Janie and I have seen rather a lot of Martin Crimp’s work over the years. This opportunity, to see Martin Crimp’s latest thing performed by the man himself, seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.
Which indeed it was.
Crimp can range from “weird but utterly gripping” to “so weird it is utterly impenetrable”. This piece was somewhere in the middle of that range.
We found the piece fascinating, we enjoyed many of the vignettes and it got us talking about the piece and the issues raised by the 299 characters afterwards, all of which is a good thing. But within that whirlpool of ideas, while it was interesting theatre, there wasn’t any gripping drama.
As always with Crimp, there is some superb writing in there. Janie and I will carry some of the one-liners with us for a long time…
…although the one along the lines of, “a man over the age of 40 wearing a leather jacket – alarm bells start ringing” was a bit near the mark, don’t you think?
We’ve been interested in Martin Crimp’s writing for years. Sometimes his plays are a bit too weird even for us, but they always make us think and are usually chock-full of suspense and creepiness.
Dealing With Clair is no exception. One of Crimp’s earlier works this, when he was writing exclusively for The Orange Tree, it is very loosely based on the Suzy Lamplugh tragedy, which occurred a short while before the writing of this play and not too far away from Richmond.
Yet, this play from 30 years ago seems very contemporary and relevant today in this production.
The whole cast was excellent.
Our hearts sank a little when we saw that the designer had gone for one of those “behind a screen” designs, which we tend not to like, but actually it worked extremely well for this production, not least because the screen is removed at a telling moment in the play.
By gosh the play is creepy. We were talking about it a lot, for ages, after the evening – which is usually a sign that a play/production has really affected us – which this one surely did.
There are plenty of review snippets on the above links to the Orange Tree, but click here for links to the full reviews – mostly very good ones which the production thoroughly deserves.
I keep saying it, but the Orange Tree is doing great work at the moment – I hope they keep it going.
By the time we got to our seats, Janie and I had probably had enough suspense, drama, excitement and surprise for one day.
We’d been following the ODI cricket all day, which was well poised when we left Noddyland, in good time to get to The Almeida.
Noddyland/well poised
In fact the traffic was very light, enabling us to take an unusually direct route, but that didn’t stop the cricket from taking more twists and turns than a Sat Nav assisted London journey in a traffic jam.
Janie was convinced England were going to win throughout the Saffer chase; whereas I was less optimistic in the absence of early wickets for England on a very flat track. But between the time we drove past Madam Tussaud’s to the time we drove past the Wellcome Collection, the Saffers reduced the ask from 26 runs off 13 balls to 10 runs off 10 balls. Even Janie briefly thought England were as stuffed as…well, waxworks aren’t technically stuffed, but some specimens in the Wellcome Collection must be.
The worst part about listening to the end of that cricket match in the car was waiting to turn from White Lion Street onto Islington High Street, when the Saffers needed just four runs off the last two balls. The radio signal hit one of those building-affected interference spots and we couldn’t hear a thing for about a minute – which felt like an hour. As we emerged onto the High Street, we soon learnt that we hadn’t missed a ball; merely a lot of faffing around in the field. Phew.
So the match was won – scorecard here – just as we arrived at the Almeida. Double-phew. We sat in the car a while to decompress and hear the post-match punditry.
The Almeida was heaving by the time we entered, a little after 19:00. We collected our tickets, bought a programme, ordered our drinks and found a quieter spot in the corner of the bar. Janie wanted to read the two or three sentence promotional teaser for the play, which was absent from the programme but is the information that enticed us to book the play. I volunteered to get her the little promo card, via the loo.
As I weaved through the heaving foyer/bar area, at one point a fellow, with his back to me, was standing in a particularly obstructive place, making it impossible for me to get past. I tapped him gently on the shoulder and said, “excuse me, may I please get past you?”, to which he replied, without turning around, “NO. You can go all the way around the other side instead.”
Janie had met Ollie and indeed Ollie’s other half, Victoria, a few months ago at Chris Grant’s alumni do, so we needed little reintroduction, chatting briefly before the play and then again at some more length about the play during the interval and after the show.
It is one of those plays that gives you plenty to chat about.
The Almeida website has a superb resource on each production these days, with production information, pictures, descriptions and links to the reviews, so no point me replicating that sort of stuff – click here for The Almeida resource on the Treatment.
The Treatment has had superb reviews (as evidenced in the above Almeida resource), but one of Janie’s clients had absolutely hated this play, describing it as “rubbish”, so we went with a little trepidation. That particular client/lady often has taste that corresponds with ours. But on this occasion Janie’s client got it wrong; I can see how the play (indeed Martin Crimp’s writing generally) wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but it is very interesting and far from rubbish.
