The easiest thing to say is that it is derived from the Greek word for "actor" – someone who pretends that they are something that they are not. Only a handful of people had been allowed access to the script; neither Macdonald or Simon Kane were willing to talk to the press. Psychosis, which was performed for the first time at the Royal Court in 2000, that causes discomfort to the hilt.

A great deal of ink has been spilled on Kane’s too-short life and death, and not nearly enough on the story of the play itself.There were a few who left the play in the beginning itself, because it was just too much to cope with it mentally. The controversy began over Blasted, Kane’s first play presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1995. So, the name comes from that idea, that you can’t pin a person down to a certain idea, to a way of thinking, because human beings are just a lot more complicated than that.

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.

Indian director Arvind Gaur performed this play as a one-woman show with British actress Ruth Sheard in 2005. Certain images are repeated within the script, particularly that of "hatch opens, stark light"; a repeated motif in the play is " serial sevens" which involves counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory.

is infinitely more than a suicide note: “People take her story on and then they infuse her work with that: I find that really frustrating. Some of Chicago’s most talented theater artists have brought their unique points of view to our stages as part of the Visiting Company Initiative. Macdonald eventually settled on a cast of three: Daniel Evans, who had worked with Kane on Cleansed, and fellow actors Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter. So, my journey in this project began by trying to comprehend her previously written plays,” says Durga. In fact, there have been instances in the past when audiences have requested to open the curtains while watching it.

One thing everyone can agree on: nearly two decades after it was written, and as the circumstances of Kane’s own death recede, 4. Bringing out my own pain and emotions became pertinent to be honest with the role I essayed on stage,” she explains. When he got the news that his sister had taken an overdose, Simon rushed to visit her in hospital, then went to her flat in Brixton to collect some belongings.

End of the day, theatre is a form of art and its aesthetics are crucial to keeping the audience’s attention. The grotesquerie of Kane’s theater is not simply self-indulgent; it is meant, very directly, to shock the audience out of their comfort zone and into a more nightmarish reality. Psychosis heralds a break with all theatrical conventions–the play reads more like a poem, without character distinctions or stage directions –and even presents much of Kane’s personal medical history–her struggle with antidepressants, suicidal tendencies and her philosophical wrestling with the idea of mortality.

All of us have battled anxiety issues at some point of our life, and working on this piece has absorbed us to a great extent. She points to Kane’s formal experimentalism, the startling urgency and precision of her language, the way the play itself invites the audience to experience a form of psychosis, in which reality dissolves even as it appears. 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.