Fewer Emergencies ( Archived )

Reviews

The Guardian4 stars A group of people sit and tell stories. The first is about a woman who realises her marriage is a mistake, but stays, colluding with her husband in living a public lie while wreaking damage and violence behind closed doors. In the second, a Dunblane-type massacre has occurred; in the third the couple’s child from the first piece is locked in a tower while outside violence apparently rages. Who are these storytellers? Actors performing a play? Executives at a script conference? Where do these stories come from? In the age of Hollywood and 24 hour news coverage, is it possible to have any authentic response to the world around us or even to the emotional upheavals of our own lives?

With our imaginations colonised by the constant stream of images and, in the case of major violent events, by the stream of speculative psychobabble that accompanies them is it any wonder that we self-consciously act our way through reality. The movie of our lives rolling continuously in our heads with ourselves cast in the starring role and every response mediated through the scriptwriter and camera’s eye?

It is a subject very much centre stage at the moment, with Mark Ravenhill’s recent Product viciously dissecting the Hollywood Dream Machine, and now this triptych of vicious modern fairytales from Martin Crimp that bring the nightmare home and stab you through the soul. Crimp’s grim tales are even more terrifying because they are grounded so precisely in middle-class affluence, where the veneer of civilisation hides the hollowness and rage within, where happiness is sacrificed for a nice handmade table, truth for easy lies and we lock our children up when the real horror lies within. James Macdonald’s tightly controlled production takes no prisoners and does its job so well that you won’t stomach a cosy chatty supper afterwards.

Lyn Gardner, THE GUARDIAN, 14 September 2005

Martin Crimp’s three interlinked playlets might be described as theatre for the iPod generation and in more ways than one. Not only is there a dinky compactness to this sleek triptych, which lasts little over an hour, but it also captures that eerie modern habit, so visible among the gadget-owning classes, of retreating into an insulated world of comfort and consolation.

Seen by many, in his meticulous attention to linguistic detail, as a natural successor to Harold Pinter, Crimp is a writer blessed with a shrewd instinct for satire and a real knack for replicating the anonymity and soullessness of todays working practices.

Watching the first piece, Whole Blue Sky, you initially sense that you’re party to a savagely sophisticated joke at the expense of creative brainstorming sessions. Two women and a man (Rachael Blake, Tanya Moodie and Neil Dudgeon) sit, in James Macdonald’s coolly restrained production, at an elongated table on plastic-moulded chairs as blank as the white canvas stretching around them.

They’re conjuring up the life of an unhappily married woman. Bit by bit, prompting each other with questions, they delve deeper into her situation, groping for the right phrase, teasing out incidental details which in turn can be seized on as significant. They decide that she’s sustained by three things: money, property, family. They discover that her child (Bobby) cant sleep; that he hears a voice; that the voice doesn’t like him. Your attention is gradually drawn past these detached blue-sky thinkers into the darkest reaches of the story itself.

It’s an internalising pattern repeated in Face to the Wall, in which the trip now joined by another man (Paul Hickey) run through Dunblane-style massacre of schoolchildren, taking time to ask, absurdly, of the murderer: How’s life treating him?. Again the play – in both form and content veers off towards a point of introversion and collapse, as Hickey breaks into a 12-bar blues number about a bed-bound postman who, when roused by his son, throws tea in his face.

Fewer Emergencies, the most topical of the three, leaves us with the image of a wounded child (also called Bobby) trying to negotiate the stairs of his house while his parents are out at sea in their boat, heedless of the civil emergency.

Perhaps, all told, Crimp is not saying much more than that children reap the calamities that adults seriously strive to avoid, but it’s the creepy, beautifully crafted way he captures this process of surreptitious damage that’s so compelling.

Dominic Cavendish, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 15 September 2005

Metro3 stars Three people sit at a white table. A woman is telling the story of an unhappy marriage. She revises the story as she goes, accommodating and rejecting suggestions from the other two. Her character has a child. She is terrified of ageing. She is determined to pretend to her child that everything is ok.

The man takes over. He tells of a man who enters a school and shoots four children. Again, the others muscle in. Does the killer have a nice house? Was his childhood unhappy?

Recalling his earlier work, Attempts on Her Life, Martin Crimp’s new play questions whether narrative can convey meaning. His cast construct their stories in much the way a film director might storyboard a script, yet their construction also becomes the performance.

