Everyone has a story, but who owns it? What happens when a young woman sells her story to a film production company, only to see it falsified? Martin Crimp’s intricately conceived 1993 satire, The Treatment, opens with a confessional in which Anne explains how she was gagged with tape by an electrical engineer (possibly her husband). In a pale blue room without pictures (sleek design by Giles Cadle), her unlikely story becomes the picture.
Aisling Loftus’s Anne, a damaged ingénue, speaks as if on autopilot. Indira Varma’s glamorous Jennifer, producer/interrogator in black high heels, is fantastic, combining professional carnivorousness with comic verve. Her partner, Andrew (Julian Ovendon), cuts a dash too, especially in a scene of unhinged amorousness in a Japanese restaurant. Add in Anne’s arresting oddball partner (Matthew Needham), talkative has been playwright Clifford (Ian Gelder) and Ben Onwukwe’s crazy blind taxi driver (we see a blurred projection of a New York night through a car’s windscreen) and you have enough wild cards in the pack to shuffle any story.
Lyndsey Turner’s production is flawless, but Crimp’s play, for all its brilliance, leaves one hollow. Its most unsettling insight is that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is also, often, less convincing.
