Ears may be even more than eyes, because Crave is put across by four people perched in a row at a table and 4.48 Psychosis is James Macdonald's staging of a posthumous text that reads as if it wasn't designed for performance. Yet Beckett's Not I and That Time work better on the stage than on the page, and that's also the case here. The faces of the actors and, especially in 4.48 Psychosis, their body-language gives an anguish an identity and a clarity that would surely be missing even if the two pieces were transposed to radio.
Pain links the plays, and intensely intimate it feels.
In Crave, it's mostly explained by twisted or thwarted love. Alan Williams, identified ony as A, blandly declares that he's a paedophile, and may have been one of those who has damaged Eileen Walsh's C, though a boy rapist and maybe a father or stepfather seem also to have featured in the emotional equation. At any rate, he's middle-aged and avid for close encounters with younger flesh, while she's half his age and ravaged with grief, guilt and forlorn longings she can't explain. What's remarkable about this piece is that Kane looks at her capsule sufferer clinically from the outside as well as fiercely from within. The free-flowing script describes the inability of medecine to understand, contain and normalise 'madness' through three actors, who alternately pick up and discard threads of dialogue.