Psychosis premiered one month after her suicide, the connection between the playwright and her work was apparent to all. All three actors set about learning the text in its entirety; every moment would be rehearsed, but in keeping with the script’s freeform feel, it was decided that some sections should be left to the moment – if one person started a speech, the lines would be theirs for that performance. 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.

They include Phaedra’s Love, based on Seneca’s classic story of a scheming mother and son, and a later play, Cleansed, which centered on the survival of love amongst a group of inmates in a futuristic concentration camp. If Kane is not exactly part of the establishment – the thought would probably have amused and horrified her – she is now a canonical figure, celebrated in many countries worldwide. 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. The vivid and raw nature of the text made it difficult for us to detach from it when not at rehearsals, let alone taking artistic liberties during its making,” says actor Shatarupa Bhattacharyya, who portrays a state of Sarah’s mind, in which she has already gone through a lot in life, and has now “accepted and made peace with the fact that death is her final destination”.

Psychosis, which was performed for the first time at the Royal Court in 2000, that causes discomfort to the hilt. Some portions appear to be dialogue, perhaps between a patient and a dictatorial clinician (“ Oh dear, what’s happened to your arm? Designer Jeremy Herbert created a setting that was as stark as the text, a single large mirror suspended at a 45-degree angle over a plain white floor – visually elegant, but also a metaphor for the script’s prism of multiplying personalities.

To me the heart of it is a love story – what does it mean to love, can we love, all those questions. In 2003, there was a successful staging in Brazil, which played to a full house for six consecutive months in São Paulo, and also gained media attention for its defying gender aspect, as the role was performed by male actor Luiz Päetow. In the years since, the myth has only hardened – Kane the tortured martyr, driven to put her own psyche on stage. 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 and Dresden.Sarah Kane’s life and career came to an abrupt end, when the playwright hanged herself at a London hospital in February 1999. So, my journey in this project began by trying to comprehend her previously written plays,” says Durga. The plot demands a deeper analysis of what mental health issues are — what’s the right way to attend to people suffering from depression; how empathetic and compassionate one needs to be; and who decides on the extent of medication and institutional care,” Shatarupa elaborates.

It was crucial to Kane to show depression with all the accuracy she could summon, he adds: “Mental illness is so often sentimentalised, or portrayed as madness – I hate that word. Everyone I spoke to remembers a moment at the very end of the performance, where after the play’s haunting final line, “please open the curtains”, Evans and McInnes opened a window in the roof of the theatre, allowing the June night to flood into the silence. She was there to talk about her plays – Blasted, which had scandalised and horrified the critical establishment back in 1995, and her equally mould-breaking dramas Cleansed and Crave, both of which had opened earlier that year.Only a handful of people had been allowed access to the script; neither Macdonald or Simon Kane were willing to talk to the press. Narrating stories of depression and anxiety on stage can be difficult, especially if the storyline sounds more like a ‘suicide note’ than the script of a play. 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. Who knows it could also be self-love or her desire to find someone — a ray of hope that would serve as a purpose for living,” says Srinivas, adding, “Reading the play multiple times, once as part of Kahe Vidushak Foundation’s Natya Alochan, gave me a different perspective of the script. 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.