Sarah Kane is a compass point in the world of edgy student theatre, and this year students from London’s Royal Holloway boldly go where many have gone before.
Crave is Kane’s penultimate. It was premiered at the Fringe in 1998, just a few months before her suicide at the age of 28, and has since been obstinately reappearing in Edinburgh year after year like an angry ghost. Typically considered her most mature work, it’s an unflinching, anarchic projection of her disturbed psyche, told through the morbid mutterings of four strangers in a bar. They are the fragmented voices of one shattered mind despairing over sexual and familial rejection. Together they paint the portrait of a nervous breakdown.
Essentially Crave is a meaningless play, valued for its wild uniqueness and bolstered by the premium of its writer’s death. It has been staged to great effect in some triumphantly creative productions in the past and there will be more good productions in the future, but this particular one is a dud. Crave needs a thoughtful and enterprising director to interpret it in their own way and play around with it. Here, there’s no added value.
It’s a lacklustre narration of a shallow script handled by actors who look cheerfully drama-school, who look smug about putting on a Sarah Kane play, who look like they’re laughing when they grimace in Kane’s incurable agony. Crave is a blank canvas and a blank canvas is what Royal Holloway Theatre has brought along to the Fringe. Where’s the imagination? What are they trying to achieve?
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