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# REVIEW: Crave online at Chichester Festival Theatre
- URL: https://www.scenemag.co.uk/review-crave-online-at-chichester-festival-theatre/
- Published: 2021-05-21T16:04:01.000Z
- Updated: 2021-05-21T16:04:01.000Z
- Description: Brian Butler finds the dizzying word-play at Chichester totally enthralling
- Author: Brian Butler
- Tags: Arts, Reviews, Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre

![](https://www.gscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-company-in-CRAVE-at-Chichester-Festival-Theatre-Photo-Marc-Brenner-2417.jpg)

CRAVE. Photo Marc Brenner

Watching **Sarah Kane**’s 50-minute four-hander about love, sex, desire, rejection and isolation is a mind-blowing experience. Apart from the fact that you need to watch it more than once, its simple staging and rapid machine-gun dialogue keeps you always on the edge of your seat.

On four separate platforms, which sometimes become treadmills, **Alfred Enoch**, **Erin Doherty**, **Wendy Kweh** and **Jonathan Slinger** are nameless characters searching for love, meaning, acceptance and peace in a world that resonates after 15 months of lockdown. Filmed in front of an audience at **Chichester Festival Theatre** in the lockdown gap last year, it’s now streaming once more on demand.

Kane is brilliant at pithy one-liners , and they often come in such quick succession that we are still figuring out the meaning and are overtaken by the next bons mots.

In a world reminiscent of **Samuel Beckett**’s lost souls , memory and desire blend in this extraordinary rain forest downpour of words. Dissonant seemingly separate speeches somehow melt into one another , leaving us gasping at the power of the writer’s language – *“If I could be free of you without having to lose you”*, says one character. Then shockingly: *“I’m not a rapist, I’m a paedophile”*. Or how about: *“you’ve fallen in love with a person who doesn’t exist…..I hate the smell of my own family… I never met a man I trusted… what’s anything got to do with anything?”* I’m sure you get the idea.

![](https://www.gscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-company-in-CRAVE-at-Chichester-Festival-Theatre-Photo-Marc-Brenner-8056.jpg)

CRAVE. Photo Marc Brenner

And Kane works in well-worn cliches that have a new edge – *“It’s not me, it’s you”*. The variety of the piece is staggering considering its brevity – we get love letters, bitter memories, things the characters wished they’d said, and mental breakdowns .

Maybe the line *“only love can save me, and love has destroyed me”*, best sums up the puzzling nature of this piece – and the moral? It’s probably summed up in another one-liner: *“No-one survives life”*.

Whatever you make of it, it’s a great watch and **Tinuke Craig** directs it with sharpness, speed and in a film-like style , with large blow-up images of the characters behind them.

Crave is available on demand until **May 29**,[ CLICK HERE](http://www.cft.org.uk/?ref=scenemag.co.uk) to see it.