THEATRE: THE CITY
Image: Rotating around an alienated couple, Christopher and Clair, their rarely seen children, and a deeply lonely nurse neighbour, The City is a dark and cryptic treatise on marital breakdown, consumer imperatives, the brutalities of war and the nature of storytelling, written by edgy UK playwright Martin Crimp and directed by Benedict Andrews.
Written by the edgy and unflinchingly severe British playwright Martin Crimp and directed by the similarly visionary Benedict Andrews (The War of the Roses), The City was never going to be a comfort piece. Clever and compelling, yes. Compassionate, no – but then do you ever really get that in the city?
Rotating around an alienated couple, Christopher and Clair, their heard-of-but-rarely-seen children, and a deeply lonely nurse neighbour, The City is a dark and cryptic treatise on marital breakdown, consumer imperatives, the brutalities of war and the nature of storytelling. Duplicities form a visual as well as thematic motif; there is Clair’s writer friend, Mohammed, who asks her to Lisbon, and Christopher’s female work colleague with an uncanny head for business (and, it is suggested, something more besides). The audience is enclosed in the mirror image the stage, while mirrors and costume duplicates are increasingly embedded into the crescendoing uncertainty. Because uncertain it does become; are these characters real, or imagined? Are we collectively willing their intrigues and miseries into existence? This is the real power of The City. You leave feeling that you are complicit in its construction – the urban power struggles, global insecurities – and it is suggested, its potential destruction.
3 July–9 August. Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay. $30-75, 9250 1777 or sydneytheatre.com.au
