Theatre review: The City

Published on Wednesday 24 February 2010 18:04

THE CITY **** TRON, GLASGOW

NO-ONE ever said that Martin Crimp's dramatic writing was easy stuff. As one of the leaders of the current generation of English playwrights, Crimp has an unsettling way of taking the everyday detail of modern, middle-class life – the day in the office, the voicemail message, the chance encounter on a busy station full of blank-faced commuters – and suddenly gathering it up into a full-blown piece of frightening poetic surrealism.

Crimp's 2008 play The City, now staged in a new studio production at the Tron, is a fine and disturbing example of his work, a 75-minute essay in disrupted realities and shifting perceptions that begins in the mind of Clair, a London literary agent with (so it seems) a husband and the regulation two children. When we first meet her, she is in the garden of her house in London, recounting to her husband Chris – who has just lost his job – a strange meeting on a station with a man called Mohammed who is upset because his sister-in-law has just made off with his daughter. The sister-in-law is a nurse; and as Clair's story emerges and moves on, the nurse appears as a distraught neighbour in her garden, ranting about a distant war, and triggering an escalating series of shifting images and merging characters.

At the core of the play is the image of the city both as a real place and as a vital arena for the imagination. The suggestion is that, as we pound the cities of others into dust, we lose the coherent cities of our own minds; and there's something about Andy Arnold's spare production, with its ultra-simple garden set, that never quite captures that resonance. But there's a fine central performance here from Selina Boyack, as Clair. And if Crimp's play finally leaves us more baffled than enlightened, it's also the kind of rich and bold poetic drama that shakes and stirs the imagination in ways beyond forgetting.