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Review Round-up: Crimp Style Cramped in The City

Martin Crimp’s latest play The City received its world premiere on Tuesday (29 April 2008, previews from 24 April) at the Royal Court Theatre, where it runs in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs until 7 June 2008.

Crimp wrote the dark comic mystery as a companion piece to his play The Country, which premiered at the Royal Court in May 2000. The premiere production reunites Crimp and director Katie Mitchell, whose collaborations include The Country and Face to the Wall at the Court and Crimp’s new version of The Seagull at the National. Crimp’s long-term association with the Royal Court began in 1997 when his play Attempts on Her Life premiered at the London venue. Mitchell recently re-explored that play, in an NT production last year.

The City features three characters - city worker Chris (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), language translator Clair (Hattie Morahan) and nurse/neighbor Jenny (Amanda Hale) (See News, 4 Mar 2008) - as they fight to make sense of a surreal and collapsing world. Stage Design is by Vicky Mortimer, lighting by Paul Constable and sound by Gareth Fry.

Most first night critics were disappointed by The City, its “loquacious content” and failure “to ignite” making it “fatally underpowered”. Katie Mitchell’s direction garnered mixed responses, with some critics applauding her “superbly disciplined production” while others tired of her evident reverence for Crimp’s piece. Benedict Cumberbatch, Hattie Morahan and Amanda Hale were widely praised for their performances, although overall it was felt that they couldn’t save a production that was “all enigma and self-conscious artistry”. The Guardian’s Michael Billington provided a contrasting view – he praised Crimp for his “subtle articulation” and concluded that here was a “writer in full control of his talent”.

Benedict Nightingale in The Times (two stars) - “What will the critic who described Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, which the National revived last year, as so obscure, so terrible that ‘one flees from it as from the Tower of Babel’ be saying about Crimp’s new play The City? His comparisons are more likely to be Bedlam or the Slough of Despond or, even more damagingly, an American academic’s thesis on deconstructionism in the Post-Modern era. And though I rather admired Attempts, an impressionistic piece that brought to life a fragmentary, fin-de-siècle world, I must say that The City left me feeling more impatient than enlightened … What’s happening? Why are Jenny, the foreign writer’s sister-in-law and Chris and Clair’s daughter, a little girl who strums the piano and recites obscene limericks, all dressed as nurses? Why must Chris, having indeed lost his job, become a butcher at Sainsbury’s, complete with hat and badge? Above all, what’s the point of a denouement in which Clair decides that most of the characters, perhaps including Chris and herself, are her own inventions? Well, perhaps this is part of Crimp’s attempt to tell us that we’re disoriented people inhabiting a disorienting world that’s also insecure and dangerous … But I left the theatre feeling that this was more paranoid fancy than genuine threat.”

- by Kate Jackson

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