Stitching up The City

The City is the most recent in a series of dark contemporary choices for the Red Stitch theatre company. This is a company that have become proficient in serving up the gritty intricacies of the human psyche by putting on plays that your every day Jane and Joe can relate to, without simplifying their meaning. Operating on a tight-as-a-wire budget, Red Stitch hasn’t let the contracting purse strings hinder the quality of their productions. Simplistic, often stark, sets; ensemble actors and an intimate venue have actually added, not detracted, from the quality of the works they have chosen as part of this season.

This month, guest director Adena Jacobs will bring Martin Crimp’s The City to the Red Stitch stage. Jacobs, who graduated with a Bachelor of Creative Arts (honours) from Melbourne University and Master’s of Theatre Practice from VCA in 2008, tells ArtsHub that she has wanted to be involved in theatre since she was a child and found the role of the director; the interpreter and the observing eye, to be the one that suited her best. She hasn’t looked back since.

Jacobs is no stranger to bleak plays, but painting Martin Crimp’s The City with one austere overcoat would take away from the complexities that initially drew her to the work. Puzzling and multilayered, The City is touted as being part of the ‘in-yer-face’ genre of playwriting. Set in a middle-class London home, it examines three views of the modern metropolis. Crimp’s ubiquitous despair (it is often said that his characters never experience love or joy) is offset by the witty dialogue and comic dimensions of the central couple.

There are obvious comparisons to be drawn between The City and Polly Stenham’s That Face, staged by Red Stitch earlier this year. Also set in a middle-class English family and both witty and visceral in their dissection of human breakdown; however, Jacobs tells us that the comparison is superficial at best, “Polly Stenham makes That Face from the inside of experiences and Martin Crimp is writing from a dramatic place, partly from a philosophical place. Rather than being a classical drama it’s sort of an anti-thriller.”

The City explores urban life, the outside menace and the nature of fiction itself. We have the fundamental narrative of the breakdown of a marriage, and a man who’s trying to reinstate his identity and to find a way to feel connected with his relationships and society. On another level we have the wife character, the translator (Crimp himself has often worked as a translator), which Crimp has used to create a meta-narrative about the nature of writing and fiction and how we construct our lives and identities to try and create meaning. Says Jacobs, “On one level, it’s a relationship piece and on the other level it comments on the way that we fabricate and dream up our lives.”

Is it difficult to distance yourself when you have to deal with a desolate subject matter, day in and day out at rehearsals? Says Jacobs, “No, it’s not actually, in a way for me the work that I’ve done in the past is probably usually slightly in the bleak territory, so it doesn’t feel that unusual. I actually think Crimp, even though his vision is bleak, his articulation is incredibly witty and clever.... It’s viewing it’s people from a sort of mild distance so it doesn’t feel as tragic, it’s slightly more removed in that way.”

Jacobs says that the size of the venue definitely changed the way they put the production together, “If we had been given a huge space we might have configured it totally differently... Our kind of way into it was going, ‘how can we incorporate intimacy into a play like this? How can we start from claustrophobic intimacy rather than the other way around?’ In a way it’s the sort of frame that you’re set in, we have to do it in a space and it’s small but I actually really love intimate spaces in theatre.”

Generally Jacobs’ strives to make theatre that speaks truthfully and in a way that she can share and communicate with the audience. She says, “I guess I’m particularly interested in how theatre puts the audience in the position of the voyeur, which we are so often are in daily life and I guess theatre is constructed like that, I guess that theatre can be a bit like a peep show in some way.... The audience is sort of invited in to something that they would never ordinarily be allowed to watch in their normal life.”

The intimate space of the Red Stitch theatre enhances that voyeuristic element that Jacobs is interested in. The audience is so close that they can see the actors’ sweat as it runs down their brow; watch them catch their breath as they punch out hefty monologues - even more impressed with their ability to remember that many lines than with the performance itself. Red Stitch takes those reasons, and combines them with that heartbreaking analysis of what it is to be a human. It plonks them down in front of you to take from it what you will. And isn’t that why people go to the theatre?

The City
by Martin Crimp
Directed by Adena Jacobs
1-25 September
Opening Night – Friday 3rd September