1 And let him observe that this is not magic but work, my friends. Gedichte 1934–1941 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961), Vol. IV.

2 Brink Productions is a South Australian theatre company, most of whose members were trained at the same institution: the Flinders University Drama Centre in Adelaide. In a reversal of the normal practice of theatre companies in Australia, the permanent members of the group are the actors, who administer and run the company, while directors are chosen by the actors and employed to work on particular productions.

3 The Department of Performance Studies funds one project a year in which professional actors rehearse in facilities provided by the university and permit students to observe their process. These projects are part of the practical training provided for honours students preparing to undertake participant observation in professional theatre companies. They are recorded, usually using two cameras and making a live edit, and a team of three students takes responsibility for the documentation of each day's work. Two are responsible for image and sound while the third writes a log detailing time, tape references and a brief indication of the activities involved. This log is a crucial element in making the documentation accessible to users after the event.

4 Quotations from director or actors are taken from my field notes backed up by the video recording of the workshop made by the students under the guidance of Russell Emerson, technical director of the Department of Performance Studies, and from interviews carried out by Russell Emerson and myself in Sydney in July 2004 and in Adelaide in October 2004.

5 Page numbers for quotations from the play are given in parentheses in the text and are taken from Kane, Sarah, 4.48 Psychosis (London: Methuen, 2002)Google Scholar. I use the term ‘section’ rather than ‘scene’ to refer to the twenty-four segments as ‘scene’ suggests some kind of narrative segmentation and even location in fictional place while these segments contain little suggestion of either.

6 Section 2 (pp. 3–4) is a densely written page containing a description of a state of mind (‘a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall’), a mini-narrative (‘and they were all there’), and exhortations to an unknown other (‘Don't let me forget’).

7 The impulse grid exercise involves actors taking up a position on the edges of the stage space and entering it only when they feel an impulse to do so. Once in the space, they may walk, run, sit, stand or lie, again according to their impulse of the moment and without letting what the others may be doing affect them. Then they must gradually open up to what the others are doing and begin to feed off each other's energy, still employing only the five permitted actions. Finally they bring the text into the action.

8 The Queen's Theatre in Adelaide is a vast dilapidated building that was built as a theatre in 1840 but only used for its original purpose for a few years before serving as a court house and lock-up, a horse bazaar and, throughout a large part of the twentieth century, a parking facility. It is a huge, dark, cavernous space that resonates strangely with Sarah Kane's small-scale, intensely wrought text.

9 The terminology used here is taken from my taxonomy of spatial function (see McAuley, Gay, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 24–35).CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Theatre space’ refers to the physical venue, ‘performance space’ refers to stage and auditorium in their relationship to each other, and there are three interconnected dimensions to the space the actors occupy in the performance: ‘stage space’ (the material reality of the stage), ‘presentational space’ (the set, props, lighting and other features that shape and order the stage space in the production in question), and ‘fictional place’ (the place or places where the dramatic action is supposed to be happening).

10 Interview with Geordie Brookman, 7 September 2004.

11 Vitez, Antoine, ‘Antoine Vitez’, Cahiers Théâtre Louvain, 46 (October 1981), p. 96Google Scholar. This is a contribution to a symposium called ‘Filmer le théâtre’ convened by Denis Bablet for the CNRS in Paris in 1977.

12 The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 10.