The Treatment, theatre review: Warped and witty take on the movie business

Martin Crimp’s Nineties play is a satire on the movie business and its insistence on treating everything as a commodity. Stylishly revived by Lyndsey Turner, it feels like a darkly thrilling hallucination about the slipperiness of truth. It’s also a cool and troubling portrait of chic New York, strongly reminiscent of David Lynch in its blend of violence, humour and the uncanny.

Naive and nervy Anne (Aisling Loftus) tells a fractured story about being abused. It’s music to the ears of slick executives Jennifer and Andrew, whose mix of commercial ruthlessness and emotional cluelessness is perfectly conveyed by Indira Varma and Julian Ovenden. They bring in washed-up playwright Clifford (Ian Gelder) to add a voyeuristic sheen, and Anne’s experience gets distorted.

As he pictures these unhappy figures, each in some way hungry, Crimp evokes a cannibalistic world. It calls to mind the novels of Paul Auster, in which the city is a maze, a Kafkaesque scene of crisis where every hunter is also a quarry. It’s redolent, too, of the work of Bret Easton Ellis, especially American Psycho — a blank realm of rapid consumption and mass-produced celebrity, punctuated with dystopian taxi rides and trips to high-end sashimi bars.

Giles Cadle’s design conjures just the right air of soulless expensiveness. Music by Rupert Cross creates a sense of nagging, almost itchy urgency — a symptom, perhaps, of the characters’ self-absorption, their combination of modish emptiness and unrelenting drive. All the while their overlapping dialogue represents their failure to make themselves understood.

As the movie project develops, Clifford falls foul of Gary Beadle’s John, the bankable star whose involvement ensures that it can be funded. Later his desire to include ‘a Shakespearean element’ has ugly repercussions, and Anne’s partner Simon (a pumped-up Matthew Needham) injects a note of very sour menace.

A few of the play’s details haven’t aged well, but twenty-four years on from its premiere it remains a warped and witty vision of exploitation, particularly pertinent in its grasp of how stories are treated as consumer goods, ripe for the market and for whatever debasement the market demands.

Until June 10, Almeida Theatre; almeida.co.uk