Crave (1998)
Crave at the Royal Court Upstairs (Ambassadors)
When Crave premiered on the Edinburgh Fringe in August, the Fringe programme had the running time down as an hour and a half. Not a short play but not a long one either. In the event, it was a gross over-estimate. When the cast walked off the stage after less than 45 minutes, the audience sat stunned, not sure whether this was the end or perhaps only an unannounced interval.
Few things in this new play by Sarah Kane follow protocol. It is stretching the definition of the word, in fact, to even call it a play.
Four characters walk onto the stage and seat themselves into a line of chat-show-like leather swivel chairs, calf-high tables topped with water in front of them. An old man, a young man, a young woman, a middle-aged woman. And they talk. Two of the characters switch seats at one point but, aside from this and some demonstrative sitting, there is no action.
The momentum is all in the dialogue, if again, it can be called that. Word association is more appropriate. Words and thoughts – spoken sometimes briefly, sometimes at length, always with emotion – pinball jerkily, disjointedly from the mouth of one character to the next. There are some gems of lines, the kind you’d expect to turn up in a dictionary of quotations – or on a bumper sticker. ‘No one survives life’, for instance, and ‘Love by its nature desires a future.’
The precise development of the relationships between the characters is difficult to decipher. The old man is not a rapist, just a paedophile who violated the young woman as a child and continues to pursue her into adulthood. The middle-aged woman wants a child, wants to not die alone; she settles for the alcoholic young man and a fling that becomes yet another dependency. Power shifts continuously and all four become damaged, deranged and terribly bitter. Such is the nature of love, loss and desire.
Is Crave theatre? Of a sort, though really more group performance poetry than anything. That doesn’t make it any less mesmerising. Just brief.
Terri Paddock
