crave
Littered with words like guilt, death, headache and heartache,
Crave
is not for the soft-eared or light-hearted. In fact, it is the play's
relentless focus on all things tragic that characterises it and gives
it its almost excruciating depth.
Written by the late British playwright Sarah Kane (she killed
herself a year after writing the play)
Crave is a lament that
displays almost crudely the clutches of depression. Pain blossoms on
stage as the four characters tie each other up in knots of love, lust,
guilt and anger. "This is terrible," says one of the characters and
he is right. But my god it's beautiful.
The script sparkles and spits, tugging at the viewer, even as
it causes them to recoil with its sharp edges. Kane has succeeded in
combing the pleasure of sharp, insightful words with the pain of their
meanings.
All of the performances were strong and honest, some remarkably
so. Nothing short of bravery would be required to embrace these roles
and the actors do so with passion and commitment.
With a virtually empty set, and a very text-based script, the
chances of the play lapsing into stylistic cliché were high.
The directive prowess of David Lawrence avoided this trap.
Crave is like an
item of clothing that is uncomfortable and
scratches your skin. It may not even fit right in all the necessary
places. But it's such a catching colour and there is something
so...truthful about it that you wear it anyway. Maybe even two
days in a row.
- Kathy,
The Package
Uplifting despite tone of despair
As its name suggests Crave is
a piece totally coloured by its
characters' overwhelming and all-consuming need.
In advance it seemed to hold out the possibility of being
extremely depressing, but experiencing this very fine production
by The Bacchanals, one left the 50-minute play feeling oddly uplifted
despite the despairing tone of much of the writing.
The scene is set by the back-projection of a graffiti-scarred
abandoned street. On the stage the four actors sit with their backs to us.
As the show begins they turn and speak, at first alone and
then in duos, a trio or quartet as their overlapping conversations
become dialogues or counterpoints.
What they say are mostly anguished lines about love - love
lost, love betrayed and brutalised.
In fact, you slowly realize, it's not their love that has
been unrequited but their neediness. In depressive style they've
zeroed in on craving itself rather than the objects of their craving.
At the same time we see projected behind them images
suggesting the possibility of infinity - sands, the cosmos - and
perhaps therefore the possibility of hope and peace.
Probably the key image is that of a hand holding a flower.
This is held for a while and becomes a source of tension the longer
it's there. Will that flower be crushed, we wonder?
This image reveals why
Crave is a drama despite its
total absence of a conventional plot or dramatic devices. What we
worry about is the survival of these characters whom we have come to
appreciate: as their anxieties become more plain to us we become more
gripped by their situation. Or will they take their own path to
infinity by killing themselves?
The members of The Bacchanals who perform in this play
are Tina Helm, Carey Smith, Eve Middleton and James Stewart. They
create a seamless ensemble exactly like that of a well-balanced
string quartet as they recreate the essentially musical rhythm
of the writing.
David Lawrence's direction is most strong here in the
way the characters move through space, dynamically creating the
psychic universe of Kane's characters in physical space. Clearly
there are several ways you could deal with words like these and
here the director has adopted an expressive style.
There's no reason to fault that, but to say that at times
it can and does lead to a shrillness at the most anguished and
therefore highest volume moments.
- Timothy O'Brien,
The Dominion Post
It is widely, if not universally, accepted that a play has to be more
than personal therapy made public to become valid theatre. But with
Crave there is not even
a therapeutic process happening. There
is only a deeply humourless hunger for something other than all that
seems to be.
As its four actors wallow in the septic sludge of human existence, the
people they play and the random platitudes they speak exhibit a
compulsive inability to lift their sights above "me, myself and I".
They slowly drown in the self-defeating assumption that life is
something that's being done to them and it's supposed to be doing them
better. In short, Crave is an
exercise in destructive self-indulgence
that can only have one inevitable and uninspiring end.
This is the fourth and penultimate play of a mentally disturbed
young woman who, at the age of 28 (in 1999) hanged herself in a hospital
bathroom. Two days before, a flatmate had foiled her earlier suicide
attempt. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to see
Crave
as the extended suicide note of a clinically depressed and therefore
self-defeating mind.
According to the British Theatre Guide, Sarah Kane had a
breakdown in 1997, the year before
Crave premiered at the
Traverse in Edinburgh before returning home to the Royal Court
Theatre Upstairs in London. In the face of comprehensive critical
condemnation of her previous plays,
Blasted (1995),
Phaedra's Love (1996) and
Cleansed (1997), The Royal
Court continued
to nurture Kane's supposed talent. Or maybe they were exploiting her
notoriety.
It is my guess that the radical revisionism that has swirled
around Sarah Kane's plays is driven, in part, by a need to assuage
the collective guilt of those who were part of the process. Either
that or the wellspring of guilt has simply increased the capacity
for commercial exploitation.
Harold Pinter, who leapt to Kane's defence over
Blasted
(in which, for example, limbs are chopped off, a woman receives a
penis transplant, and heroin is injected through an eyeball
[note: none of these events occur in
Blasted.]), is
right when he says, "[She is] facing something actual and true and
ugly and painful." But should she have faced her demons in public or
in private with a professional counsellor? How able is the theatre
industry to exercise the compassion, support and rigorous therapy
she clearly needed?
A critic who experiences Kane's plays as alienating assault, devoid
of effective dramatic engagement, must be free to say so. It may well
be that, as some have suggested,
Crave can be played as a
lyrical yet authentic symphony for four voices that engages us and
rewards our interest and attention. But this premiere New Zealand
production goes nowhere near that for me.
I find it intriguing that in the process of pursuing their admirable
quest to go where others fear to tread, the Bacchanals continue to
reveal their craft limitations. Carey Smith, Eve Middleton, James
Stewart and Tina Helm exercise the same range of emotions with the
same physical and vocal manifestations we've seen before. They seem
to make each role they play fit their moulds rather than stretch
themselves to meet each new challenge. Tina Helm's repetitive
excursions into tremulous weeping verging on hysteria are
especially tedious this time around.
Director David Lawrence claims the writing in
Crave is complex
and multi-layered. "Whereas initially it seemed to affirm my feelings
of hate and despair," he writes in the programme, "it now seems to
affirm love and redemption through those two mighty opposites, cruelty
and compassion."
Had he and his actors managed to find and share such insight on
the night, I'd concede the journey was worth it. But because the
most dramatic element in his production is the use of bright white
light as the threshold is crossed, it clearly supports the play's
glorification of death as the answer.
So my misgivings are moral as well as artistic. I can't help
wondering what effect this production might have on an audience
member prone to depression. Could it provoke them to emulate its
outcome or might realising they're not alone stop them feeling so
desperate? Should counselling and help line numbers be clearly
publicised (as they are when such material airs on television) or
does the right of artists, and all people for that matter, to express
themselves regardless of the limitations of others absolve them of
further responsibility?
- John Smythe
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