Fewer Emergencies

A clue to Martin Crimp’s post-structuralist, no-action Absurdist play is that he finished Fewer Emergencies the day before the 9/11 attack in 2001. Crimp arguably shows how this huge fissure continued to shatter our world, our communities and our lives.

Staged by The Company at the Old Fitz, the play is really three separate but related playlets. Three nameless characters each tell a confronting story as the other two chip in with questions and suggestions, describing the reality they all watch in the middle distance … yet also seeming to create it.

First in Whole Blue Sky a woman (Monica Sayers) observes her early marriage, her child and her desperation to escape. In Face to the Wall Bayley Pendergast is an horrific mass murderer blowing off the heads of school children and speculating on how his privileged life led to this. A boyish figure (Clay Crighton) sits just offstage prompting his lines, as the others help fill in the murderous circumstances - and with some wit!

In the final story Olivia Hall-Smith leads the trio observing a boy (Crighton) trapped in a nightmare abandoned by his parents at the end of the world.

Crimp’s deliberate obscurities could drive you mad, but Harry Reid’s sleek and inventive direction draws us into the haze, as does a cast confident in voice and effective movement.  We can’t identify these ‘non-characters’ but their  communication - and jazz improvisation! - is controlled and direct enough for us to share their conundrum. 

And the invention of dressing them as cleaners - either forensic cleaners of blood or ones to clear away old stories - was master-stroke. Crimp just gives them numbers.

This is on a stage unadorned except for four chairs, but aided by Reid’s atmospheric and stirring musical interludes. The result was an impenetrable  play made beguiling and intriguing.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Robert Miniter.