CRAVE (Chichester Festival Theatre)***

 

By Sophie

Link: https://www.cft.org.uk/whats-on/event/crave £10

Available until: The play will be livestreamed every night until Saturday 7^th November, though performances from Thursday onwards will not have a live audience. There will also be a Saturday matinee.

It’s difficult to say exactly what this play is about or even what happens in the play. There are four characters who are onstage the whole time. They talk and sometimes they respond to each other, but a lot of the time, they’re saying what they’re thinking and feeling and remembering. Sometimes they characters are speaking out loud. Sometimes they give us an internal monologue. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Even when they are speaking out loud, the other characters don’t necessarily hear them. They all have their own pain.

‘Characters’ is probably the wrong word. They don’t have personalities as such and director Tinuke Craig doesn’t seem to have encouraged the actors to show personality. They don’t even have names – they’re known by a single letter. They’re all more a mass of emotions than a character, and the emotions are very sad. They’ve been through terrible things and they’re feeling terrible things. It’s like the emotions have taken over and the personalities aren’t there anymore. The feeling that it’s not worth being alive. That life isn’t going to get better. That everything hurts. That they really are all alone.

It feels very real because although I haven't done the things they've done, I identify strongly with a lot of their emotions. I’d like to say that writer Sarah Kane has done brilliantly to put these thoughts into words, but that seems like a really inappropriate thing to say considering they probably really were her thoughts. Sarah died by suicide in 1999, aged 28.

I think it’s usually very wrong to bring someone’s personal life into an evaluation of their work. I was appalled once when I was asked to write an essay reflecting on the relationship between a director’s health issues and one of his productions. I felt it wasn’t my place to talk about his health and that it was wrong to assume it had some bearing on every single thing he did and to speculate about the ways in which it affected various aspects of the production. I didn’t get a particularly low mark for the essay as I also commented on other things which my tutor liked (I gave him some rubbish about pipes looking like penises: he loved all that stuff), but I know I’d have got a higher mark if I’d talked about the writer’s illness. But it didn’t feel right then and I still feel I made the right decision.

However, in this case, I am seeing a connection and I can’t get it out of my mind. The idea of shouting your pain out into nothingness, as the characters do, and not getting a response because no-one is really there. Or if they are, they aren’t listening and they hear something else instead. It is harrowing to watch this play, which is so full of such raw, desperate feelings which probably really were felt by the playwright. Writing the words down in a play is one way of getting people to listen. But if you put it on a stage, the audience can step away from it as though it’s not real.

Alex Lowde has designed an almost bare stage with four treadmills. The treadmills look striking on the stage, partly because they are so unexpected, but also because Joshua Pharo has lit them so well. The lighting is low enough to make them look slightly ghostly, but you can still see everything that’s happening. The treadmills really are quite scary in this production: they trap the characters, who are in a constant fight not to have to go back to square one. Always fighting against the tide and you can’t stop fighting for long because I’d guess that if you get to the end of the treadmill and don’t move, you’ll fall off the end of it (I don’t know anything about treadmills except stories from people who have been injured or almost injured by them. Perhaps only the horror stories are worth talking about). The treadmills keep going, just like life, and you have to keep adjusting because no matter what you try, the way you’re going is wrong.

The play does have an audience in the theatre, but I can’t help feeling that, in some ways, the livestream audiences have an advantage. I don’t know why four treadmills looked so beautiful (I’m not an art person and I’m definitely not a gym person), but the livestream audience get to see them from different angles and can see the different shapes they create.

The actors cope well physically with the production, and if they’re thinking about the treadmills the whole time, as would only be understandable, it doesn’t show in their performances. They all present the emotions clearly and almost too convincingly. The actors are Erin Doherty (C), Alfred Enoch (who I saw only yesterday in What a Carve Up – he was very different here and equally brilliant) as B, Wendy Kweh (M) and Jonathan Slinger (A). They give a powerful performance which is unsettling to watch but not insensitive to the subject matter.

I’m not sure what I think about it. I’m not sure that I like it (though the actors are very good and I might have mentioned that I like the set). But it’s a good play to experience.