Composer Philip Venables adapts Sarah Kane's play "4.48 Psychosis" into opera, with the work returning to the Royal Opera House a decade after its premiere.
Venables conceived the opera during a sleepless overnight flight from New York to the UK in January 2015, after attending the Prototype festival of new opera. He spent six hours reading and annotating Kane's text while making notes on his laptop. "Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life," Venables writes. "The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera."
Kane's text, according to Venables, triggered a creative surge. "Sarah Kane's text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas," he recalls. "I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around." Venables describes the experience as a "fever dream," with his mind cycling through text, music, dramaturgy and theatre without pause.
The resulting opera adaptation marks a significant creative milestone for Venables. He reflects on the work's impact on his career, describing how the project changed his life. The opera's return to the Royal Opera House represents a moment of recognition for both the composer's vision and Kane's 1999 play, which was her final work before her death that year. Kane's spare, fragmented text has proven fertile ground for musical interpretation across the decade since Venables' premiere.
The Royal Opera House staging brings the work back to London audiences a full ten years after it first premiered, suggesting sustained interest in this unconventional operatic adaptation.