The fourth play by
Sarah Kane (1971-1999),
Crave premiered in
Edinburgh on 13 August 1998, originally under her pseudonym Marie Kelvedon.
It is for four speakers, who do little but speak. They sit in a row, and only once or twice is there any action. A and B are male, C and M are female. It is a constant flow of cross-currents, mostly very clipped lines, with occasionally one speaker expounding at length. There are complex relationships of love and hate and history and violence between them, but it is not entirely clear how, or at least not clear to this reviewer.
If two were middle-aged and two were young you could read it as parents and children, love affairs from a generation ago and from now, but the ages aren't strongly marked and the relationships between the four speakers are much more labile. It is as if sometimes one man is speaking as a father, then as an abuser, then as a lover, sometimes to one woman and sometimes to the other. On re-reading the playscript I have once more came away with this confusion. yet this is not an imperfection in Sarah Kane's writing; she wrote this infinitely complex flow, knowing exactly what she was doing.
It is more like the interweaving abstract themes in a string quartet. You hear notes of lost youth, betrayal, pain, annihilation. I've been looking through it again wanting to slice out a single extract that illustrates its nature, but with such an unbroken weave it's almost impossible. Here's an arbitrary glimpse:
C If I die here I was murdered by daytime television.
A I lied for you and that is why I cannot love you.
M Do not demand,
A Do not entreat,
B Learn, learn, why can't I learn?
C They switch on my light every hour to check I'm still breathing.
B Again.
C I tell them sleep deprivation is a form of torture.
B Again and again.
M If you commit suicide you'll only have to come back go though it again.
B The same lesson, again and again.
A Thou shalt not kill thyself.
C Vanity, not sanity, will keep me intact.
M Do you ever hear voices?
B Only when they talk to me.
A Weary souls with dry mouths.
C I'm not ill, I just know that life is not worth living.
A I've lost my faith in honesty.
B Lost my faith in
M Forwards, upwards, inwards,
C Lost.