The hope is that in this production, each character will be humanised in their physical interaction with one another. “The approach to the gender of the characters will be radically different to most productions of Crave” The four characters, each assigned a letter by Kane instead of a name (C, M, B and A), don’t physically interact in most productions of the play but Ward and the assistant directors (Elizabeth Laurence and Ilona Sell) were keen to make a break with the tradition of treating Kane’s characters as voices reading text. In terms of bringing the play to the Corpus space, the play is of course relentless, and Ward thinks this production leans into that – using Talulah Thomas’s score in lieu of a set to gesture to where the characters are. Given the challenging content, the division between the rehearsal room and life outside has been crucial for the wellbeing of the directorial team and the cast. Though she is cautious about drawing a line between ‘real’ life and what happens on stage, some distinction between the space in which the characters suffer and the other non-theatrical world beyond is part of what Kane was doing when she wrote Crave. What makes Kane, and Crave (a shorter and much less physically violent play), more than that reputation is the careful way in which the characters are offered a gesture of a ‘line of flight’, at least partially, from the misery of the space of the play by the end.Ĭrave, at least as Ward sees it, is a simultaneously moral and anti-didactic play which limits the cruelty – of which there is plenty – to the confines of the stage in other words, the cruelty does not necessarily continue. Within that framework, Ward suggests that Kane is a perversely moral playwright, contrary to initial reception of her more infamously violent early plays in the 1990s as revelling in the post-modern death of morality. When I ask Ward why she chose to pitch the play for this term’s ADC/Corpus programme, she responds that she is compelled by the world of the play, which Kane has written to be deeply invested in interpersonal relationships, how they are formed and how we process them. Even if that’s true it’s a low bar Kane’s plays are famously challenging viewing. So says Jack Ward, the director of a new production of the play at the Corpus Playroom which runs next week. Sarah Kane’s Crave is arguably the easiest to stage and easiest to watch of all the celebrated and controversial playwright’s works.
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