THE CITY. To 7 June.
London.
THE CITY
by Martin Crimp.
Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs) To 7 June 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3.30pm.
BSL Signed 15 May.
Post-show talk 8 May.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7565 5000.
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 May.
The strangeness of the familiar world.
This show has that rarity at the Royal Court: a front-curtain, used before and between the five scenes of Martin Crimp’s new play. Though it’s actually a blank screen which, like the set’s bare walls, suggests a canvas on which anything can be written. As with the Diary that features at start, middle and end. And as a variety of stories can be inferred from Crimp’s teasing cross-references.
This is The City: a place of nervousness, uncertainty, deja-vu and half-memories. Of pressures isolating individual within a close relationship, of multiple opportunities and threats that open upon unending contacts and information.
Chris and Clair, as polite and anonymously named a professional pairing as you could find, have two children (as near the statistical 2.4 as whole numbers allow). They meet a neighbour, nurse Jenny. She has a carefully-voiced complaint about noise (another city phenomenon) connected with her attempts to relax between unsocial-hours shifts. But she opens a link to her doctor husband, who’s involved in a war somewhere.
At the start, a chance encounter related by Clair steps back from being a child-abduction but opens onto political repression and torture. Alongside, there’s the start of a narrative of the urban paranoia of job-loss that makes its final statement through a piece of costume. The fourth character, a young girl, becomes the nexus of numerous references in the script.
If, at times, Crimp seems to be manufacturing games without solutions, he does create an abstract of the pressures underlying modern urban opportunities. It’s a nervousness caught in the finely-controlled performances, Benedict Cumberbatch and Hattie Morahan’s couple living coolly self-possessed lives where reason is a balm soothing-over panic. Amanda Hale’s nurse addresses them as patients needing guidance through their condition, while suggesting also a world within herself.
Katie Mitchell’s production combines a stripped-down style with moments of dislocation, as characters enter in a slow-motion world of their own before snapping into normality when in contact with each other, or turn a simple look in a face-mirror into an event, as if preparing a face to meet the faces that they meet. Altogether intriguing.
Chris: Benedict Cumberbatch.
Clair: Hattie Morahan.
Jenny: Amanda Hale.
Girl: Matilda Castrey/Ruby Douglas.
Director: Katie Mitchell.
Designer: Vicki Mortimer.
Lighting: Paule Constable.
Sound: Gareth Fry.
Assistant director: Lyndsey Turner.
Sound associate: Sean Ephgrave.
2008-05-05 13:32:11