In this staging of The Country, a series of four dialogues played in a single room, the intimacy of Martin Crimp’s text is zoomed up to loom large over the audience. Julie Fox’s richly austere set has outsized the proscenium – usually absent in Theatre Junction – into a frame that disappears as it engulfs. Within this space, the first scenes play out across rectangles of light running across and up – a set of stairs, a solid wood table extended laterally through the wooden floor – that project axes on which the characters contest duels of “violence, cruelty, and sexual competition,” as we read in Mark Lawes’ concise introduction. The first scene assaulted me with its energy, which exploded inexplicably but relentlessly out of its questions and cross-questions. Mark Lawes is balled and pugnacious, Fiona Byrne desperately deliberate and contained, and it matters little that only one of them draws blood. The tight, delimited space of the theatre has always held a special power to represent the claustrophobia of our domestic worlds and the psychological dystopias we create at home. Crimp is compressing dramatic tradition in reducing and restricting this inner world into a theatre that is absolute because it performs only dialogue, and his text gives no directions to frame this performance beyond the sparse naming of several objects: “A large room, wooden chairs, an old table.” The play could be performed in cinematic close-ups, or on a runway where characters speak past each other, or directly at the audience. But here, in a space simultaneously centered and pushed off kilter with shadows, I found myself dizzied as if its pettiness had suddenly become twenty feet tall.
It was the words that made me most dizzy. Having read the play in the afternoon, I had the sense that they persisted from the text not as ideas or thoughts, but as things. Sharp, lightweight things – like the syringes in Rebecca’s bag. This was at first an effect of Crimp’s dialogues and the clarity with which they were performed. Crimp forces apart the banal weapons and damaging effects of intimate quarrels: the formulaic rejoinders, habitually defensive or aggressive, that come tumbling out of one partner before the other has finished; the duplicity between what is said and what is left unsaid; the swift punches that land square because their angle of attack is oblique. The work centers on these fissures. In Crimp’s most celebrated play, the baffling and post-modern Attempts on Her Life, the title’s heroine exists only in a dismembered state of seventeen identities. The effect of Crimp’s dialogue in this piece, superficially less avant-garde, is similar. The characters are effects of the exchange – flashpoints where words manage to hit their mark and make their violence visible. And when the words do claim a certain weight, when they seem to refer to solid and heavy things outside in the world, or to flesh, they express desires of belonging, of finding some place in the world, in which the voice metamorphoses into the landscape it bespeaks.
This outside is Crimp’s country, which the text imagines to be wet: a glass of water from the kitchen, the sounds of a shower upstairs, or a moist landscape of moss and fell. It is tasteless, pure, absorbing, cleansing. The third character Rebecca, played with corrosive vulnerability by Raphaele Thiriet, embodies the only way in or out. For me, the strength of this performance was to frame this threshold as the violent pivot of the play, and to anchor our view firmly in this frame.
Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de
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