Theatrical Psychosis and Analysis: Harold Pinter’s <i>New World Order</i> and Sarah Kane’s <i>4:48 Psychosis</i>

ABSTRACT In staging both conscious and unconscious fear in often threatening contexts, plays by Sarah Kane and Harold Pinter invite audiences to identify with the characters’ fears and anxieties, just as the the plays’ characters may (or may not) play out some of the fears of the audience. In Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and Harold Pinter’s New World Order (1995), the stage is the site of psychic projections and processes enacted by characters and situations, either in specifically psychoanalytic scenarios, as in 4.48 Psychosis or in New World Order’s face-offs in which characters bully a victimized character, both physically and emotionally. In both plays, the dramas of analysis and belittlement operate simultaneously, as the plays’ performed dramatic actions expose elements of the characters’ unconscious fears and desires, while also provoking audience identifications with and analyses and projections of the same fears and desires. In this sense theatre itself becomes an analytic process as one way of inciting audience response.