only love can save me and love has destroyed me
crave
by sarah kane
Thursday 4 July -
Saturday 20 July 2002
Bats Theatre,
1 Kent Terrace, Wellington
Four unnamed characters in an unspecified time and place question
love's assault on the wholeness of the self in a bleak but somehow
uplifting world. The NZ premiere of a work by controversial UK
playwright
Sarah Kane.
cast:
James Stewart (A)
Carey Smith (B)
Tina Helm (C)
Eve Middleton (M)
Design & Photography Sar Ruddenklau; Production Manager
Eve Middleton; Posters Ian Freer & James Stewart;
Directed by David Lawrence
The first time I heard of Sarah Kane was the headline announcing her
suicide on the front page of
The Stage one Thursday morning in
February 1999. I was living in London at the time and fascinated by
the about-turn the media did in their attitude to her writing. Find
reviews of the original productions of
Blasted or
Phaedra's
Love and I can guarantee you'll encounter commentary that makes
the uncomplimentary stuff you'll find on some of the review pages on
this website seem pretty jovial and friendly by comparison.
Blasted was described
most famously as "a disgusting feast of
filth". More interesting to me was the reviewer who said, "Until
last night I thought I was immune from shock in any theatre. I am
not." Some of the more mature reviews look beyond the violence and
brutality but the unanimous view seemed to be that her plays were
appalling at best, with one critic questioning the judgement of any
theatre that would programme them. The
Daily Mail's Jack
Tinker was so vilifying in his spleen that Kane named the sadistic
torturer in Cleansed after
him. Crave was written
under a pseudonym in order to escape the inevitable "from the
controversial author of Blasted"
label. In the wake of her
death, of course, some radical revision in thought has occurred -
now critics claim Sarah Kane was the most important British
playwright of the 1990s.
I sought out the first two plays quickly - I had hoped to come back
to New Zealand with an arsenal of new plays to put on. I read and
saw a lot of stuff I thought would be great at Bats and was always
surprised when I returned to NZ to find that Circa or Downstage had
already grabbed the plays before I'd even had the chance. I obtained
the double volume of Blasted
and Phaedra's Love with
its wonderful King Lear-invoking
cover. I read Phaedra's
Love first, determined to enjoy it despite the 30-odd reviews
saying it was juvenile and gratuitous. As a modernized Greek
tragedy, I hoped it might be exactly what I was looking for...but
by the end I just found it juvenile and gratuitous. Not so with
Blasted, though. I had
thought in light of my love of
Titus Andronicus, The Spanish Tragedy
and Tourneur's plays
that I would never be shocked or disturbed by violence in the theatre
again. By the time I'd read the series of vignettes that end
Blasted I needed to have a
long lie down. Neither play was
suitable - I didn't like
Phaedra's Love and didn't believe I
knew any actors that would be prepared to do half the stuff in
Blasted, nor could I see how
Blasted could be staged
without a ton of money to spend on making everything as realistic
as possible (sorry to those who like expressionism - while I agree
that you couldn't, for instance, stage the rats or the sunflower in
Cleansed realistically,
I don't think there's anything even
remotely emotionally effecting about expressionist staging and,
however people have tried to stage
Blasted over the last 8
years, I believe it was written to provoke a severe emotional
response and must be staged as naturalistically as possible to work).
So much of the literature I've come across says we should ignore
the fact that Sarah Kane took her own life and try to consider
these plays just as plays rather than as an elongated suicide note
or cry for help. But I find it impossible to separate the writer
from the work as I think that's a huge part of the appeal and
complexity of the plays, not to mention a vital contribution
to the understanding of them.
In April 2001 I spent a few days in Auckland after teaching the
Shakespeare course for the second (and what turned out to be the
last) time at the National Youth Drama School in Hawkes Bay. I
felt like I'd come full circle - the year before I'd had a wonderful,
inspiring week and it had seemed like the first time in
years that my
brain had been functioning at its full capacity. It was the
beginning of questioning exactly what I wanted out of life and
realizing that deep down I was profoundly miserable by some of
the choices I'd made and the circumstances I was then living in.
