The Treatment

by Martin Crimp

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 10 May 2017

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Martin Crimp's 1993 play, with Aisling Loftus as Anne, Indira Varma as Jennifer and Julian Ovenden as Andrew, supported by Matthew Needham as Simon, Ellora Torchia as Nicky, Ian Gelder as Clifford and Gary Beadle as John and a couple of dozen mostly silent extras. The sets are designed by Giles Cad;e and lit by Neil Austin.

This is a really disturbing play, not least because it begins in what could be just a probing but essentially light-hearted satirical tone as two 'facilitators', husband and wife team Jennifer and Andrew, listen to Anne's strange tale of being tied up and having tape placed over her mouth. They immediately perceive this as the prelude for sexual assault or abuse, ignoring Anne's insistence that there was no abuse, not even any physical conflict or contact. They are already envisaging a fairly conventional sexual thriller, while Anne is soon uncomfortably aware that she is out of her depth.

Simon, Anne's estranged husband, is a looming presence, somewhat threatening, but not in the obvious way that Jennifer or Andrew imagine. When he calls out to Anne in the street as the couple are taking her to a Japanese restaurant, she manages to pretend not to know him; their later conversation certainly carries tense overtones, but Simon seems more appalled that Anne was made to eat raw fish than by anything else in her account of what she has been doing. There is certainly something odd in the dynamic between them, but we never quite get to the bottom of it.

Clifford is brought in by the facilitators to prepare a script - or more likely a 'treatment' of the story, but Jennifer and Andrew have also latched on the idea that they would gain more involvement in the story ('make it their own' as well as Anne's) if Andrew claimed to have fallen in love with Anne. This of course confuses her further, and when Clifford introduces his own idea that there should be a voyeur witnessing the abuse, and Andrew encourages him to watch his own real seduction of Anne, the whole situation has moved very far from easy laughter, and Anne is repelled and shocked.

As a picture of media exploitation of ordinary lives, of city sophisticates running rings around naive lower class people, of unrelenting self-regard losing all touch with civilised behaviour, this is a startling and probing piece of work. Simon and Anne are obviously out of their depth. Clifford, living on past and faded glories (two plays on Broadway in the 60s), is unceremoniously dumped by the facilitators when John, the preening star they have engaged to play the part of Anne's tormentor, objects to his attempts to control his own script. Nicky, at first a doormat of a receptionist, becomes a horribly self-important contributor to the denigration of the real Anne as she is virtually willed out of existence in a production meeting. If it was all too plausible in 1993, it is even more so in the modern age of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. Even Andrew's unexpected realisation that he really has fallen in love with Anne cannot survive the impetuous flow of Jennifer's unstoppable desite to reinterpret reality to suit herself - it is a rather interesting echo of the situation in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in which Valmont is caught out by his own better nature.

The performances are completely convincing. Aisling Loftus allows Anne to be both naive and determined, but not strong enough to exert herself properly, while Julian Ovenden's easy charm covers a dangerous insecurity. Indira Varma's Jennifer is impossible not to watch, and yet the character is amazingly self-absorbed, utterly unable to admit to being wrong or at fault or indeed responsible for any misfortune. 

The background presence of New York, a teeming and uncaring city, is cleverly evoked by projections of street scenes through the front window of a taxi during scene changes, and by the constant movement of nameless people through corridors in offices and restaurants, and along sidewalks, going about their own business and failing to notice whatever else is in front of them - just as all city dwellers inevitably do. The set is marvellously flexible, being a series of grey walls which can serve as almost anything required. In a place like this, it is almost credible that there should be a blind taxo driver who feels he knows the city well enough to navigate its streets, provinding his customers warn him when there is a red light.