Theatre Review: The City

The City by Martin Crimp. Directed by Adena Jacobs. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Melbourne until 25 September.

There’s a stunning moment in Ms Jacobs’ adventurous, counter-intuitive direction of Mr Crimp’s edgy, tense, efficient if unremarkable elegy to inner-urban, fringe-dwelling fatalism for the Red Stitch Actors Theatre. When Clair (the captivating Fiona Macleod) has returned from a conference in Lisbon, she has gone straight upstairs to bed. A bright red alarm clock rings incessantly, bringing her downstairs to resume her tranquillised existence of manufactured empathy with her world and, particularly, her husband Christopher (a fearless Dion Mills). All of the elements – Ms Jacob’s razor-sharp direction, Danny Pettingill’s lighting design, Dayna Morrisey’s set design and Jared Lewis’s sound design – converge to make this a singularly riveting moment. And how I hoped it was all going to end there.

In the impossibly dense, concrete-laced, inner-urban sprawls of London (where this play is set), one constantly struggles with claustrophobia – a certain sky-lessness – which leads to a heightened awareness of how our spirit-sucking proximity to others in the high-density world of semi-detached fortresses exists in London like nowhere else I have experienced. (This is not to say that my experience is vast, but London’s inner-urban environments are pinched and cramped to the point of occasional bouts of immense paranoia.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, paranoia and neurosis are the constant feeders to Mr Crimp’s characters who are all really just in desperate need of a weekend by the sea. Or in the country.

Playwrights who fashion their plays as structure to action (or in Ms Jacob’s adventurous interpretation, inaction) run the risk of being found to be suddenly transparent – which on this occasion is no more clearly articulated than in the long-overdue appearance of the ‘Girl’ (Georgie Hawkins on this occasion). The young girl’s arrival opens a Pandora’s Box of, now, truly horrific possibilities. Regrettably, no sooner have the demons been released, than they are back in their box with the lid firmly closed. It is just one of the many points in this performance at where the calibre of what was happening on stage departed from the reason they were there. The trend of British playwrights exploring their quasi-autonomous habitational quagmires might well be interesting for them (or anyone who has ever lived in Islington), but the lack of universiality in the themes at play results almost immediately in an outstanding production in conflict with its source and, ultimately, superior to it on nearly every level.

Ms Morrisey’s set design which, while perfectly functional and cleverly multi-dimensional, is all too easy-on-the-eye to connect us to the environment in which Mr Crimp’s tortured characters might exist. More East Malvern than Eastgate Estate. But Clair and Christopher’s home is made of sterner stuff – blood, sweat and tears – as was cleverly articulated in the artfully contained and beautifully studied and composed performances from Ms Macleod and Mr Mills as the uptight couple in need of some serious marriage guidance counselling sessions.

Meredith Penman is superb as the next-door neighbour ‘Jenny’, and escorts the role to well beyond the pinnacle of its potential – particularly in her ‘this is how you act a monologue’ moment, downstage centre and delivered with the full force of an actress possessed. This is how good the acting is at Red Stitch – but the point at where the actors leave the characters behind says two things: yes, the writers give the actors their permission, but ultimately, the play itself is found to be wanting.

Curiously, one of the plays many structural flaws fails to reward the fascinating ‘Jenny’, Ms Penman (or us) with any kind of meaningful denoument. Strangely (and it may have all become a little too obscure for me by this stage), the essence of ‘Jenny’ is assumed by the ‘Girl’ (they wear identical costumes) and ‘Jenny’ is reduced to anesthetised wallpaper. So, you assume, ‘Jenny’ is the grown-up daughter. Or something.

Spoiler alert: The final scene, which plays with the deadening weight of a self-conscious epilogue, is incredibly anti-climactic and leans heavily (and deflatingly one-dimensionally) on the “then I woke up and realised it was all a dream” analogy. Playwrights ‘writing about their characters in their play talking about how the play came to be written’ might, some years ago, been considered marvellously illuminating post-modern de-constructionism. Today, it’s just pretentious – and in this case particularly, only serves to whip the rug out from under everything and everyone, including us.

So to all those playwrights out there beavering away on their inner-urban, Global Financial Crisis-infused, pre-apocalyptic nightmare piece: please know how to finish.

This review was commissioned by Stage Whispers magazine @ www.stagewhispers.com.au