Martin Crimp’s bewildering, but always riveting new play suffers from a bad case of urban angst: being adrift in a fear of random attacks, jobs lost, children abducted and hostile, snooping neighbours. In 2000, Crimp wrote ‘The Country’, in which an unhappy couple find no respite away from the city. The couple in this new play are no happier, but the playwright has added a surrealistic layer.
Katie Mitchell’s production is alive to every raw nerve, as the wall-like curtain is lifted to show a streamlined interior. Hattie Morahan as Clair and Benedict Cumberbatch as Chris confront each other in a series of scenes that take place over a single year. Chris is anxious about the fate of his job in a global company and obsessed with the power of a woman called Jeanette; Clair, a translator, is equally preoccupied with a famous writer, Mohammad, whom she meets in the street and who fails to kiss his daughter good-bye. The girl is going to live with his sister-in-law, who despises him. How odd is that?
Other disturbing stories are told and strange events occur – Chris loses his job and becomes a butcher at Sainsbury’s – which are never explained. Two bizarre characters appear. Firstly, there’s the neighbour, a nurse who moves and talks like a mal-functioning clockwork toy. Then there’s Chris and Clair’s young daughter, who is bafflingly also dressed as a nurse and is spookily grown-up.
As if to explain these odd interlopers, Clair admits that they have been invented by her, but that they wouldn’t come alive, just as the nurse complains that her piano-playing is lifeless. In contrast, Mohammad talks of the death of his child as an aid to making ‘the fire burn more brightly’. There are no neat explanations, but the sense of anxiety, plus Crimp’s apparent revulsion for his trade, make for very unsettling viewing.
2 comments
If you have the opportunity there is a good fringe production of the Country running at the Tabard theatre (see review) for the next two weeks.
Please include a link to the theatre's website so I can buy a ticket.