Crave ( Archived )

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CRAVE (L to R) Ingrid Craigie; Alan Williams, Eileen Walsh, Andrew Scott, Ingrid Craigie; Ingrid Craigie, Andrew Scott

Photography by Ivan Kyncl

Direction: Vicky Featherstone Design: Georgia Sion Lighting: Nigel J Edwards Sound: Ric Fetherstone

Cast: Ingrid Craigie, Andrew Scott, Eileen Walsh, Alan Williams

4.48 PSYCHOSIS (not pictured)

Direction: James Macdonald Design: Jeremy Herbert Lighting: Nigel J Edwards Sound: Paul Arditti

Cast: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, Madeleine Potter

“If you think of the late Sarah Kane only in terms of eyes being gouged out and dead babies hungrily gnawed – and last month’s revival of Blasted anyway proved that there was moral purpose to those horrors – you should take your ears and eyes to the quietly unsettling double-bill that ends the Court’s season of her plays.

“Ears may be even more than eyes, because Crave is put across by four people perched in a row at a table and 4.48 Psychosis is James Macdonald’s staging of a posthumous text that reads as if it wasn’t designed for performance.

“Yet Beckett’s Not I and That Time work better on the stage than on the page, and that’s also the case here. The faces of the actors and, especially in 4.48 Psychosis, their body-language gives an anguish an identity and a clarity that would surely be missing even if the two pieces were transposed to radio. When she killed herself in 1998, Kane was regarded as a brutal, in-yer-face dramatist: these plays show she was as interested as late-late Beckett in finding fresh ways to express the nuances of pain.

“Pain links the plays, and intensely intimate it feels. In Crave, it’s mostly explained by twisted or thwarted love. Alan Williams, identified ony as A, blandly declares that he’s a paedophile, and may have been one of those who has damaged Eileen Walsh’s C, though a boy rapist and maybe a father or stepfather seem also to have featured in the emotional equation. At any rate, he’s middle-aged and avid for close encounters with younger flesh, while she’s half his age and ravaged with grief, guilt and forlorn longings she can’t explain.

“Andrew Scott’s twentysomething B hopes to find a mix of lover and mother in Ingrid Craigies’ older M, who unluckily sees him as no more than a means of dealing with a biological clock that’s moved into shrieking-alarm mode; but their cravings, while helping to explain the play’s title, don’t have the same power. The centre of Vicky Featherstone’s immaculate production is surely Walsh’s C, with her round, desolate face and her feelings that white maggots are swarming out of other people and down her throat.

“…For 4.48 Psychosis – named in tribute to the dawn moment when you’re at your sanest and therefore most prone to suicide – the quartet has become a trio but the music is hauntingly inventive. Macdonald has put a mirror over the stage, in which we see reflections of Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter as they pace, squirm or move into foetal positions; but the piece doesn’t need visual elaboration.

“What is it like to be obsessed by a lost love, betrayed by the medical profession, consumed by self-hatred, and so depressed that nothing but suicide will serve? What’s remarkable about this piece is that Kane looks at her capsule sufferer clinically from the outside as well as fiercely from within. It is, in effect a woman’s post-mortem on a self as self-destructive as, sadly, Kane turned out to be – and there’s nothing else like it in the language.”

THE TIMES

“The most shocking aspect of these two short plays by Sarah Kane is not the raw, clearly autobiographical horror they describe, it is Kane’s incredible ability to create such wonderfully crafted, elegiac art out of her very private sufferings. Crave and 4.48 Psychosis both concern themselves with abuse, loss and the silent scream of depression…

“4.48 Psychosis, …, is so stunningly staged and dangerously beautiful that it all but leaves a bruise. The free-flowing script describes the inability of medecine to understand, contain and normalise ‘madness’ through three actors, who alternately pick up and discard threads of dialogue. Kane’s dense allegorical language moves effortlessly around the corridors of institutionalised insanity, and the journey is deft, brilliant and unnerving in the extreme. James Macdonald’s direction coaxes wonderful performances from the cast, and the multimedia effects add an ingenious dimension to their dance of desperation. As one character remarks ‘Some will call this self indulgence’, but the sheer, blistering power and poetry is enough to stun even Kanes’ most determined detractors into silence.”

TIME OUT

‘The Court’s retrospective of her work allows us to see both of these final desperate plays back to back in the intimacy of a re-modelled main auditorium.

“For Crave, the audience enters through the circle and is immediately up close and personal with the actors, who sit in four chairs in a line as if taking part in a confessional chat show. For 4.48 Psychosis, you enter through the stalls, make an unsettling walk to the back of the theatre, turn, and find yourself looking back to where the auditorium should be – only to be confronted by a vast angled mirror that reflects the action on the stage. Before the play even begins you are discomforted, and once it does the effect is completely dislocating, like a strange out-of-body experience.

“The plays are like crystal goblets designed to hold Kane’s liquid poetry. The productions, directed by Vicky Featherstone (Crave) and James Macdonald (4.48 Psychosis), are much the same as when the plays premiered in 1998 and 2000 respectively. But these plays are so vividly and elastically theatrical that they could be done in many ways.

“Seeing the plays in tandem it is quite clear that they are as linked as night and day. They are like a pair of terrible, beautiful twins, fascinating, subtly different and yet also the same. You can’t stop staring although you know for decency’s sake you ought to avert your gaze.

“Make no mistake: this is not a fun night out. It is almost too much to bear as the disintegration apparent in Crave (which despite its despair, is playful, tender and sensuous) turns into a hellish freefall in 4.48 Psychosis. These texts don’t so much push at the boundaries of theatre as simply dissolve them. Just as Kane dissolved herself.”

THE GUARDIAN