✭✭✭✭✩

written by Martin Crimp,

directed by Theodor-Cristian Popescu

Actors Repertory Company,

Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

March 19-April 3, 2010

Those who like brain-teasers should love Martin Crimp’s fascinating 2008 play The City.  Crimp’s mental sensibility seems like a cross between Harold Pinter and David Lynch.  As in Pinter’s play Old Times (1971) or Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive (2001), The City begins in a realistic, even clichéd manner, but as the action progresses increasingly bizarre elements crop up so that we basically have to alter our story of what is happening on stage with every scene.  This reaches a point, as in Pinter and Lynch, where we have to consider the possibility that not all the characters we meet or events we see are “real.”  The surprising twist in the final scene seems to explain everything on the surface but opens up new mysteries below.

Gillian Gallow’s all-white set is so pristine it appears at times beautifully modern but at others eerily institutional.  There we meet the central couple of Clair (Deborah Drakeford) and Chris (Peter James Haworth), who can barely answer the question “How was your day?” because of disturbing experiences.  Clair witnessed what she thought was a child abduction only to realize it was something else.  Chris learned he may soon lose his job through restructuring.  Next we meet Jenny (Janet Porter), a nurse and Chris and Clair’s neighbour, distraught with images of atrocities in a war-torn city where her husband is a military doctor.  Why does Chris and Clair’s daughter (Anja Bundy) spout obscene limericks and dress like Jenny?  Why does Jenny give Clair a knife saying it is good for dealing with children?  Why does Chris want to celebrate his new job by driving into oncoming traffic?  A growing sense of unease builds up as we begin to feel the characters are struggling to carry on as usual despite some unnamed cataclysm that has shaken them to the core.

Robert Perrault’s soundscape gives the everyday sounds of street-life an edge of menace.  Sandra Marcroft’s brilliant lighting design subtly finds threatening shadows in ordinary scenes.  Under the taut direction of Theodor-Cristian Popescu the entire cast give intense, highly detailed performances that suggest that some explanation, however odd, underlies their enigmatic words and deeds.  By the end some may feel Crimp has merely been playing a game with the audience.  Others may realize that he has led us down a path shaped like a Möbius strip and made us recognize that the continual construction and reconstruction of stories is how we understand life, whether in the theatre or outside it.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly, 2010-03-22.

Photo: Deborah Drakeford..