Martin Crimp’s plays are (in our experience) always sinister and weird. The Treatment (which Crimp wrote and was first performed in 1993) echoes some of the themes Crimp also covered in The City – which we saw at the Royal Court in 2008 and which I Ogblogged here. In particular the crazy, suspenseful nature of cities. Menace that is partly overt, partly covert; some only in our minds, some all too real.
Coincidentally, Benedict Cumberbatch was in the audience with us, sitting very close to or even next to Ollie and Victoria. As a young, up-and-coming, virtually unknown but clearly very talented actor, Cumberbatch starred in that production of The City (and indeed Martin Crimp’s version of Rhinoceros at The Royal Court – Ogblogged here). I think we first saw Cumberbatch at the Almeida as it happens, as Tesman in a superb production of Hedda Gabler in 2005.
Benedict Cumberbatch also plonked himself at the next table to ours during the interval, much to the complete nonchalance of Janie, Ollie and Victoria…until I pointed him out to them.
Actually, these days Benedict Cumberbatch is everywhere and in everything, so on that basis this encounter was hardly a coincidence. Indeed, given the size of the cast used in The Treatment it’s a miracle that Cumberbatch wasn’t in the play rather than merely watching it. Stranger still that Janie and I didn’t see him eating at Ranoush in Kensington later in the evening. Absolutely everywhere, he is.
Janie and I will find ourselves talking about this play for some while, I’m sure; certainly for the rest of the weekend…and this is a long weekend. That’s the sign of a good play to us. We also thought it was a superb production, with excellent performances and very innovative stage direction/set design.
I have a copy of the play if anyone wants to seek enlightenment from reading that, let me know. I challenge you.
Tucked into my copy of the play is a short script for something else – I think it is a sample from one of Simon David’s pieces – quite impenetrable without context – clearly it was that sort of night.
We were really looking forward to this piece but found it disappointing.
It felt to us like a rather inconsequential, silly piece trying to be profound.
Cate Blanchett has never really done the business for me on stage. Strangely, with this piece, my feelings about her undoubted abilities as an actress were enhanced but it would have been a struggle for anyone to wring much out of this play.
A double bill of Martin Crimp plays, the first brand new, the second an older one.
Part of the Orange Tree’s 40th anniversary celebrations and a nod to one of its bigger achievements; championing Martin Crimp’s work in the early days.
What a grim evening of theatre this turned out to be.
The only ungrim thing about the evening was bumping into George Littlejohn and his good lady in the foyer before the show and then again in the interval. I have known George since 1994 when we met, for reasons that will only be explained to you if you click here, at the 1994 inaugural Accountancy Awards. Only click if you find pompous awards funny; don’t click if you take them seriously.
The play is about young upwardly mobile Viennese trainee doctors in the 1920’s, who should have been among the most happening people on earth were it not for their unfortunate juxtaposition with time and space (i.e. 1920’s Vienna) and their existential angst.
Janie and I hated the first half of the play and resolved not to stay for the second half. I’m not saying that it was either going to be members of the cast, or us, or a mixture of those two cohorts, but suicide was clearly on the cards during the second half. We made absolutely certain it wasn’t going to be us.
Unfortunately for George and his good lady, they had some sort of connection with someone involved in the production, so they stayed for the second half. We wished them luck as we waved them goodbye.
The irony of the bad straplining of that last piece will not be wasted on George Littlejohn, who was at one time the editor of Accountancy Age, no less, but has since managed to exceed even those giddy heights.
Despite their ordeal, sticking out the whole evening, I am pleasantly surprised, indeed delighted, to report that both the Littlejohns seem hale and hearty at the time of writing (January 2017). Janie and I ran into them both again at the Curzon Bloomsbury on New Year’s Day 2017 – click here, which triggered this memory and hence this write up.
Weird play, this one. You never quite know what’s going on with Martin Crimp. This play is a companion piece to one named The Country, which we saw at the Royal Court in the summer of 2000 and rated as “very good”.
The Country was also weird, but The City was, I think, even weirder. Short play, though. I seem to recall it got us talking and thinking, which is good.
A young Benedict Cumberbatch, still emerging as a star, was in this one. Hattie Morahan and Amanda Hale were also very good in it.
Benedict Cumberbatch was a young actor on the “one to watch” list in those days; now (writing in 2016) one might pay good money to avoid him – simply because of extreme overexposure to his manifest talent, you understand.
Janie and I were very taken with this creepy three-hander at the Royal Court. I remember us agreeing that it was Pinteresque at the time – without the influence of reviews I hasten to add.
I think this was our first sighting of a Martin Crimp play and for sure we were intrigued enough to seek out his work several times subsequently.
Owen Teale, Juliet Stevenson and Indira Varma, directed by Katie Mitchell. All people who had impressed us before and/or since.
My friend Michael Billington in the Guardian shared our fascination with this piece and also saw the Pinter parallels:
