Sarah Kane plays: Crave

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Sarah Kane Crave

He´s following me... He needs to have a secret but he can´t help telling The heat is going out of me/ The heart is going out of me
And though she cannot remember she cannot forget Clutching a fistful of sand What ties me to you is guilt I crossed two rivers and wept by one

I am the beast at the end of the rope Happy and free

Sarah Kane's Crave from 1998. Four people sit on chairs facing the audience and talk to the audience separately. Because of the critical furore from Cleansed, this play was initially presented under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon.

Crave premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh on 13 August 1998. Directed by Vicky Featherstone with the four roles, C, M, B and A played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Ingrid Craigie, Paul Thomas Hickey and Alan Williams. A previous version was given as a staged reading "by accident to fill a gap in a rehearsed reading season set up by Paines Plough". Kane says " I think of it more as text for performance than as a play" and "I wanted to find out how good a poet I could be while still writing something dramatic".

(image from the 2015 production by DodgeballQueenAllison "the disintegration of the human mind through love, loss, and desire" with A- Austin Aschberner, B- Braxton Hogan, C- Chelsey Goldsmith, M- Hannah Hays, click here for the video).

"The lilt of a lullaby runs through 'Crave,' the English dramatist Sarah Kane's chamber piece for four haunted voices. Close your eyes during the play, which is receiving its New York premiere at the Axis Company, and the effect is of thoughts moving restlessly through a mind on the threshold of sleep...It isn't sleep, however, that's being courted here. There are many forms of craving in ''Crave,'' but they all bleed into one heartfelt yearning: a wish for the unconditional release of death" (Ben Brantley, New York Times, 11 November 2000).

Gaëlle Ranc in The Notion of Cruelty in the Work of Sarah Kane writes

It is about desire and death but above all, it is an experiment in form (Chapter Four).

Desire is the need for something. Something is missing, there is a gap, a void to fulfil. In Kane's plays, it is translated by silences, pauses, suspension points, typographical blanks and shortened sentences. Kane's characters are all looking for the thing they need, specially in Crave the title of which defines this feeling of void and need (Chapter Four)

Strangely, even if Kane's plays are full of sadness and despair, they nevertheless contain positively humorous passages, for example when ... a character in Crave says 'As a child I liked to piss on the carpet. The carpet rotted and I blamed it on the dog' Chapter Four)

You can read the full text on the site here.

Ken Urban in From An Ethics of Catastrophe - The Theatre of Sarah Kane writes

Crave works powerfully as a series of disconnected meditations, fluctuating between the intensely personal and the powerfully abstract. While the narrative suggests the pain of individuals, the play has a distinctly international consciousness; B’s use of Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and German takes the personal and places it in a global context. The speakers’ stories, as a result, become almost superfluous to the concatenation of images.