"As spacious as the countryside itself"
The Country
(2008)
Pulling Focus for the Tabard Theatre
Tabard Theatre, 27 May – 21 June 2008, 19.30 (14.30 Sat matinee). 1hr25.
Corinne and her doctor husband Richard have moved to “the country”. One night, he brings home a young woman, Rebecca, whom he says he found collapsed by the side of the road. The truth (or otherwise) of this story is explored during this five-scene snapshot of a middle-class marriage in which at least one of the partners despairs at her need to “simulate love”.
Billed as a “thriller”, the exquisitely tight script begs more the question of who-done-what, rather than who-dunnit. Corinne teases her husband, scissors in hand, as she snips at both him and a magazine. It’s clear she doesn’t trust him, every line an attempt to wrong-foot him. Until she asks for a kiss, which is never forthcoming. Only then do we see her sharpness blunted by her husband’s dull-as-stone response: “I have kissed you”.
The storyline teases the audience just as Corinne teases her husband. When we’re eventually given some longed-for plot details, they’re immediately disputed by a character on-stage. The audience, like Richard, is constantly wrong-footed, which serves only to intensify our desire to get inside this former country granary and find out the truth that is, all too often, unspoken.
David Shelley suits the role of the dulled, shifty Richard. Dulled, perhaps, by drug dependency; shifty because of the real reason he moved his family from town to country. Rebecca (Jennifer Kidd) has all the power, and hits the nail on the head when she says “everybody wants to hear a story, don’t they?”. It would have been fruitful to see the character played with more danger and spike, so personifying the theoretical threat she represents. The closest we get is when she’s squeezing her lover’s hand, not having told him she’s carrying scissors.
Federay Holmes’ performance as Corinne is exemplary. She treads the line of playing stylized text with a believably naturalistic delivery. The dialogues between Corinne and Richard pack a punch, swerve out of the way, overlap and mesmerize (all the more impressive given the supposed restrictions on fringe-theatre rehearsal-time).
This play is a cavern, as spacious as the countryside itself, yet small enough for painful echoes to resound again and again, whether or not you wish to hear them. The audience may become suspicious of red-herring plot development, but when Richard says of the young woman he’s brought home: “she’s not going to wake up; trust me”, we have no choice but to be drawn-in and to care about what happens, or fails to happen, next.
The awkward beauty of Orlando Jopling’s music adds to a thoroughly enjoyable and well-executed production of a superb play, directed by Simon Godwin. Not one for seeing plays more than once during a run, the writing is so laden that I may not be able to resist another trip to The Country.
[Nigel Pilkington]
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