Crave, by Sarah Kane

AuthorSarah Kane

As a teenager, Sarah Kane was a committed Christian, but after her degree in drama at Bristol University and MA at Birmingham in Playwriting, she rejected these beliefs. As well as writing, she directed other author's work, and she also worked hard to encourage other writers in their work. For many years she battled with severe depression and in 1999, at the age of just 28, she committed suicicide.

Crave was Sarah Kane's fourth play. Her first, Blasted, opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs after an agent, Mel Kenyon, saw a performance of the first two scenes which Kane wrote while she was a student. It became hugely controvertial, with it's scenes of dark and violent brutality leading to attacks by critics and more widely by sections of the press, some of whom held Kane up as an example of (and on some occasions a contributor to) the decline of British society. However some notible fellow playwrights, including Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, came to Kane's defence.

Her next play, Phaedra's Love, is a modern reworking of the myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus, and was first performed in 1996, th year after Blasted. Like Blasted before it, and Cleansed which was staged two years later after it, it was dark in tone and featured graphic scenes of violence, and it's production was highly contentious. Although her later pieces 'Crave' and '4.48 Psychosis' were different in style, they had a similarly strong impact, and after her death her pieces have continued to be performed widely across Europe and to be cited as influential by many other writers.

Blasted (1995)
Phaedra's Love (1996)
Cleansed (1998)
Crave (1998)
Psychosis (1999)

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PlayCrave

CRAVE premiered at The Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in August 1998, but was first heard as a reading as part of a programme run by Paines Plough. Aired under the pseudonym, Marie Kelvedon; partly as a private joke, (Kane grew up in Kelvedon Hatch), but largely so the play could be heard without the attendant baggage of being written by "Sarah Kane, controversial author of Blasted". Kane produced the following fictional biography for Marie : "Marie Kelvedon is twenty-five. She grew up in Germany in British Forces accommodation and returned to Britain at sixteen to complete her schooling. She was sent down from St Hilda's college, Oxford, after her first term, for an act of unspeakable Dadaism in the college dining hall. She has had her short stories published in various European literary magazines and has a volume of poems Onzuiver ('Impure') published in Belgium and Holland. Her Edinburgh Fringe Festival debut was in 1996, a spontaneous happening through a serving hatch to an audience of one. Since leaving Holloway she has worked as a mini-cab driver, a roadie with the Manic Street Preachers and as a continuity announcer for BBC Radio World Service. She now lives in Cambridgeshire with her cat, Grotowski."

Since I first read the play I knew it had to be seen and heard if one is to have the opportunity to engage with even a fraction of what is happening in the play. Rehearsals have absolutely proved this. Someone once asked me if CRAVE was a play for the theatre. I answered in an almost indignant affirmative. And then I found this by Ian Shuttleworth in the FT...

"It isn't theatre," declared a friend after the London opening of Sarah Kane's Crave. I was surprised how strongly I disagreed, and how difficult I found my explanation. It is true that Kane's latest play has no plot in any conventional sense, nor any physical action; Kane's script denotes the characters by initial letters only, and includes no stage directions of any kind other than indicating where to leave a beat between what are almost invariably single, brief lines. The work resembles a spoken poem more than a play. Crave echoes Eliot's The Waste Land on many levels – quotation, oblique reference, occasional lines in other languages (German, Serbo-Croat, Spanish) and general atmosphere; the city to which the actors refer might as well be Eliot's "unreal city", their emptinesses and sufferings those of his characters... but far more passionately expressed. Even when the object of want is not articulated (as, aside from one bravura extended monologue, it scarcely ever is), the ferocity of the craving itself is palpable.
Given these circumstances, then, is Crave a play – is it, at any rate, a theatrical play rather than a radio piece? I believe fervently that it is, and that it gains more than most works from being presented in the living, visible, physically present flesh. Kane is painting fierce, impressionistic portraits of the turbulence in human hearts; for the work to be presented in any way less direct than this, with those hearts and mouths in the same space and time as we who witness and empathise with their longings, would be to cripple the work. It demands physical communion. That makes it theatre, and marvelous theatre at that."

And the last word to Sarah Kane.
"If a play is good, it breathes its own air and has a life and a voice of its own.
What you take that voice to be saying is no concern of mine.
It is what it is. Take it or leave it."

