Crave
BAC, London

Chris Wilkinson

Crave is an astonishing piece of writing. It is the fullest artistic expression of the emotional trauma that, just a few months after it was written, would drive Kane to suicide.

The play combines many of the characteristic elements of her earlier work - the tone of repressed hysteria, and the self-loathing combined with an ironic and wickedly dry wit. But alongside her final piece - 4.48 Psychosis - it also represents a significant break with her previous plays. Everything has been pared down to the absolute basics: gone are the copious and virtually unperformable stage directions, and instead of the recognisable settings and characters, we are left only with four voices named simply A, B, C, and M.

Whilst a threadbare narrative does run through the script - as with Beckett's Not I - the importance of this is subsumed by the emotive force of the writing. Unfortunately, this is exactly where Liquid Theatre's production stumbles. Director Matt Peover delivers a production that focuses on 'story' at the expense of all else. According to the programme blurb, the play is set in an 'anonymous city' where 'random moments are glimpsed through apartment block windows'

To this end we are greeted with a set comprising a table with a bottle of wine and glasses. As they speak, the characters lounge around this room, sipping wine, and sniping at each other with their lines. It's like watching an Alan Ayckbourn play whilst coming down from a particularly bad trip.

It is true that the performers deliver the script with a great deal of clarity. The company is talented, and they certainly speak well. They are helped in this by staging that serves to underline heavily who is speaking to whom and when. But in achieving this clarity, the company has castrated the piece of any real meaning. Kane's script is closer to a delicately constructed musical score than a play. Its success relies on an ability to manipulate the rhythm, tone and pitch of the language. Watching it should be a painful experience, one in which the audience feels overwhelmed by what it is hearing. In this production, however, the poetry of the writing has been suffocated by the relentless pursuit of 'sense'. As a result the words are left feeling bland and inert.

The nature of Kane's work is such that it will constantly both demand and offer opportunities for reinterpretation and experimentation. In this case, the 'concept' that the company gave itself, served to do little more than force the text into a straightjacket from which it could not break free. One of the show's dates is Friday 20 February - the fifth anniversary of Sarah Kane's death. It is a shame that it cannot bear a better testimony to her genuine talent as a writer.

Till 22 February