Set in an unnamed city from which voices and images spring, Crave is a meditation on the nature of craving, and more specifically, the nature of loss.
The play in its earliest form was written under a pseudonym Marie Kelvedon, as part of Paines Plough’s first ‘Wild Lunch’ season of script-in-hand performances at the Bridewell Theatre in 1997.
This anonymity enabled Sarah to make a radical departure in the form, content and style of her writing, and to gauge the response of an audience unburdened by preconceptions based on the extreme reactions to her past work, including Blasted in 1995.
Crave marked a departure in Sarah’s work. Having pioneered a new theatre where brutality and action express an emotional narrative, in Crave she deployed language like music. Rhythm and orchestration were as vital as content to understand and respond to the play.
The result was dark, compassionate and exhilarating, and was commissioned immediately by Paines Plough.
In 1998, Paines Plough and Bright Ltd opened Crave at the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before it transferred to the Royal Court in London.