Imagine a Britain in which a company can legally forbid employees to have sexual or romantic relationships with each other. That fearful restriction serves as the premise for Mike Bartlett’s chilling black comedy, an allegoric satire upon a world in which freedom’s boundaries close in upon you and an individual’s intimate relations are subject to surveillance and control by omnipotent authority.
Yet although Contractions, which lasts just 45 minutes, sounds ominous, futuristic notes, moving in upon terrain more expansively covered by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and even Franz Kafka, it strikes me as old-fashioned. It is not the prying interventions of modern technology in the form of snooping cameras that betray Bartlett’s amorous characters. They betray themselves.
The play consists of encounters between Julia Davis’s emblem of formality and impersonal officialdom, the manager, and Emma, Anna Madeley’s personable young sales woman.
Our disbelief is invited by the compliance of an unseen sales representative, Darren, who has come to the manager to tell tales about his dinner with his colleague Emma. When mere sexual attraction leads to serious romance the manager seeks to takes control of Emma’s affair. In scenes of blackish comedy she probes for information about its quality as if sex were a form of computer-generated pleasure.
The love-affair, which leads to the birth of a child and Darren’s exile to Richmond and then Kiev, precipitates Emma’s decline into brow-beaten despair. A climactic scene of grief and surreal absurdity makes it apparent Miss Madeley’s unbelievably placid Emma had been suitably brainwashed into conformity.
Lyndsey Turner’s under-dramatic production performed in a Royal Court rehearsal room gives some audience-members a permanent rear-view of Miss Davis. From there the last words of her sentences often drop into unintelligiblity.
Until 14 June (020 7565 5000).
Contractions
Royal Court Backstage
