The Treatment (or oh Lyndsey Turner we love you get up)

The Treatment is a weird play. It is the story of Anne, a woman to whom a terrible event has happened (or didn’t happen or will happen) and her dealings with two married culture merchants in New York looking to turn it into a script. The title refers both to the one-page treatment they want from her and to the manipulation she is subject to so that they can get it. That's both a fairly good summary and one that really doesn't offer even a thumbnail sketch of what the play is about.

Crimp’s language has a deftness almost unlike any other’s. He’s as poetic as Ridley but with a more keen sense of how this might work into drama and his images aren’t stubby grenades like Ridley’s but expansive: they accrete out of nowhere, at first seeming facile, but resolving into real weight.

He is also, I would hasten to add, not a writer who should be trusted. His work does not reward anything but startling vision in directors and collaborators. Written On Skin is as fine a modern opera as exists: Crimp’s breathtaking libretto providing the imagistic structure that Benjamin’s score and Mitchell’s direction enlivened. There have been enough unthinking Attempts On Her Life productions now to demonstrate that it’s not a script that just works on its own. His are scripts that needs fixing: they need interpretation, they need a lens, muddled or otherwise, to make them work.

The Treatment is not postmodern in the same way (at least a few of the characters onstage are supposed to be based in the real world and people don’t always talk funny) but it’s not some naturalist soufflé. It’s a grubby play about grubby people.

Take one central motif of The Treatment: noise. Everywhere in this sort-of New York of Crimp’s imagination there is noise: people hear alarms that no-one else can, music from nowhere plays in every restaurant, people cannot find the signal to hold onto in any story.

Yet this feels like the least noisey version possible of this play. It draws out the implicit plotlines-- everyone is subject to being bought and sold and fucked and blinded-- and makes them woefully explicit, without finding ways to develop or complicate them or even solve some of the problems in the text. Every opportunity for a gag becomes a gag. Every opportunity for a shock becomes a shock.

And that’s the main problem, really. This production doesn’t solve anything, it sort of sticks to the cue sheet. Having your main female character have her story stolen from her, get manipulated into having sex, then have a breakdown, then get tied up by her ex-husband is the definition of a problematic text crying out for some intelligent, progressive direction but Turner’s direction just does it: no comment, no reconstruction.

People dance a bit to some nice music at the end of the half and coming out of the interval and there was a quietly theatrical moment where Anne does a handstand but everything else seemed to be a pretty paint-by-numbers flashy reconstruction of a pretty dated play.

And the stagecraft was actually at times quite harrowingly poor: extras kept walking through doors at the back of scenes for some unknowable reason (I imagine this was because the city is so busy with people or some other pointless reason, but I just kept thinking, these people probably did five rounds of auditions to pointlessly wander across a doorway and back again); a party scene with aforementioned extras had them all rhubarbing at specific moments and over-emoting like I was watching the chorus of Les Mis all trying to get spotted to play Glinda in Wicked; and the set, well the design seemed to me to believe that nasty, Crimpy, noisey, New York looks like those panelled walkways on fancy new underground stations, all grey and boring and occasionally-- as when we actually were supposed to be on a subway-- the screen they lowered for all the transitions and when they wanted the visible stage to by shorter for whatever reason, all that really happened was that sightlines were impaired for anyone not in the stalls (i.e. me in the cheap seats). There was a fun bit at the end with some loud music and some more dancing and a fan blowing paper everywhere but that does not a revival make.

Basically, I was disappointed. The central performances were generally pretty good and well-played but I remember seeing Chimerica in the same space early in its run in 2013 and thinking how expansive the production had been, how glad I was to have seen it realised so thoughtfully and theatrically, how I wished I had more money so I could go see plays directed by Turner more. No such luck here. If you want to be enlivened, have a read of the script. Or this poem, if you're feeling not sold.

P.S. I don't know when it became OK for people to do ropey American accents onstage and charge £40 for the privilege of making an audience squirm, which is not to suggest I think a bad accent is unacceptable, just that maybe all that Pointless Extras money might have been better spent on some accent coaching, Mr Almeida.

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