Image: Ally Harris in Crave photograph courtesy of WA Youth Theatre Co.
A non-linear, non-narrative performance; Crave’s script is pure poetry. Crave explores sensations, memories, impressions and plays with words to create images within the minds of the audience. Four characters, A, B, C and M, deliver lines provided by the playwright without context, stage direction or character description. The dominant theme of this exploration is love and the pain of love. But other ideas make their way into the text through memories haunting the characters. Director Renato Fabretti takes the many challenges of Sarah Kane’s penultimate play and develops this work with two separate casts, bringing the words off the page to create a performance.
Alternating casts deliver this production of Crave for WAYTCo. The reviewed cast features Luke Binetti (A), George Ashforth (B), Ally Harris (C) and Megan Hollier (M). As an ensemble the four performers are tight: delivering lines with precise timing to overlap and syncopate as well as take a breath and deliver synchronised, single words to effectively create a new timing and sense of space in the densely-written prose. Beyond the impressive technical control of their lines, all performers work together to deliver subtle hints of interaction, moments of eye contact and body movement to (not quite but nearly) interact while voicing conflicting thoughts.
Ashforth is well-grounded, taking on the delivery of lines in various languages with aplomb. The lighting often leaves his face obscured, but his precisely calibrated use of posture conveys the heightened drama in his role. Harris delivers repeated lines rapidly. His deliberate force of punctuating the syllables is a particularly outstanding piece of controlled theatre. Her bright smile contrasts with lines from other performers. Binetti makes the most of the lyrical qualities of his lines exploring the yearning for love that might have been, he contrasted vividly with the responses from Harris and Hollier. Hollier is sharp in her responses, cutting cleanly between moments of near-happiness to anguish and anger.
The accompanying soundscape hovers at the edge of awareness, the atmospheric qualities becoming more and less acute as the play progresses. Sound and visual aspects combine as water starts dripping its way to the stage, pooling around the actors’ bare feet and then running off, without remark or explanation. The hanging slabs of concrete at the rear of the stage define the space in a heavily stark way, lending a slightly skewed industrial feel to the atmosphere. The sound and Dylan Dorotich-O’Keefe’s lighting design move with the text, assisting the shaping of the play as a whole.
Director Fabretti has set challenges for himself as well as the two sets of cast; an intense experience for performers, creatives and audience members alike.
WAYTCo’s production of Crave not only impresses with the capacities of its young artists, it serves as a reminder that the scope of theatre reaches beyond light entertainment and clever narratives to even darkened mirrors of the hidden aspects of the human experience.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Crave
By Sarah Kane
Presented by WA Youth Theatre Co
Director: Renato Fabretti
Assistant Director: Eloise Carter
Stage Manager: Laurie McAinsh
Lighting Design: Dylan Dorotich-O’Keefe
Staging: George Ashforth
Performed by: Luke Binetti, George Ashforth, Katherine Langford and Megan Hollier / Declan Brown, Odne Stenseth, Ally Harris and Daisy Coyle
State Theatre Centre of WA Perth Cultural Centre
2-11 June 2016