A year on, returning to the National Youth Drama School was not
the great experience it had been the first time around - instead
of an onto-it, enthusiastic class I had a bunch of grumpy,
difficult teenagers, many of whom either didn't want to be doing
the class or didn't want to be taught by me. I never really
recovered confidence after the first, difficult day, and the rest
of the week was hard slog. But it was the first week since my
marriage break-up four months earlier where I wasn't thinking
about my wife every minute of the day and the first week where I
felt like I could
function as an individual human being. But in spite of all these
feelings, the overwhelming feeling was one of depression; that I
was a worthless human being who couldn't teach, who couldn't act
or direct but had just had the occasional fluke or lucky break.
Regardless of any good things that might have been happening,
ultimately my cats felt like the only reason I had to get up
every day and continue with my life.
That week in Auckland I obtained a copy of
Crave. I was
a little surprised, especially after
Blasted and
Phaedra's Love, that it
had no stage directions, the
characters were nameless and there was no discernable plot.
I read it on the overnight train from Auckland back to Wellington
and it blew my mind. Like
Hamlet did when I was 15, here
was a play that understood exactly what I was feeling and going
through; here was a play that confirmed that life was not worth
living; here was a despairing, angry play that said all the things
I wanted to say to my wife. Those first few readings made little
sense to me on a practical level (i.e. what the story was/might be
or who the characters were) but on a psychological and emotional
level I engaged with it immediately. I arrived home Friday morning;
on Saturday we had the first full cast readthrough of
Volpone
- the wheels of the trilogy were beginning to turn - and that night,
in between dinner and wine (I cooked a gigantic meal and squeezed all
the actors into my tiny flat), I said to Carey, Eve, James and Tina,
"We're going to do this play next year after we do
Hamlet."
In retrospect it seems odd that every show I directed in 2002 -
Bacchanals or non-Bacchanals - exorcised some personal demon in a
way, be it my father, dead friends, ex-wives and so on.
I spent the next year trying to explain to people who Sarah Kane was -
virtually no one in NZ had ever heard of her, despite how many
productions the five plays she wrote received throughout the rest of
the world. Sharyn Duncan at BATS was interested and keen, and
tentatively programmed the show for July 2002. She'd spoken with
a co-op who were keen on doing
Love and Understanding, a great,
grim play by Joe Penhall - another great 90s UK playwright that NZ had
never heard of - and Sharyn thought that the two shows could form a
double bill. The group wanting to do the Joe Penhall play fell
through, however, and Downstage eventually beat them to having the
first production in Wellington of a Penhall play with their staging
of Blue/Orange. Even though
BATS is not usually the theatre
you'd expect to find current UK plays being staged at, the energy
and anger of the writings of Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill
and Anthony Neilson is not, to my mind, well-suited to the safe
environments of Circa or Downstage. Over the next few months I had
dreams in which another theatre would announce that they were doing
the plays - and indeed was disturbed when I spoke to someone who was
seriously thinking about doing
4.48 Psychosis in May 2002,
even though it never eventuated - but before too long I heard back
from Sarah Kane's agents and paid the licence fee. To my joy - and
I guess it'll be my wee place in theatre history - I would be
directing the first professional production of a Sarah Kane play
in New Zealand.
Despite the happy time we'd had doing
Hamlet, Carey and I,
at least, felt that the days of the large cast Bacchanals shows
should be left behind. Whenever I work with a large cast I spend
the rehearsal process vowing I'll never do so again. But once
the show is up and running or over, I often forget all about
the hardships. It's so hard, especially when you're not paying
people, to co-ordinate everyone to be in the same place at
the same time; to get everybody to give the same level of energy
and commitment. Often during the Trilogy it would take only one
tired or hung-over actor amongst fourteen to destroy the focus
of a full run-through. But when there're less of you, there's
more onus on everyone to give 100%. Even the notion of being
able to fit the entire company in one car was uplifting. And
with Carey, Eve, James and Tina I knew I was working with four
very well-matched actors in terms of attitude and ability.
