The City
The City, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf 2; July 3-August 9, 2009.
BENEDICT ANDREWS is a director who springs immediately to mind to answer the question: how to deal with the intricacies and bold challenges of English playwright Martin Crimp? In another time and place Andrews would be the cavalier with a duelling scar on his cheek – but the other guy would be dead. Not to say that Andrews fights and wins the battle with Crimp’s most recent play, more that the two are natural brothers in arms. And the audience is the ultimate winner.
In just seventy-five minutes the territory covered includes extreme drama, middle class ennui, indefinable but malevolent intent and anxious, high-tension comedy. It’s all generated, on a starkly-lit rake of matt black terracing, at first through Chris (Colin Moody) and his wife Clair (Belinda McClory), then their neighbour, Jenny – a nurse (Anita Hegh).
The post-working day exchange between the couple that opens the play is a masterpiece of trivia and disinterest. He’s a corporate highflier, she is a literary translator and never the twain shall meet. If either genuinely listens to the other it’s not obvious and they provoke uneasy chuckles of recognition in the audience. Jenny the nurse is a further disquieting presence. She is lower down the social and financial ladder than the pair and her antagonism towards them suggests an edge of resentment and envy.
More intriguing, however, is the quickly materialising sense of disjuncture and unreality. Jenny’s husband is a doctor, away at an undisclosed and secret war – she says. Clair has just met an author named Mohamed to whom she is drawn and with whom she has just experienced a profound, if unlikely, exchange – she says. And Chris is actually a downward spiralling highflier who is about to hit the ground with a status-crushing thump, or perhaps already has – but he isn’t saying.
-c750x442.jpg)
The city of the title is an idea and a reality – several realities – beginning with the unstated truth that the city is an inhuman and unnatural place to live. Chris, Clair and Jenny inhabit this one with varying degrees of pleasure and pain, which they endure or enjoy to much the same degree. The other evocations of city are imaginary – in Clair’s and Jenny’s minds – and equally rich and obliquely disturbing. It’s interesting that Dealing With Clair, his first major success from 20 years ago, has been programmed virtually simultaneously through Griffin Independent (review here on Stagenoise) because Crimp’s preoccupations and foibles are evident in that play and are now even more polished and accomplished in The City.
Crimp is well served by the excellent cast and creatives (set design Ralph Myers, lighting Nick Schlieper and costumes Fiona Crombie) and Andrews’s unadorned yet extremely effective production. The questions of who and what is real are joined by other mysteries of modern urban living and as (I think) Gertrude Stein once said: “If that is the answer, what is the question?”
