About the work
Gier is the German title of Sarah Kane's 1998 play Crave. The work marks an important formal shift within Kane's small body of work: instead of conventionally named dramatic characters, four voices identified only by letters speak in a highly fragmented structure. Deutsches Theater Berlin presents Christopher Rüping's production transferred from Schauspielhaus Zürich.
Plot
There is no conventional linear plot. Four voices move through overlapping fragments concerning love, desire, loneliness, violence, memory and the longing for intimacy. Identities and relationships remain deliberately unstable. Declarations of love, recollections, accusations and verbal repetitions form a polyphonic interior drama in which it is often impossible to assign a particular experience securely to one speaker.
Cultural significance
Crave is widely regarded as a pivotal work in Kane's development away from the explicitly staged violence of her earlier drama towards an intensely compressed and poetic theatrical language. It has become part of the established repertoire of late twentieth-century British drama and is frequently discussed in connection with in-yer-face theatre while simultaneously departing from its more naturalistic conventions.