This student edition presents both the text of the play with explanatory commentary and notes, helping readers and performers understand this last play by controversial playwright Sarah Kane. 4.48 Psychosis is a tough, sparse and moving work and is full of energy and beauty in spite of its bleak themes. The play sees the ultimate narrowing of Sarah Kane's focus in her work. The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of phychosis: the mind itself. A single voice, dragged through therapy and endless medication, reveals the true experience of clinical depression. This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient. This Student Edition features full supporting notes to help the student reader or performer understand this influential and challenging work.

With her controversial stage art, the young playwright Sarah Kane broke new dramaturgic ground and made a lasting impression that changed British drama forever. Even though it is part of the canon covering post-war drama, Kane’s work has often met with misunderstanding and fierce criticism due to the uncountable representations of atrocities. How can we make sense of Kane’s seemingly crude and bleak theatre? Mainly concentrating on the play Cleansed, the author examines the nature of violence in Kane’s writing. What purpose does it serve? Is it simply employed for its shock value? Or is it rather used as a metaphor? Kane herself considered her third full-length play as a play about love. In suggesting a figurative reading of the late playwright’s texts, the author shows how Kane embraces violence as a metaphor of the various sufferings both love and life perpetrate upon the human being. Locked beneath the revolting cruelties, we can find a vivid theatricality, powerful images, and a unique rhythm and sound of language.

Accompanying CD-ROM provides short film clips that reinforce the key concepts and topics in each chapter.

Length: 1 act.

Caryl Churchill is widely considered to be one of the most innovative playwrights to haveemerged in post-war British theatre. Identified as a socialist feminist writer, she is one of the few British women playwrights to have been incorporated into the dramatic canon. Top Girls is one of Churchill's most well known and often studied works, using an all female cast to critique bourgeois feminism during the Thatcher era.

Two provocative new plays from the notorious author of BLASTED, which probe the nightmarish world of twenty-something who are coming to grips with sexuality, social ostracism and the effects of drugs. Cleansed will premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in the spring of 1998 and Crave premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, during the 1998 Edinburgh Festival.