Casting was obvious - all four actors came to the same conclusions
about who should play what part.
Returning to reading the play a year later I was in a much more
balanced frame of mind but the play still seemed to say exactly
what I was feeling. The joy of the writing is that it is so
complex and multi-layered; whereas initially it seemed to affirm
my feelings of hate and despair, it now seemed to affirm love and
redemption through those two mighty opposites, cruelty and compassion.
I had no idea how I would direct it, and the actors each confessed
they liked the script but had no idea what it was actually about.
We knew that a large part of the rehearsal process would involve
textual detective work.
What we did decide early on was that we wanted to have things
projected - Eve had liked the projection of words onto the back
wall of BATS which had taken place in
Po@rt, a poetry
show I'd lit at the same time as we were doing
Wealth and Hellbeing. I thought
in such a text-based play as Crave
that projecting words would be great, but as we talked with Sar
and she developed her design ideas, it moved much more towards
images and away from words, bar subtitling the lines of dialogue
Carey's character spoke in Spanish, German and Serbo-Croation.
Sar, Eve's cousin, shifted to Wellington to study design at the
start of 2001 and volunteered to help out on
Hamlet.
Most nights she ran the front-of-house system, was an audience
wrangler, and most importantly she made the giant yellow Danish
crest that hung at the back of the stage in the downstairs space.
Crave would be the first
time we'd actually had an official
Designer for a Bacchanals show. While yet again the poster was
created by James and friend Ian Freer from my design, Sar took
all the photographs, decided on the actors' frocks and created
all the slides. There were about 50 of them in the hour-long show,
ranging from shots of empty, dirty streets to landscapes, hospital
corridors, faces, plane propellers and various other abstract
things that connected unconsciously with the text of the play.
The one other design idea we'd gone in with, and this one was more
conceived out of malice than any aesthetic value it might have, was
that we would be painting the space a different colour. Virtually
every show Carey and I had ever been involved in at BATS had
involved us being screwed over by the requirements of the 'main
bill' show. When we'd done
So, You're A Man (the comedy
show that Carey, myself, Taika Cohen, Jemaine Clement and Bret
McKenzie performed in Auckland, Wellington and Melbourne over
1996-97) there in 1996, we'd had to abandon most of the carefully
choreographed physical comedy in the show, because the play we
were sharing the space with had a giant, abstract set in the centre
of the stage which we had to perform around. For the first season
of Taika and Jemaine as The Humourbeasts we had to share BATS with
a show who'd painted the whole space red. But the more prevalent
memory was of
Margaret and Vanessa's Xmas Show
at BATS in
1999 (the show I met James and Eve doing). It was a late night,
physically rowdy show with a huge living room set and thirteen
heavily-booted actors throwing themselves all over the stage - and
we were sharing BATS with a one-woman show that had one chair on
stage and had painted the entire space a very rare shade of
post-it note yellow. We lost an entire day out of production
week because we made an unavoidable mess of the floor but there
wasn't enough paint left to do another coat, so actors spent the
day carefully scrubbing off the thousands of scuff-marks by hand.
Carey and I vowed that when we had a main-bill show at BATS, we
would repay any show sharing the space with the same inconvenience
and lack of fair play as had always been accorded us. So for
Crave we would paint the
entire back wall of the theatre as white as we possibly could.
Before we began rehearsals, we had a series of meetings at which
we read the play aloud again and again. I read reviews of every
production I could find and knew all the various extremes to which
Crave had been staged,
ranging from the original production,
in which the four actors sat in chairs and addressed the audience,
to productions in Europe that had given the play giant living room
sets or suspended the actors in the air on bungee cords. The
discussion page on the Sarah Kane website was also an incredible
resource - virtually every question we had about certain lines had
already been asked and answered, even if the answer was "We will
never know what this bit means!" Sarah Kane explained everything
to the original director and cast, who all swore never to reveal
what the real story behind the play is. Every time we read it
aloud we focused on a different thing - sometimes we just read
all of M's lines in isolation, to see what things they told us
about her character. Then we might read only M and C's lines,
to see what connections there might be between the two that
informed how we chose to interpret either character or certain
speeches or moments. Reading it again and again we decided on
what our interpretation of the 'story' would be; who we thought
the characters were and what bits might be staged as scenes
between characters, what bits might be characters in isolation
and what bits were four different parts of the same 'voice'.
