Theatre

As this neatly timed, elegant revival illustrates with uncomfortable clarity, you can take the couple out of ‘The City’, but you can’t take the gnawing unease of modern living out of a Martin Crimp play. It’s a devastating, fractured portrait of betrayal, the possibility that a city doctor’s retreat to a pastoral idyll will prove redemptive is
no sooner conjured than destroyed.

Richard has brought home an anonymous 25-year-old he found unconscious, lying in the road. But from the moment she first questions his apparent act of chivalry, his wife’s distrust needles its way under the skin of their every marital exchange. When Rebecca wakes up, her own hypodermic history with Richard poisons their communication entirely.

Simon Godwin’s simply staged, fluent production deals beautifully with the play’s haunting ellipsis. In less sensitive hands, the brutally truncated dialogue, strewn with half iterated clues of defining, off-stage events, could come across as so much self-conscious posturing in the shadow of Pinter. Instead, they prove dangerously captivating. If it doesn’t quite fly as an evening, it’s because Jennifer Kidd’s firebrand, fiercely astute Rebecca (pictured) outshines Federay Holmes and David Shelley as the couple in crisis. But this remains a finely tuned, disturbing revival that leaves you wondering with discomfiting persistence whether empty simulations of happy English marriages are the only kind there are.