Sarah Kane’s Crave is a disorientating mixture of monologues, anecdotes and dialogues about the torments of passion, desire and love.
Crave explores the wretched pasts of A, B, C and M, incorporating harrowing accounts of eating disorders, rape and paedophilia, and how they have affected the characters’ identities and relationships. The roles were sensitively played and the performance rehearsed to perfection with the actors responding energetically to each other’s monologues. The longest monologue – a list of simple but endearing things A would like to do with the person he’s in love with (for example ‘take you to the eye hospital’), forms a beautiful focal point for the piece, creating an oasis of emotional stillness amidst fast-paced snippets of dialogue.
The script gives the director a lot of responsibility since it does not specify who the characters’ utterances are addressed to. The Woodplayers have done a fantastic job of drawing out dialogic interactions without detracting from the solitary vulnerability of the monologues and the more introspective lines. This production of Kane’s minimalist and unconventional play fully captures the script’s perplexing disjointedness without pretentiousness – creating a moving collage of the complexity of human emotion.