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by Sarah Kane, directed by Jennifer Tarver

Nightwood Theatre, Young Centre, Toronto

April 28-May 19, 2007

Nightwood Theatre deserves our gratitude for bringing Sarah Kane’s Crave to Toronto in such a powerful production.  The play has been acclaimed as one of the most important of the 20th century.  Now we have a chance to see why.  Kane (1971-99) fought severe depression all her life.  At the time of her suicide at age 28 she had written five plays that have come to be recognized as a major contribution to world drama. 

Crave (1998), the most formally experimental, is basically an hour-long quartet for four actors, two women and two men, designated only by letters not names.  The four speak in constantly intertwining monologs.  Sometimes it seems as if they are speaking to each other.  However, given their isolation, emphasized by the adjoining display cases of Teresa Przybylski’s elegantly abstract set, what we hear is more likely a chorus of the mingled cries of suffering individuals. 

There are hints of a story.  An older woman M (Maria Ricossa) seeks to have a baby with a thuggish young man B (Carlos González-Vio).  A severely depressed young woman C (Michelle Monteith) seems to be fighting a sense of worthlessness that has plagued her ever sense she was sexually abused by an older man not unlike the paedophile A (Hardee T. Lineham).  As the play progresses we try to fit the pieces together.  Is the older man C’s father or grandfather or related to her at all?  Is the older woman A’s wife, C’s mother or the psychotherapist for the other three?  Are A, M and B the voices from the past that continue to haunt C?  Or are all four aspects of the same personality trying to be heard?  All four crave--whether it is some form of future, love, oblivion or freedom--and all four suffer from this craving.  The poetry of Kane’s language is so potent we are drawn into the enigma it depicts even though it forces us to confront the very horrors of existence we most want to forget. 

All four actors give immaculate performances but what lingers the longest are the sickly combination of tenderness and perversion of Lineham’s character and the frightening self-hatred and death-centredness of Monteith’s.  Director Jennifer Tarver favours a view that privileges the Kane-like C as the central character.  Tarver also tries too hard to undo some of the abstractness by encouraging naturalistic acting that despite Kimberley Purtell’s stunningly cool lighting makes the four actors seem more like exhibits at a human zoo than aspects of the psyche.  Yet, this is a minor point.  The play has such force that by the end I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.  This is a play no one who loves the theatre should miss.                    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-05-01.

Photo: Hardee Lineham, Michelle Monteith and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio. ©Guntar Kravis.