First presented in 1998, Sarah Kane’s play Crave is a work with a strong poetic charge and immense violence.

Indeed, although Crave echoes the recurring themes in Kane’s dramaturgy, it differs through its fragmented structure. It features four entities – A, B, C, and M – giving rise to a series of choral utterances in an indeterminate location and an unknown temporal setting; the drama is opaque. However, it is possible to patch together the tendencies in the dramaturgy in order to identify certain landmarks, such as some characters’ penchant for disintegration and self-destruction, or their quest for love and an idealized balance, the only outcome of which seems to be death.

Faiza Maskhouni offers a unique direction of the play; by choosing to depict the story of two couples as a disenchantment, she seeks to exacerbate the violence resulting from a binary and heteronormative view of love, in order to denounce its mechanisms. The scenic proposition unfolds like the world, with its grim realities of domestic, sexual, and psychological violence, and is supported by elaborate costume and set designs that pay particular attention to the historical reconstruction of the drama imagined here. J. C. Beaulé is responsible for the translation, adapting the language to the Quebecois context.