27 April 2017

The Treatment (by Martin Crimp)

Almeida Theatre

Reviewed by John Watson

Stars ****

As always at the Almeida, the direction (by Lyndsay Turner) and the acting were both excellent. In particular Indira Varma (Jennifer), Ben Onwukwe (the taxi driver), Mathew Needham (Simon) and Ian Gelder (Clifford) turned in performances which could fairly be described as memorable. The staging was good too, generally uncluttered with an effective use of darkness between scenes to punctuate the performance.

The play (by Martin Crimp) was first performed in 1993 and is primarily about abuse. That is not sexual abuse, of the type which Jennifer tries to get Anne (Aisling Loftus) to describe in the first scene, nor physical abuse either, but the abuse implicit in a complex pattern of characters all exploiting each other for their own advantage. A life story stolen here; a husband stolen there; a nasty physical assault. Who is abusing who? It depends on where you look from. The play worked well at that level, but attempts to link the story to the metropolis of New York itself were less successful. Certainly there were some good “clown” scenes on the streets and in taxi cabs, but they, and the other allusions to place and perspective, were not really sufficient to add the extra dimension of the “city as a set” promised in the programme.

It made for an entertaining evening but without perhaps the depth that the audience had been led to expect.

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