In the third scene, the three debate depicting the improved state of the couple’s marriage from the first scene by sticking them in a sailing boat, even though back at home, an apocalypse is dawning. Theatre, indeed all art, is the business of spinning false narratives.

Crimp’s play fizzes with ideas. Nonetheless, it is difficult to engage with a play that is essentially about disengagement. The more violent and disturbing the story, the more dispassionate and disinterested the way it is presented. And James Macdonald’s unusually lethargic production stifles the potential of Crimp’s more vivid images. Stories may be artifices but they are also theatre’s livelihood.

p(=reviewer-name). Claire Allfree, METRO, 14 September 2005

Times3 stars Stepping into the Theatre Upstairs, transformed for James Macdonald’s production of Martin Crimp’s terse new triptych, is like entering a nastily chic operating theatre. In Tom Pye’s startling design, the entire space is white, and initially flooded with ultraviolet light so that it glows with a discreet menace.

Actors sit at a long table, and talk in disturbingly detached manner of a world characterised by both public and private acts of violence. The lighting changes to red and then to green and gold, as the play’s complex linguistic journey links horrific accounts of cruelty and bloodshed to a queasy evocation of middle-class life. It’s all very elegant; the problem is that the visuals are the one significant way in which the production develops in its 70 minute duration.

Stylistically, Fewer Emergencies lies in territory similar to that occupied by Crimp’s 1997 play Attempts On Her Life. The characters are nameless, there is no textual indication of setting and the dialogue has a fluid and compelling ambiguity. It comprises three short, linked sections Whole Blue Sky, Face To The Wall (which the Royal Court presented as a stand-alone work in 2002) and Fewer Emergencies and the intricate reverberations of its imagery, its tinder-dry humour and above all its overriding sense of acute anxiety reward close attention. At first, the characters’ well-heeled urban types, played by Rachael Blake, Neil Dudgeon, Paul Hickey and Tanya Moodie seem to be brainstorming for a TV drama, tossing gruesome ideas into the air with obscene insouciance. Later, they could at times be conducting an official enquiry into a Columbine style massacre.

It’s well worth sticking with it, because the piece is crammed with piercing imagery and astute observations.

It’s grim, gripping and it demands more colour than it gets here.

Sam Marlowe, THE TIMES, 14 September 2005

The Independent3 stars Cruel and Tender, Martin Crimp’s updating of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis to reflect the War on Terror stood out in last years deluge of political dramas. In his latest work, Fewer Emergencies, contemporary politics are still concealed but still bubble under the surface.

In three episodes, three or four nameless characters, placed in a timeless, placeless white box of a set, talk through narratives. It is unclear whether these scenarios are real or imaginary, or possible storylines for a book, or even acting workshops. They are loosely held together by the theme of middle-class contentment threatened by the violence and unspecified emergencies latent in 21st century life.

Whole Blue Sky is the most touching episode in which a picture of happiness of family life is undermined by the unhappiness of the wife and mother, whose convivial dinner parties conceal the fact that the guests have screamed at each other in private, punched each other. The final episode, Fewer Emergencies, gives a contemporary resonance to this angst as we are warned that there is an emergency on right now. We see a family desperately trying to preserve their cosy life by means of comforting platitudes (things are definitely looking up) and familiar possessions in the face of unstoppable disaster.

The pristine white box in which the anonymous characters sit becomes a screen for the projection of their fantasies and anxieties. In Whole Blue Sky, this projection is realised literally as the silhouettes of the actors vacillate on the white screen behind them; in Face To The Wall, on the theme of a school massacre, the walls are drenched in red light; and in Fewer Emergencies, the dappled green background represents the sun of optimism that descends into darkness. For a conceptual piece, three episodes feels a little too long. Nevertheless, Rachael Blake, Tanya Moodie, Paul Hickey and Neil Dudgeon give expression and humour to Crimps crisp writing. There are some killer musings on the class system, from the suburban mother who knows the “good schools” and “the importance of fruit” and whose dining table “extends and extends”, to “the differences between nice families who hoover the insides of their cars” and “those who leave burnt mattresses outside their homes.” For many in the audience, these observations and the vague menace of violence will seem all too familiar.

Alice Jones, THE INDEPENDENT, 14 September 2005