A plane crash; tanks stopped on Tiananmen Square; a ruler standing on a palatial balcony; the interrogation of the perpetrator of a mass shooting. There Has Possibly Been an Incident consists of three monologues and one dialogue, fractured and woven together. The success of Chris Thorpe’s new play is that it’s not just about these events but that it formally recreates and examines the cognitive and sequential conditions by which they occur. It’s a remarkable and intelligently unified piece. This is a play which inhabits the present. Actors sit in front of microphones, holding (if not always reading) their scripts. As they speak, there’s no sense that they’re deliberately building a set of narratives but, rather, each individual snapshot of the present is placed on top of the last and a stratified story emerges. These stories are composed of repetition and coordination; the audience is left to do a lot of work discerning the relationships between each moment, translating them into something more familiar and perceivable. This style gives the characters a certain optimism – they’re living entirely in each individual moment, imbued with possibility and potential, unhindered by the disappointments of the past or the fixed answers of...

This is a shortened version of a review that can be found here: jamesfennemore.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/crave-burton-taylor-studio/ Facing any contemporary production of a play that, at its premiere, felt new and formally game-changing, is the challenge of re-awakening that spirit of radical innovation that may have been long since buried underneath the repeated performances that fame brings. This is especially the case for Sarah Kane’s Crave . From our contemporary perspective, post- 4.48 Psychosis and after the proliferation of writers influenced by Kane’s formal experimentation, Crave is more recognisably ‘Sarah Kane’ now than it can have been 15 years ago. Hypnotist Theatre’s production, therefore, whether they like it or not, begins by coming back. Four bodies, two male, two female, speak from a dimly lit stage. Samuel Ward’s direction has the actors split into two pairs, placed alongside and slightly overlapping one another: the play becomes two dialogues, but dialogues which permeate one another as words and images and emotions pass across all four communicants. We simultaneously feel four separate characters and one composite consciousness, eerily fractured yet unified. This production’s strength is in the work done to get behind the oblique lines and characters, delivering performances that brim with intensity and...