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The Bench Production

Characters

A	Terry Smyth
B	Jeff Bone
C	Robin Hall
M	Julie Wood

Crew

Director	Damon Wakelin
Producer	Charley Callaway
Stage Manager	John Wilcox

Director's Notes

Whenever anyone has asked me what CRAVE is about I have, perhaps flippantly, replied that I don't really know. This is not the usual stance for the director of a show, granted, but the truth is not so very far from the flippant. On the page, CRAVE can appear nigh on impenetrable; four unnamed characters, all of whom seem to constantly switch both character and stylistic form, in a near narrative-free text. Where does one start?

From the moment I first read the play, I knew there was something magical locked within it. The imagery is poignant, startling, original, savage, revelatory, beautiful and evocative – often all at the same time.

"What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.
or
"If you died it would be like my bones had been removed.
No one would know why, but I would collapse."

Even without the relative security of a readily identifiable narrative structure, the fundamental element of theatre lies in the interaction of characters in a given time, place and space. So that is where we started; who are these people and how are they connected? The choices we have made may not be Kane’s original intentions, but I feel it lives and breathes in a manner that is truthful, honest and unflinchingly direct.

"And if this makes no sense then you understand perfectly."

In identifying that M, (Julie Wood), is the central character we were able to extrapolate or trace back every exchange to her; from the physical and emotional abuse meted out by B, (Jeff Bone); to the interior dialogue and commentary provided by C, (Robin Hall), and again to the echoes of a past that M cannot escape provided by A, (Terry Smyth). We have made a sense of this play that conveys the stark beauty of Kane's language; that allows her, admittedly often quite dark, sense of humour to emerge and that allows her unexpected optimism to permeate its way through the tattered, shattered characters she has created for us.

"If I die here I was murdered by daytime television."

A word, maybe more, for the cast. Brave souls, all! Jeff, Julie, Robin and Terry have openly accepted every conceivable challenge and opportunity that a play like CRAVE throws your way. They have grappled with HOURS of textual analysis as we sought to define character, structure, meaning, intention, text and sub-text. They have wrestled stoically with a text so fragmented that I can only imagine how difficult it has been to learn – and then Terry had to learn that speech! (You’ll know which one I mean, I promise.) Once we started moving about, they have had to cope with choreography...yep; walking and talking at the same time. They have discovered that I am vaguely OCD when it comes to symmetry and particularly the exact location of centre stage. And through it all, we have laughed and laughed and laughed. The performances they have created are sincere, thoughtful, considered, honest and true. I am grateful to them and proud of them.

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Reviews

Portsmouth NewsMike Allen

Bench Raise Kane To Great Height

Don't go looking for indentifiable characters in Sarah Kane's play. They don't eve have names. Don't go looking for action or narrative. And don't whatever you do, go looking for cheap laughs.

Yet although the controversial writer of 'Blasted' and 'Cleansed' was never one to court easy favour with audiences, Crave has a strangely lyrical and elequent quality, and even a degree of admittedly bleak humour.

Bench Theatre capture these qualities well under what seems to be inspired direction by Damon Wakelin.

With no stage directions or even punctuation to help him and the four actors he often avoids the obvious in terms of movemet and inter-reaction, yet his decisions generally seem effortlessly right. No-one is likely to understand every word at a first hearing but every shade of meaning appears to be burnt into the minds and souls of actors Terry Smyth, Jeff Bone, Robin Hall and Julie Wood.

It is impossible, of course, to dissociate such despair from Sarah Kane's later suicide, yet the play ends on a pretty positive note.

The News, July 18th 2008

Southern Daily EchoHam Quentin

Review: Crave

Mostly free of a definite narrative, Sarah Kane's poetic drama must be interpreted differently by all who see or perform it. It says much for the work and for this production that this does not lead to any obscurity, lack of tension or absence of emotional engagement.

Two men (Jeff Bone and Terry Smyth) and two women (Robin Hall and Julie Wood) deliver rapid fire speeches and snatches of dialogue, that dramatise, among other things, lust, desire, perversion, love and the need for autonomy. Although a little too busy in places, director Damon Wakelin's staging mostly helps his very able cast to make the rapid transitions of character and feeling required, and his lighting design brings the show to an effective, moving conclusion.

But the actors deserve equal credit for the depth, variety and energy they give to their performances. Smyth's delivery of the show's only long speech was outstanding.

Daily Echo, 25th July 2008

Links

Production on Myspace

Production on Piczo

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Photographs

A (Terry)

M (Julie)

B (Jeff)

C (Robin)

One of the most tense moments of the piece

A more relaxed shot, from near the start of the play

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