"This is exactly the kind of play you hate!" said Carey during the
first of these sessions. It's well known that I hate theatre where
things are ambiguous and unusual just for the hell of it, where style
over-rules substance. I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent
human being and have come to the conclusion, after sitting through
so many shows where I've been convinced that I must be stupid for
not 'getting' it, that when I see theatre that makes no sense it's
the production's fault for being unclear rather than mine for being
stupid. I find such theatre patronizing and I've been infuriated
sometimes, asking directors afterwards, "What was that last scene
about?" and they've said, "It's what you make of it". This is a
total cheat and insulting of audiences' intelligence. Even if the
meaning is not clear,
the director and actors should always have an opinion or an angle on
it. In the case of Crave,
we were aware from the outset that
it is a bewilderingly complex piece of writing but we felt that so
long as we knew what
we were trying to say with it, meaning would somehow be conveyed
to audiences, and I was determined that if someone were to ask me
afterwards, "What was that last scene about?" I'd be able to tell
them emphatically rather than fob them off by admitting I didn't
actually know or had no real clear idea of what I was trying to
convey.
What still seems amazing to me in retrospect was that we only
rehearsed Crave for two
weeks. It transpired that BATS
would be available in the daytime for us to rehearse there, so
rather than the usual weeks/months of squeezing in time whenever
we could get it, we opted for two weeks' full time rehearsal at
BATS, beginning on Tuesday 18 June. The show opened two weeks
and two days later. I always remembered how, when rehearsing
The Frogs after years
of working with students and amateurs,
I was surprised when what I'd hoped to get through in a 3-hour
rehearsal was achieved the first time a scene was on the floor -
the joy of working with professional actors. Rehearsals for
Crave took place
while the worst show I've ever directed
in my career was playing in the evenings. This show had done a
lot to batter my confidence and self-belief and had been the
reverse of The Frogs -
what I'd intended to achieve the
first time a scene was on the floor would take all of a 3-hour
rehearsal. By the end of its first rehearsal,
Crave was
already in better shape than the other miserable show would achieve
by its last night (I should point out that much of the other show's
failure was my responsibility and not that of the actors - who
included Erica and Adam - who strived against impossible odds to
do their best).
Swift and happy as it was, the
Crave rehearsal period was
intense. I felt in watching it like I was spending eight hours a
day being kicked in the back. The five of us worked blindly,
creating the staging and concept from scratch; and for all our
readings and analyses of the play in the preceding months, once
we were actually in the theatre we worked largely by instinct than
plan. Every idea I threw at them was taken by Eve, James, Carey
and Tina and pushed as far as they could take it. Their work as
an ensemble was, I thought, incredible. At the same point every
night of the season, I watched the four of them dealing with the
rapid-fire, speaking-as-one-style text of the last 10 pages of the
script and thought, "You are the most amazing actors in the world!"
as I marvelled at how they were pulling it off - because it was
nothing to do with me.
Production week was very easy and happy. The white wall (which, as
we'd anticipated, caused great problems for the show that shared the
space with us for the last week and a half of the run) was easily
created. A huge crowd of volunteers - other Bacchanals and Rialto
staff - came down and the paint job was achieved in no time. I lit
the show from scratch, building the lighting design around the
performances of the actors, and it's the best lighting I've ever
done. Sound and music for the show was simple. We opened with
the lengthy "An Echo, A Stain" by Bjork, which consists entirely
of lines from Crave
(Bjork was a big Sarah Kane fan) and
closed the show with Elvis Presley singing "It's Now Or Never",
which seemed oddly appropriate - again, going on instinct rather
than any plan. We also had a soundscape of sea noises for certain
parts of the show. Phil Greig, the technician at Rialto, sorted us
with a slide projector and we had a lens wide enough for the slide
projections to fill the entire back wall of Bats.
