The Country ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Juliet Stevenson as Corrine, Indira Varma as Rebecca, Owen Teale as Richard

Production photography by Ivan Kyncl

Direction: Katie Mitchell Design: Vicki Mortimer Lighting: Paule Constable Sound: Gareth Fry Movement: Struan Leslie

Cast: Juliet Stevenson, Owen Teale, Indira Varma

“Martin Crimp’s new play is an assault on the pastoral myth: the Virgilian idea of the countryside as a place of order, harmony, continuity. What Crimp shows, in this fascinatingly cryptic 90-minute piece, is the fractious disharmony of a deracinated generation less concerned with planting roses than tranferring neuroses from the city to the country. As in Crimps’ last play, Attempts On Her Life, the audience plays the role of detective: we piece together the plot from scattered clues…

“In the past, Crimp’s plays have attacked urban consumerism. Here he widens his vision to suggest that country life is now filled with transplanted bourgeois desperation. Richard’s unseen doctor-partner constantly quotes The Georgics: what we get from Crimp is a Pinterish philippic about corrosive deceit and delusion. If it works it is because Crimp artfully witholds information to generate suspense and because he subtly plays with verbal leitmotifs… The Pinter parallel is strongly reinforced by the use of language as a mask. When Corrine finally meets Rebecca, the unexpected guest, their encounter is fraught with a semantic nit-picking that conceals mutual hostility: as Rebecca shrewdly remarks, “the more you talk, the less you say.” And the last scene between husband and wife is an elaborate verbal dance in which a truth suddenly spoken comes like a blow in the face.”

Michael Billington THE GUARDIAN, 17 May

“The Country is Martin Crimp’s first place since the ultra-modern Attempts On Her Life in 1997 and it’s premieried now in a meticulous, subtly creepy staging by Katie Mitchell. Like Crimp’s compelling, microscopically calculated script, the production gives a powerful sense of the abyss gaping under this precarious middle-class marriage. The excellent Juliet Stevenson plays an anxious woman slowly waking up to the nightmare of a colossal fraud. She had though that the move to the country would represent a clean break with the past and with her husband’s dangerous habits; in fact, it was a premeditated con and proof of the stubborn persistence of his addictions.

“Last year, when the Court invited writers to direct a rehearsed reading of a favourite play, Crimp chose Pinter’s Old Times. His creative affinity with this doyen of dramtists can be seen during the various confrontations here, in the skill with which he lets you feel the weight of what is unsaid and the power that people wield by holding information in reserve.”

Paul Taylor THE INDEPENDENT, 17 May

“I began mentally to prepare a review suggesting that Crimp, whose translations very nearly outnumber his original plays, has still to find his own voice. Yet, let’s admit it, a work influenced by such-and-such a writer is not neccessarily just counterfeit goods.Increasingly Katie Mitchell’s brilliantly tense production, combined with some marvellously meticulous acting, began to draw me into what became a fascinating if undeniably Pinteresque situation. Why has Teale’s Richard left the city medical practice for one deep in fell country? Specifically, what’s his relationship with Indira Varma’s Rebecca, the 25-year old American he brings back one night to his shambolic family home, claiming to have found her lying unconscious in the road?…

“I don’t think I’m giving away too much if I tell you that the answer is to be found in thoise old reliables, sex and drugs… the end, which must also remain unrevealed in detail, still left me chilled. A phone rings unanswered. A doctor emptily smirks. A marriage exists and does not exist. Children have parents and don’t have parents. It was almost enough to leave me glad that Martin Crimp is still in search of an artistic identity.”

Benedict Nightingale THE TIMES, 18 May