material on every level, and the creative team, producers and cast rolled up their sleeves and met the challenges with grit and dedication. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to that heroic cast and the producer, Sarah Crabtree.
By opening night in May 2016, our noses were so close to the grindstone that nobody had really thought about how it might be received. There was simply relief and astonishment that we had made it to the stage. So the overwhelming audience response felt like a huge release of tension, a euphoria borne from sweat and tears shed along the way.
A number of critics noted that the text was clear and present in the opera, that it “seems to emanate from everywhere”. This was my proudest achievement. Kane’s text was a libretto just waiting to be set, full of music. Aside from passages of dense poetry, there are song forms, conversations, extracts from psychological tests, prosaic medical notes, descriptions of dreams – and, streaked throughout, the darkest of humour. I tried to find musical equivalences: love songs, musical humour, percussion dialogues to grasp the banality of psychiatry, contrasted with moments of deeply expressive, impassioned opera. I threw as many ideas at it as I could, and the text reciprocated … it opened floodgates of imagination. A text such as this is a rare and precious thing.
Over the following months I began to process the experience. Aside from the confidence boost, the success of 4.48 kickstarted another period of creative abundance: my close collaboration and friendship with director Ted Huffman. We wanted to make more, as quickly as possible. We talked every day about new projects, we watched shows, shared links, read, fantasised, critiqued. We applied for residencies, wrote pitches, talked to everyone we could. Since 4.48 we have made three operas and a handful of smaller pieces, for vocalists, instrumentalists, choirs, even schoolchildren; doubtless we will make more. It is joyous.
Reflecting on this as I prepare for the 10th anniversary revival at the Royal Opera House makes me realise how Kane’s text has for ever shaped the way I think about and make my work. These days I better understand those gut instincts that led me to her text and guided me through composing. I can now articulate the questions it provoked, the questions that I still ask of any new project: What is the relationship between character and performer? Who is speaking, and to whom? What does singing or speaking mean? How do we create a frame for performers to tell our story to an audience directly, without artifice? How do we create community on stage? Above all, I cherish Kane’s creation of a theatre of the imagination, not a theatre of representation. Tell, but don’t show.
Kane has taught me more about opera than any opera ever has. It saddens me that, more than 25 years after the publication of her text, post-dramatic or formally experimental work graces British opera stages so rarely. We’re hung up on dramatisation, on representation, on the suspension of disbelief. There are so many other ways to skin a cat.
While the opera has had several other performances and productions in the US, France and Germany, coming back to our original production and watching a new cast tackle it afresh has been a real pleasure – and also underlines the unique achievement of the original cast. Alongside, I’m writing and directing my first music theatre piece without Ted, The Alonetimes, a collaboration with Jennifer Walshe, which has its UK premiere on 19 October at the Schwarzman Centre in Oxford. A brand new adventure and returning to where I began, all in the same week. I’m incredibly lucky, and I owe it to that meeting with 4.48 Psychosis, all those years ago.