The opening night was one of the most incredible nights I've had
in a theatre - which will sound arrogant, talking about one of my
own shows in that way. But the experience of the night was
astounding. A packed house, including our friends, family and
other Bacchanals, filled the theatre on a freezing, pouring night.
I was oddly terrified - usually I light my own shows so that I'm
not actually in the audience but doing something I'm relaxed and
confident about. But my heart pounded and I was trembling with
every lighting and slide cue. It wasn't until during James'
huge speech, which occurred about 15 minutes into the show,
that I relaxed. In the speech A, a paedophile, has a two-page
long, unpunctuated monologue in which he addresses the child he
used to abuse about how much he loves and misses her. James was
even more challenged and bewildered by it than he'd been by the
mountebank scene in Volpone.
On opening night as he listed
his desires and all the things he'd do to make his lover happy,
he got to "and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because
it would get more attention than me" the audience
laughed and
suddenly we - me in the lighting box and Carey, Eve, Tina and
James onstage - all had the same sudden realization that the
audience were listening intently to every single word of the play.
The atmosphere in the theatre was electric. Well after the end,
half the audience were still seated, deep in discussion.
The actors were still hiding backstage and I went to find them.
They were all bunched in the corner in the dressing room, too
scared to come down. "That," said Carey, "was the hardest thing
I've ever done in my life. I was absolutely terrified - playing
Hamlet was a hundred times easier." The others agreed and James
said that by the start of the show he was shaking so hard with
nerves he didn't think he'd be able to stand up properly. What
was so ironic was that the praise for Carey that night was
centred around how comfortable, relaxed and confident he'd been.
"He looked like it was no effort whatsoever," someone said. We
had a fantastic party at BATS that night and praise for the
production was enormous. "This will be the one!" everyone said
to us. "This will be the show that puts you guys on the map!"
Alas, it was not. Crave
did okay business but nothing
like you would expect the NZ premiere of a Sarah Kane play to do.
The dreadful weather maybe had a lot to do with it...but many
people who saw the show saw it twice. We never really recaptured
the electricity of the opening night but it was still incredible
to watch each night. Audience responses were unlike anything
we'd ever had, either - many people, some of whom had experienced
some of the horrible things that affect the characters in the play,
said what a cathartic experience seeing the play was. The
various readings of the end of the play were fascinating too.
One reviewer claimed that we were inciting audience members to
commit suicide and questioned not just my morals for putting the
play on, but also BATS' for programming it - but we'd seen the
ending as the dawning of a new day, as realization, as catharsis,
as understanding, not as something negative. And, as far as I
know, no one committed suicide after seeing our production of
Crave.
And the positive reviews for
Crave said we'd achieved
exactly what we'd wanted: something that was uplifting in spite
of its tone of despair. How strange that the show I'd originally
wanted to do because it said "Fuck you for ruining my life" to my
wife now said "My pain makes me a better human being, and tomorrow
when I wake up things might not be great but they will be better
than they are today". Lines like "Only love can save me and love
has destroyed me" and "The spine of my life is broken" or the
passage paraphrased from Job - "Let the day perish in which I was
born" - gave way to the quieter, calmer, saner moments: "If you
died, it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would
know why, but I would collapse".
With Carey leaving NZ, though, nothing would be the same again.
Crave set a new
standard for Bacchanals shows, though: a
truly ground-breaking piece of new writing, acting of an extremely
high standard, complex and comprehensive lighting (a far cry from
the three floods of the trilogy), a consistent and coherent design
and a show that, in spite of its ambition, was very easy to pull
together. How ironic that what was supposed to be a holiday after
large-cast, four-hour long productions of the classics would prove
to be twice as complicated and demanding, and yet just as satisfying
a play to work on. - David
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