James Fenton, trenchant former theatre critic of the Sunday Times, once described his job as going out at 6pm and being read to all evening. It’s a jolly idea. But not when a play becomes an illustrated narrative. City of Glass is one of the most visually inventive, video-dextrous plays I have seen. It is also one of the most aloof.
Duncan Macmillan’s tale of fracturing identity is based on Paul Auster’s novel – the first of his New York Trilogy – and on the graphic novel by Auster and David Mazzucchelli. It begins with a wrong telephone number – the caller is asking for a detective agency called “Paul Auster”. It goes on to contain mirrors, multiples, madness. A man whose son is dead is on the track of someone who might kill his own son. The tracker, who calls himself Paul Auster, meets someone who is called Paul Auster but is not a detective but – hmmm – an author.
The morphing and merging of people and places is brilliantly captured in Leo Warner’s production for 59 Productions. With all the inventive esprit you would expect from a director and company who worked on the London Olympic opening ceremony and mapped artwork on to the sails of Sydney Opera House. A lichen-coloured apartment changes in a blink into a gallery of alluring old masters – and a venerable library. Grey dust drizzles at a funeral. Walls splinter into a spiderweb – as if a stone had been cast at glass. The Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are conjured out of 20th-century America. The transitions are seamless. Distinctions dissolve. Everyone is untethered from who they think they are. A laconic Raymond Chandler-style voice narrates over the images.
It is a terrific spectacle. But not quite an event. Dislocation is Auster’s subject and that is vividly seen here. But demonstrated rather than enacted. Not felt in three dimensions. The human one is missing.
• City of Glass is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London until 20 May
