With Crave I've now seen all of Sarah Kane's inevitably small canon of theatrical work; originally premiered under a pseudonym to avoid being judged on the playwright's notoriety, her penultimate play marks a shift of direction into a more abstract poetic style. It famously has no stage directions and the characters are lettered rather than named, leaving it up to the actors and director to find characters in the stream of words (by the time of her de facto suicide note 4:48 Psychosis, Kane had also dispensed with telling us which character says which line, or indeed how many characters there are.) It's a piece that defies an easy summary of what it's about, although like its successor it's built on despair - though rather than that wider existential horror this is more specifically rooted in having despaired of love. There's a failed relationship at the heart of Crave, an intense and highly sexual one and almost certainly abusive to some degree, although whether this is the voice of the abused or the abuser is as fluid as anything else here.Rather than four distinct characters we have different aspects of the same cry of pain, but slight differences in their voices do start to emerge: A (Jonathan Slinger) is (comparatively) chipper but has a disgust for many of his past actions, and is the one likely to talk in rambling parables.
B (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) is the most sexually charged, and sometimes starts speaking in Spanish or German; C (Erin Doherty) is the most alone, the most self-loathing and in the most pain. And if one of the characters is going to step back from their own pain and take the role of a therapist digging into the others' truths, it'll be M (Wendy Kweh.) The institutional grey tracksuits of Alex Lowde's costume design back up this idea of a group therapy session, but that's about as literal as Tinuke Craig's production gets.
Each actor stands on a treadmill that inexorably pulls them back as they try to go forward, a pretty literal staging but an effective one, especially as the quartet struggle to ever be on the same level as each other, with the treadmill speeds constantly changing, and varying between characters. And Craig has a couple of variations up her sleeve as to how the metaphor works, that do, against all the loss of hope in the voices on stage, suggest that a way forward is possible. Crave is the sort of play where you appreciate the performances and production rather that being able to get to the heart of it on a first viewing, and here it's a painful but satisfying experience.
In terms of the live stream itself Chichester's offering is a mixed bag: Artistically it's been well thought-out - Ravi Deepres' projections form a major part of the staging, and they've been integrated effectively into the live video as well. I was less sold on the streaming platform, booktixlive, though - technically usable on an Amazon Fire TV stick and similar devices, in practice it's a faff to set up, and after streaming perfectly for the half-hour "test" before the show started, the connection failed as soon as the lights went down, meaning I missed the first minute or two. Using it on the laptop seems the safest option, but isn't great if more than one person is watching. Still, live streaming services are bound to be something that'll develop and improve over the years, as now the genie's out of the bottle I can imagine them carrying on even once the current need for them is gone. Crave is one of the shows that's fallen victim to the second lockdown coming just as the theatres started to reopen, but as it had a short run anyway it's only having to cancel three days' worth of performances to live audiences, and they will still go ahead online. Let's hope that even as stream technology improves it's not too long before we're not so heavily reliant on it.
Crave by Sarah Kane is booking until the 4th of November at Chichester Festival Theatre, and until the 7th of November as a live stream.
Running time: 50 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
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