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

Week #1 : 'Miss Julie' by August Strindberg

Miss Julie..... Mistress Julie...... Mademoiselle Julie....... Oh, how your prestigious birthright belies you...

August Strindberg wrote a gripping tale of a society woman bent on seducing her fathers porter into a sexual experience to prove that she still has power over men of any status after her disastrous engagement that has just ended. The events that follow allow herself to be wrapped in his tangling web of seductions all to be humiliated, belittled and ultimately manipulated into sacrificing herself in the end.

Written in 1888, 'Miss Julie' was so controversial, it was not produced in Swedish theatres for over 14 years. This seminal text of the Naturalism period, that Strindberg himself described as a "modern psychological drama", has been depicted as volatile, psychologically turbulent and captivating. 

Strindberg influenced such writers as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Ingmar Bergman (to name just a few) with his intellectual thoughts on morals and class structures all wrapped up in characters that were multidimensional and contained within a plot that was not fabricated. 

'Miss Julie' is all this and so much more!

                    

The action happens across the span of a single night where societal status is challenged and crumbled beneath the weight of seductions from both Julie and John. Both try to best each other with desperate actions that would shake the morals of any human being, yet John takes it in his stride and cuttingly overhands the dangerously enticing situation to manipulate and ruin Julie for his own gratifications.

The script allows a man and a woman to create a growing psychological tension on stage that not only covers sexual attraction and eventual domination, but the mechanisms of polarised upbringings of the upper and lower classes of society and their desperate layers of control.

          "Why do you go about in livery on a holiday evening? Take it off at once." (Julie to John when in the company of his fiancée - the kitchenmaid)

John, who will not be bested in any situation, seemingly plays right into Julie's flirtations and enables the situation to grown beyond her power. As the night spins beyond anyones control, the status of men and women, class distinction and the strong and the weak are put to the test.  John clearly sets the tone and in one fowl swoop, cheapens Julie's actions and a forces a flow of abuse onto her:

          "No one in my station of life could have made herself so cheap as the way you carried on tonight, my girl... Have you ever seen a girl in my position offer herself in the way you did?" 

Strindberg was quite specific about the way in which he wanted his play to be seen: a small stage, the single setting of a small working kitchen and fireplace, with a glass door leading to the garden. Other items on stage reveal a large bell and a horn for the residents of the upper house to contact their staff. (Later on also Julie's pet canary and large knife...)

The dialectic of class conflict is delivered through the only openings to other parts of the household: the staff quarters on one side of the stage and the opulent gardens on the other. The kitchen then becomes the intermediary between both worlds. The very personalised relationship display between Julie and John in this middle ground forces the tension out in the open where the themes of love, desire and control in a world with rigid class conventions override any visceral perceptions. 

Strindberg's stage directions are almost stifling in specificity in parts, but kept relatively open when the dialogue becomes overwrought with dramatics and emotions. Writing around the same time as Ibsen, whom also heavily focused on the specificity of the actors movements; Strindberg knew exactly how he wanted his writings to be imagined on stage and did so in these directions to whomever tackled his script. (Oh,and painted  backdrops were definitely not allowed on a Strindberg production!) 

In 2012, Yael Farber re-imagined Strindberg's play to post-apartheid era with tremendous success, winning the Carol Tambour Best of Edinburgh Award. Claire Simpson reviewed the performance for Fringe Reviews: "One of those rare exceptional productions where all the elements - writing, direction performance and technical direction - combine to become more than the sum of its parts, this powerful Mies Julie lets out a cry of anguish for today's South Africa that won't be easily forgotten." Rory Eddington also commented on the performance: "While individually giving exhilarating performances, the chemistry between Bongile Mantsai and Hilda Cronje is torrid, creating a perspiration drenched eroticism. Yet perhaps the most enduring image is that of John clutching both shovel and scythe at the play’s denouement as if to ask one simple question: is this the only way? Sexy, dangerous and riveting."

     

Not so successful was the French adaptation in 2011 staring Juliette Binoche, however more for the bold minimalist modern setting rather than the performances. The reviews for this show focus on the design rather than the acting, which is disappointing considering Juliette Binoche is renowned for creating deep and often beguiling female characters. One comment made by Michael Billington for 'The Guardian' concluded that "In the end, the production makes little sense. Strindberg dreamed of a 'small stage and a small auditorium' where the entire focus would be on the situation's emotional reality. Instead the play is presented as a pictorial spectacle with the emphasis on a mood of debauched glamour and where either the glass screens or the lighting render the actors' faces semi-visible."

     

I feel that I could easily write a thesis discussing the psychological complexities of this play, let alone the numerous adaptations of the text. However, I think I may have to stop here as I draw alarmingly close to the 1,000 word mark.....

I chose this play to be my first as it will be on at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in August/Sept with aussie actor Brendan Cowell as John.  I had the chance to work with Letitia Cáceres at MTC and I am really interested to see how she will tackle this with Simon Stone's adaptation of the original text.

http://belvoir.com.au/productions/miss-julie/

Next week: 'The League of Youth' by Henrik Ibsen