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‘You’re dead to me’
Tinuke Craig’s direction makes a satisfying whole of the characters’ solitary and disjointed language, writes Jan Woolf
Erin Doherty and Wendy Kweh In Crave At Chichester Festival Theatre [Marc Brenner]

Crave
by Sarah Kane
Chichester Festival

THE play begins and concludes with the line: “You’re dead to me.” It is also in the middle of this 50-minute piece from the darkly poetic Sarah Kane, who took her own life in 1999 aged 28: a fact usually known by audiences.

“You’re dead to me” is aimed at a character who may have raped, abused, or spurned (we’re never sure of the relationships between C, M, B and A). But I wondered if it was Kane-talk, the you and me of a divided self.  

The reviewer should concentrate on the play, not the writer’s psyche, yet in her work they’re integral, and audiences might look for clues to the suicide; most of them content in their own core personalities.

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