Week #5 : 'Crave' by Sarah Kane

M - I don't want to die alone and not be found till my bones are clean 

and the rent is overdue.

A - I am not what I am, I am what I do.

C - No one can hate me more than I hate myself.

B - The fags aren't killing me fast enough.

These are the characters of Sarah Kane's 'Crave'. Four disturbed and self-destructive characters of interweaving dialogues where there is no clear ending or beginning for any of them.

It remains unclear whom is talking to whom, if at all.  Multiple conversations, multiple plot lines, multiple phrases of repetition, yet you get this unyielding feeling that no one is really talking to anyone and that no one truly understand what the others are saying.  Yet you get the feeling that each character really does understand the others.

The four characters, known only by singular letters, have distinct personalities and tones within the script:

A is an older man whom has lost his partner.  We are not given specifics to the facts behind her departure... He admits that he is a pedophile (we can take a pretty clear guess and to why she left).

B, a younger man is intent on killing himself with booze and cigarettes, but without it looking like a suicide.

C is a younger woman whom, we assume, was abused by her father with only her mother as solitude.  She is a sufferer of anorexia and bulimia.

M, an older woman, who is desperate to have a baby before she dies.

The premise of 'Crave' is.... well..... I'm not really sure how to describe it....  
The play really has no plot per say, it is a non conventional, non physical indication about four different characters journeys towards love, truth, lies, and self destruction... yet there is something about the script that draws you in, wanting to know more, wanting the characters to give up more information about themselves.  There is no location, no time setting, no tangible information to allow you to grasp onto anything.  All you have is this wanting to find out more - Who are A, B, C & M? Where are they? Why are they here? How are they connected? Is there even a connection to be made?
It is a fascinating and riveting play that allows you into the psyche of these four characters.

Sarah Kane, a inherently private person who wrote experimentally and with an uncompromising vision for In-Yer-Face theatre and it's forms.  She was heralded as one of the most talented playwrights of the 1990s.  Unfortunately, the world lost this prolific writer in 1999 when she committed suicide.  Mark Ravenhill (a fellow playwright who wrote 'Shopping and Fucking') labelled her "a contemporary writer with a classical sensibility who created a theatre of great moments of beauty and cruelty, a theatre to which it was only possible to respond with a sense of awe."

'4.48 Psychosis' (which was posthumously directed at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000) is often stated as her suicide note, but I personally think we need to be careful not to read into all of her plays as a layered version of her life and depression as we can often do with other poets whom have suffered from debilitating illnesses.

This short documentary (4 minutes) gives a fantastic snapshot of her and her works and their importance within the post-modern theatrical society.

Her dialogue in 'Crave' is less of a dramatic script but more of a tonal poem that is fractured and lacking direction of any linear form.  For instance, over 2 pages we are surrounded by the words 'Yes' and 'No' repearted over and over by all of the characters in no repetitive format.  Sometimes the characters respond to each other, mostly it seems they talk to themselves, infrequently you can follow a characters lines (disregarding the lines in-between) to follow a plot angle of a particular character. Each character also has their prophetic moments in this seemingly ramble of random dialogue. 

C - Depression's inadequate.  A full scale emotional collapse is the minimum required to justify letting everyone down.

A - Death is my lover and he wants to move in.

B - There's a difference between articulacy and intelligence.  I can't articulate the difference but there is one.

M - There's something very unflattering about being desired when the other person is so drunk they can't see.

Kane deliberately uses no stage directions in her poetry driven plays (she does use them in her more linear scripts - 'Cleansed' and 'Blasted', and sparingly in 'Phaedra's Love' - however they do not interfere with the dialogue and are more used in moments of silence and to frame a particular emotive premise).

Is this really true?
It takes an imaginative mind to work
towards a truly inspiring art form that has
been created by another imaginative person.

All of her five plays (and one 10 minute screen play) do not conform to the rules of grammar, but use punctuation to indicate delivery of the lines instead.  Kane had a clear idea on how she wanted her works to be heard, not staged.  

Her plays are tough, terse and troubled yet deal with a tremendous amount of compassion and drive.  (yes, I see what I have done there with the alliteration... I didn't mean it!)

Due to the difficult language and inherently difficult staging, so little Kane productions are directed that it was difficult to find a recent review of 'Crave'.  

The most recent production that I can find was in 2012 (the previous one was 2008) in York at the Theatre Royal.  It was played as a double bill with a Russian play - 'Illusions' by Ivan Viripaev.  Reviewer Lyn Gardner writes "... there is noting remotely cosy about this evening, which turns despair into an art form and constantly asks what it is that makes us human: our capacity to love, or our capacity to lie to others - and most of all to ourselves?

During Crave, the audience experiences a universe seen though a cracked mirror; Illusions begin with the expectation of a punchline, but as it continues it starts to feel as if we, huddled on the stage and staring out at the empty auditorium, are the joke.  it's like a bedtime story gone awry.  The threat is our inability to make sense of a shifting universe, to really know another human being and keep love constant." 

Sarah Kane's plays will never date.  They will endure though time and space.

Next Week: 'Electra' by Euripides