Terror is both a distressing reality and a potent metaphor in Cruel and Tender, Martin Crimp’s thrilling updating of Sophocles’s tragedy The Women of Trachis.
Amelia is the wife of a general who is leading an anti-terrorist campaign somewhere in Africa. One day Laela, a teenage African refugee, arrives on her doorstep. The general claims he has rescued her but Amelia finds out that she is his mistress. And that he has burned down a whole city for her sake.
Crimp’s version includes a journalist and a spindoctor, with Amelia’s entourage of housekeepers and beauticians standing in for the traditional chorus, and he illustrates how Amelia’s desire to get her husband back ends in tragedy. At the same time, the general becomes a sacrificial victim of political shifts in the war on terror.
Crimp’s writing is as sharp as shrapnel and as resonant as a bomb blast. Just as Sophocles’s Heracles found that every time he cut off one of the hydra’s heads, two more grew back in its place, so Crimp’s general finds that the war on terror takes him to the heart of darkness.
Directed with characteristic flair by Swiss-born Luc Bondy, Cruel and Tender boasts an affecting central performance by Kerry Fox as the middle-class Amelia, with Joe Dixon slightly less convincing as the tortured general. Nicola Redmond leads the chorus and the cast includes Georgina Ackerman as Laela, David Sibley as the journalist, Michael Gould as the spinmeister and Toby Fisher as Amelia’s son. This is a must-see of European theatre.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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