Christopher Rüping’s staging of Sarah Kane’s Crave at the Deutsches Theater is a visceral, unsettling experience. Stripping away conventional narrative, Kane’s poetic and fragmented dialogue on love, pain, loss and joy anchors itself in Wiebke Mollenhauer’s arresting central performance.
Mollenhauer sits in front of a camera for most of the play, with her face – a landscape of raw emotion – projected onto a two-foot screen on stage. As the other four actors weave a non-linear tapestry of trauma and tenderness, it’s Mollenhauer’s live-feed reactions that seem to control everything. A flicker of bemusement, a look of bleak terror, heart-wrenching tears – her silent portrayal speaks volumes.
The ensemble cast shifts between treating Mollenhauer’s unnamed character with fawning adoration – expressed through jarring pop song renditions – and surprisingly brutal cruelty. Benjamin Lillie delivers a particularly unsettling turn as a figure who embodies passionate devotion and abusive control, able to slip from the vulnerability of standing fully nude in front of Mollenhauer, declaring his love for her, to a virulent tirade against her projected image.
Throughout it all, Mollenhauer is brilliant. Her magnified face becomes the play’s mirror, its subtle movement reflecting an entire universe of suffering, resilience and joy in this devastating exploration of the desire for human connection.
- Deutsches Theater, Schumannstr. 13A, Mitte, Jun 2, 9, German with English surtitles, details.
