Study of the incipit of Sarah Kane’s Crave.

Crave is Sarah Kane’s penultimate play, which was published in 1998. In this play, four characters, respectively named C, M, B and A, are delivering to the audience what we could name utterances. Are they communicating? Is there a kind of logic after all in the play? The first reading of the play is really challenging, first because it is really hard to distinguish who is speaking, as initials do not help us to recognize the characters and give them a proper identity. And secondly, the character’s cues are hard to link to each other. It seems that they are only uttering some sentences, with no context and no connections. Crave is not a classical play, classical in the sense that it does not respect classical theatrical conventions: Kane does not precise the place where the action takes place, nor the time, if it is day or night. We are only introduced to the characters, and the only note by the author is the following: ‘Punctuation is used to indicate delivery, not to conform to the rules of grammar. A stroke (/) indicates the point of interruption in overlapping dialogue.’ And that is all. So in a way we are warned since the beginning that what we are going to experience is not a classical play. This play is about language, feelings, and thoughts. We have to keep in mind that Kane belongs to a generation of writers who believe in the power of words, so that everything that is said is full of meaning and is written to mean something. Characters do not have names because it is not what really matters. What matters are the things they have to say to us, and what we can understand. We are going to focus on the incipit of the play, how the characters are introduced, and what we can deduce from what is said to us… But in order to study the incipit of the play, we have to determine where are the textual boundaries of this incipit, as the play is not divided into acts or scenes. In our study, the incipit is going to end