Crave begins with an uncomfortably loud ticking sound, as the four actors stand militarily straight, looking directly into the audience, lit from above by a harsh white light.

The production masterly establishes the play's dynamic by refusing to let the audience relax. The set is impenetrable, with a telephone that doesn't ring, a glass of water that stays full, and a white balloon that floats enigmatically in the corner. This self-conscious unfathomability plays out in the fragmented dialogue, which lacks any evident structure, making interpretation difficult.

But faced with such a puzzle, the audience members instinctually begin to piece together their own narratives. As a result, the initially alien seeming scenarios slowly begin to live in our imaginations. We are helped by the actors, who embody almost clichéd characters, which they use to channel the different voices, emotions and experiences of Kane's script. Crave contains multiple allusions to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem noted for its polyphonic tissue of quotations.

Crave could easily become as impenetrable as The Waste Land but the ATC's production establishes 'characters', which the audience can fasten on to. The production gives the characters more personality than in Kane's original script through their costumes, which feature boyish pyjamas and silky nightwear. At first these individual touches felt unnecessary, but after further consideration it seems that these costumes play an important role in making these characters feel so human, while at the same time clichéd. The characters become a kind of twisted everyman, distilling peculiar individual experiences through the body and voice of an identifiable character. All the actors did a great job at performing this difficult task of balancing the individual with the universal.