Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Crave
The Smirnoff Underbelly

Dolan Cummings

Whatever it means, it is relentless.

Faced with such an onslaught of pain, self-hatred and accusation, the natural response is to try to make sense of it, to find in the confused and bitter ramblings of four voices some kind of chronology, facts, motives, a story. But Crave resists understanding. Instead, it demands attention.

The viewer's focus is dragged from one corner of the stage to another as the different characters, each facing the audience and ignoring one another, vie for attention. But it is impossible to resist coming back to 'C', played with electric intensity in Fail Better's production by Helen Bradbury. Her character is the motor of the play, driving the emotional onslaught with a combination of self-hatred and vanity. She is not so much telling her story as refusing it, asserting herself by denying her own identity.

While it deals with serious issues, then, Sarah Kane's masterpiece is anything but didactic. Incest, abuse and insanity are central to the play: that much is clear. But there is no obvious message, no reassuring moral to take home.

Still, Fail Better worked with the mental health charity MIND to inform their production, and there is certainly a remarkable sensitivity in all four performances. Chris Tester's understated young alcoholic and Lucie Collins' childish 'older woman' complement Bradbury's performance perfectly, and Joseph Brack is able to make human the play's least sympathetic character, at least for a few minutes.

The four emerge from darkness at the beginning of the play surrounded by broken glass and barbed wire; the two at the back are able to sit and stand; the two at the front, the younger two, just sit, oppressed by their surroundings. It is a grim visual spectacle, and relief comes through engagement with the subject rather than its avoidance, before the four disappear back into darkness.

It's a kind of sublime miserablism, beautifully handled.

August 4-25 (not Weds): 19.05 (1hr)

Crave has been pencilled in for discussion at the Institute of Ideas' Round Table Rumbles event on Sunday 11 August, when the theme is Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.