The Orange Tree’s 40th birthday celebrations continue appropriately with a double bill by the first new writer the theatre ‘discovered’: Martin Crimp. Crimp’s earliest six plays were premiered there in the 1980s, when it was still a room above the pub next door to its present venue, before he found fame with the Royal Court and became a key influence on in yer face playwrights. Play House is a newly commissioned work, complemented by a revival of Definitely the Bahamas from 1988, in what is the author’s directorial debut.
After concentrating recently on adaptations of European classics, Play House is Crimp’s first original new work for four years. In 13 short scenes we see the ups and downs of a young couple moving into a new home, as they dance, bicker, make love and fight. While the man is more laid-back and conventionally romantic, the woman is free spirited but subject to wild mood swings, possibly inherited from her psychotic father, including self-harming and spitting. Their future together is uncertain.
The action is presented in the fragmented and elliptical style which has made Crimp such an innovative playwright, as we try to guess exactly what is going on within the relationship. As the title suggests, the characters play games with each other, testing the boundaries of how far they can go in their intimate domestic space. A bare acting area is lined either side by a bench on which props are arranged, ready for the next exploration of male-female role-playing. Crimp has nicely set up the laboratory conditions for real sexual chemistry between Obi Abili and Lily James, both giving natural, physical performances as a couple in love learning how to live with each other, but the play lacks the compelling tension of his best work.
In contrast, in Definitely the Bahamas we see a late-middle-aged couple reminiscing to each other and an invisible third party about their inconsequential lives which contain a disturbing undercurrent. In particular, they talk about their idolised son (Crimp’s first offstage character, a device he later used with extraordinary virtuosity in Attempts on Her Life), whom we come to realise from their Dutch female student-lodger is a pretty unpleasant character. In this rather Pinteresque early work, Crimp brilliantly captures the mild snobbery and xenophobia of genteel, middle-class people who gently bicker about their conflicting memories – hence the play’s title, with the husband contradicting his wife’s Canaries-set version of events – so that we’re never quite sure what is really the truth.
In a reference to its original form as a radio play, Crimp has staged the piece as if in a recording studio, with the actors sitting at tables with scripts and microphones in front of them, while a technician produces sound effects. However, this approach doesn’t work well, partly because it’s not consistently done (the actors pretend to hold up objects and unnecessarily leave the stage), but mainly because it suggests a self-conscious meta-theatricality which is not supported by the convincingly naturalistic dialogue and performances. You fully believe that the characters played by Kate Fahy and Ian Gelder have been married a long time, she anxiously chattering, he sometimes lapsing into melancholic abstraction. James plays their lodger with demure sensuality while the mute Abili creates the accompanying sounds to this subtle black comedy.
