To my mind it's impossible to separate the life from the work, and if a director/actor's ultimate goal is to serve the text & the playwright as best as they possibly can, then you have to know as much about the circumstances that surround a piece of dramatic literature as best you can, because only then can you perceive what the INTENT is. For instance, "Twelfth Night" changes radically when you consider that Shakespeare had twin children, one of whom died in the year or so prior to the composition of the play. When he then goes and writes a play about a girl mourning her supposedly dead twin brother, what does that tell us about what he had in mind? Sure, on one level it can be performed as a bawdy comedy, but on another level there's something emotionally deeper and more important. Likewise with "Crave" - in directing it I found, as did the actors, that we HAD to know as much as we possibly could, within reason, about the circumstances of its composition and whether we're deifying her or not, we CANNOT separate the life - or in some cases the death - of Sarah from the emotional depth & impact of her writing. Yes, "Crave" can be viewed and performed as a piece of abstract expressionism, as an epic poem, or as a piece of technical virtuosity - which indeed it is at various points (it requires its actors to have an INCREDIBLE synchronicity if they're not to f*ck it up)- but at the end of the day its emotional tone, its despair and its HOPE - be it in starting again or ending your life - are what makes it an experience actors and audiences never forget. We found in rehearsing and performing that the more we learnt about Sarah's life, the more we could unlock, and the more we learnt about HER life, the more we understood OURS and were able to identify the similarities and the fundamental differences that human beings share. And at the risk of sounding cheesy and sentimental, we felt that we came to know and care about Sarah as we examined the other plays, the interviews and the reference material.
Archive 25-10-2002