'Crave' by Sarah Kane

Cackling and grinning manically, four actors crawl across the room and onto the stage to a distorted recording of “Over the Rainbow.” And so Crave begins. Sarah Kane is like Sylvia Plath on crack, with a handful of brand-new names for mental traumas. But Crave departs from Kane's usual rape-cannibalism-incest-necrophilia concoctions: four characters, a, b, c, and m, no set, plot or stage directions to speak of. The dialogue between the four is off, like a broken record, it plays over and over again, without coalescing into a coherent whole.

Even though most of the play is endowed with a Waiting For Godot-like stillness, Daniel Pitt chooses to make his actors crawl around on stage, nervously gobbling the jelly on the floor or smearing it all over their bodies. This was a good decision, as it brings out the best of the script. Particularly heartwrenching is c's arresting monologue about the longing to love, which ends with him raping the woman who rejected him. This production does Kane's later work justice: it utilizes the space judiciously, negotiating an unfortunately placed pillar in the centre of the venue while breaking up the monotony of Kane's half nonsensical semi-phrases that have earned her either respect or loathing in the theatre world.