Skip to main content

Dealing With Clair review – Martin Crimp's fierce swipe at pious yuppies

Orange Tree theatre, Richmond
This revival gains an eerie topicality, yet its ingenious study of moneyed hypocrisy makes it truly timeless

By an extraordinary quirk of fate, Martin Crimp’s 1988 play is being revived at the very moment the unsolved murder of Suzy Lamplugh is once again headline news. While Crimp’s play touches on the theme of an estate agent who mysteriously disappears, its topicality shines through in countless other ways: it is, ultimately, about the moral equivocation of the middle classes, and men’s abuse and belittlement of women.

Property lies at the heart of the artfully told story. Mike and Liz are a yuppie couple anxious to get the maximum price for their London house. So, although they have already accepted an offer, they are open to a higher cash bid from an enigmatic picture-dealer named James. Clair is the estate agent caught in the middle, who becomes the excuse for the couple’s double-dealing and an object of unhealthy curiosity on the part of the creepily intrusive James.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Q91IxO

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...