"There are worse things than being fat and 50. Being dead and 30?" says one of the voices in Sarah Kane's piece for four performers.
Kane herself was indeed dead, by her own hand, before she was 30, snuffing out one of theatre's most distinctive and courageous voices. Good plays do not, in general, need biography to accompany them, but the stream of consciousness and unconsciousness that is Crave is a rare exception.
It is autobiography. Its despair so dense ("I despair of despair") and its stabbing pain so palpable that watching and hearing it is like having your own layers of skin peeled away until every nerve is exposed.
The power of Crave is that in exposing her personal wounds, Kane exposes those of the audience too. It turns you inside out. Its 40 minutes gives you a glimpse of a lifetime in hell. Afterwards you turn your face from the bright lights of the pub in favour of a half bottle of whisky on your own.
Or at least that has always been my experience of it. But this production is so misguided and such a mixture of operatic misery and the insistently chirpy that it feels it has been directed by someone with a degree in social work who is in effect saying to the author: "Come on love, just pull yourself together and buck up."
In the text A, B, C, D are not characters but voices. They exist in the head, fluttering, raging and warring with each other in erratic fragments and extended monologues. Matt Peover's production attempts to impose narrative on the narrativeless and characters onto A, B, C & D.
The quartet sit at the table with its half drunk bottle of red wine and wander around the stage emoting theatrically as if they were at some particularly angst-ridden North London dinner party to which you wouldn't want an invitation.
Crave, is by no means Kane's best work, but its searing, frightening purity can be powerfully effective. This production diminishes it.
· Until Feb 22. Box office: 020 223 2223
