The Stage

The Country

Published Friday 1 October 2010 at 17:53 by Sally Stott

The middle-class ideal of escaping the rat race for a new life in the countryside is never going to work if you are one of the rats you’re trying to leave behind, suggests Martin Crimp’s play, first performed in 2000, undergoing a revival at the Arcola. Affluent doctor Richard and his wife Corinne’s dream country home quickly turns into a Hitchcock-style nightmare when the unconscious young Rebecca turns up on their driveway and awakens to challenge the facade of their so-called love.

A scene from The Country at the Arcola Theatre Photo: Tristram Kenton

Crimp’s continually bleak view of relationships is unsettling, and while it is undershot with a wry sense of humour, laughing at the characters frequently feels uncomfortably close to laughing at ourselves. The heightened naturalism of the dialogue, laced with repetition and misunderstandings is relentless, but creates a strikingly claustrophobic atmosphere, accentuated by Anna Bliss Scully’s tree lined set, which places us at the heart of the couple’s isolated abode.

It’s a difficult script to inject empathy into, but Amanda Root (Corinne), Simon Thorp (Richard) and Naomi Wattis (Rebecca) play up the fluctuating power relations, directed by Amelia Nicholson, to reveal brief flashes of humanity beneath their characters’ stony hearts. While the play’s themes and style may be more familiar now than they were ten years ago, Crimp’s writing is filled with such suspense and intrigue that it’s difficult to turn away, no matter how uncomfortable he might make us feel.