'We are all of us - yes - men and women - under an intense pressure. (Pause.) And sometimes the pressure is so intense … it's so intense that ... (Jenny laughs.)' She laughs mirthlessly of course. She is a nurse who visits the married couple in Martin Crimp's The City and speaks about how her husband has gone to war in a city that is being turned into fine grey dust and where the entire population is being eliminated. It's not just nightmares off-stage - the couple themselves seem to be at war with one another, and the whole reality depicted may not even be real, just a nasty story that someone is making up.
       If only playwrights after Pinter, who famously said his subject was 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet', wouldn't keep writing about the mouse under theirs. Apparently he regretted saying it, and often audiences have good reason to regret him - we have been bombarded with endless Pinter imitations that try to replicate his subtle loading of the mundane with the sinister. What above all distinguishes the real thing from the imitation is that Pinter is not just sinister but funny. Surreal but with scintillating black humour, his plays are great art in a way that The City aspires to be but isn't. Instead it is remorseless gloom, and also incomprehensible. Maybe in saying that I'm being as philistine and close-minded as the critics who wrote similar criticisms of The Birthday Party when it first came out 50 years ago. Certainly, like The Birthday Party, The City has moments which brilliantly convey the 'banality of evil', the way cruelty and fear twine into triviality. It also seems to offer hints and gestures at some deep meaning which maybe I missed. But on the whole it seemed too long and too homogenous, with little drama.
       The actors did their best, but it is hard to say whether they were good at playing their roles, since they, like the audience, seemed baffled about what they were supposed to be like. (Pinter's plays, whatever the mystifying, surreal nature of their events, are always grounded in characters who are realistic, even if mysterious.) Benedict Cumberbatch, as the husband, Chris, did an excellent portrayal of a weak, vacuous person, which seemed to be what was required, and Amanda Hale, as the nurse Jenny, gave a brilliantly grotesque performance of a physically and mentally disabled hysteric. Hattie Morahan, as the wife Clair, was rather opaque - you didn't know what she was thinking and feeling, and maybe weren't meant to. It was the Girl (stunningly acted by Matilda Castrey in the performance I saw) who seemed to have the most convincing lines and character.
       The City was a disappointment, especially after the recent staging of Martin Crimp's excellent translation of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and also because the Royal Court Theatre has in general such a high standard.
Jane O'Grady