One 2009 revival even featured an actor who, with her boyish features and close-cropped hair, looked unnervingly like Kane herself: it was theatre as raw autobiography, a Sylvia Plath-like howl into the abyss. 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. The opera was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society for Best Large Scale Composition 2017, a British Composer Award for Best Stage Work 2017, a UK Theatre Award for Best Opera 2016 and it was shortlisted for an Olivier Award for Best Opera in 2017 and a Southbank Award for Best Opera in 2017. 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. End of the day, theatre is a form of art and its aesthetics are crucial to keeping the audience’s attention.

In the arts, we are so used to discourses on mental health being measured, subtle or expressed only in parts that any deviation seems out of the mould, ambitious or risky. Other themes that run throughout the script, in addition to depression, are those of isolation, dependency, relationships, and love. 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. 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. 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.The spring after her death, Simon Kane contacted director James Macdonald, who had debuted both Blasted and Cleansed; he agreed to take the project on, and set about trying to persuade the Royal Court. McInnes, who now works as a director, admits that at first she wasn’t sure: “I remember reading it on the train home, I couldn’t get a handle on it. It felt like we had a responsibility to give breath and life to this amazing thing that Sarah had created. A Bangalore Little Theatre (BLT) production, the play is directed by Srinivas Beesetty, with Naman Roy as the assistant director, who has also acted in the play.

Stage productions of the play vary greatly, therefore, with between one and several actors in performance; the original production featured three actors. 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. It was her last work, first staged at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 23 June 2000, directed by James Macdonald, nearly one and a half years after Kane's death on 20 February 1999. 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.

Replete with shocking confessions, piercing monologues and raw visuals, there aren’t any positive takeaways from the one-hour-12-minute performance to be honest. Its language varies between dialogues, confessions and contemplative poetic monologues reminiscent of schizophasia.