‘There are worse things than being fat and 50. Being dead and 30.” These words struck home horribly as they were spoken last weekend by Jack Tarlton, in the role of a character known simply as ‘A’, in Sarah Kane’s Crave. For as every member of the North Wall audience knew — or could certainly have learned from the programme — Kane was herself dead, by her own hand, less than a year after they were written. She was two years short of 30.

The Actors Touring Company revival is the first for ten years of a short play considered something of a modern classic. Kane passed it off on its 1998 Edinburgh debut as the work ‘Marie Kelvedon’, recognising its departure in style from the in-yer-face violence for which her work was by then known.

In its way Crave is scarcely less revolutionary. There is no plot, setting or stage instructions relating to the movements of the four actors. In this production, director Ramin Gray chooses to have the quartet — Tarlton, Derbhle Crotty’s M, Cazimir Liske’s B and Rona Morison’s C— standing in a straight line facing their audience in a variety of lighting (Charles Balfour) and making their speeches to us with no reference generally to each other.

These deal with desire, loss, anger — much of what concerns humankind. Sometimes words pass around the group to create a staccato rhythm; occasionally, as in a long discourse on love by A, there are passages of great poetic beauty. There is the influence at times of the Bible and of T.S. Eliot. “That’s not it at all. That’s not what I meant at all,” comes straight from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

“What I call ecstasy is simply an absence of grief,” we are told at one point. At another: “The outside world is vastly overrated.” The poignant last words are “happy and free”.

About to begin a tour with the production, ATC chose to regard this first performance as a preview. Owing to illness, one actor had been changed ten days earlier. To her or his credit, it was not obvious which.