THEATRE: THE CITY
- Author:
- Amelia G
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Following his acclaimed recent work with STC as director of the epic production The War of the Roses, Benedict Andrews says he has enjoyed returning to something as fine, precise and emotionally fraught as Martin Crimp’s The City.
Opening this week, the darkly comic, mystery-filled play tells the story of a married couple who are having trouble communicating with each other. Andrews says he likens it to crystal which a thought or image gets shot through and then refracts: “You get multiple versions of the same image, which are parallel and all true.”
He describes the play as a metafiction which highlights its own construction while reflecting on the act of writing. “When a writer renders their views the result is simultaneously true and not true,” he says. “What is the betrayal and what is the fidelity in an act of translation? What happens when everything becomes a series of mirrors reflecting themselves? If you’re living inside a simulacrum, what is real and what is the copy?”
The notion of translation throughout the play is also something fundamental to theatre, says Andrews. “One of the things I love about theatre is the fact that one text is constantly being replayed. Hamlet will be retold according to the various eras and cultures it goes through and the various people who interpret it. Everyone watching theatre knows the person stabbed as Hamlet will get up at the end. They know his death is an act of translation. Even a contemporary play that is retold night after night is each time new, but also the same.”
On another level is the running idea of cities as artificial constructions that are eternally incomplete and always reflecting other stories. “If we’re involved in a far away war and the wealth of our society is based upon that war,” says Andrews, “then there is a ghost pulverized city beneath our city. Everyone living in the city with the hope of having a good life is complacent, and thus the state is built on violence.”
And is it as bleak as it sounds? “This is a relationship that is taken beyond the brink of collapse to a point where it’s unknown, and in order for them to continue everything must become more unknown. I think there’s hope in that: it’s not an easy hope and there no solution or sentimentality but it’s an idea of stripping away illusion.”
29 June – 9 August. Warf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay. $30-75, 9250 1777 or sydneytheatre.com.au
Photo be Derek Henderson
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Story posted on Wednesday, 24 June 2009, filed under Theatre & Performance. Follow responses via the RSS feed.
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