Anders Lustgarten’s The City and the Town is filled with fraternal strife at Wiltons Music Hall
“You’ve not been here for 13 years”
Over the final decade, Anders Lustgarten has emerged as certainly one of our most ferociously political writers. Plays like A Day on the Racists, Black Jesus and Lampedusa have raked throughout the state of the world at the moment and his newest work isn’t any completely different. A co-production between Riksteatern (the National Touring Theatre of Sweden) and Matthew Linley Creative Projects, with Hull Truck Theatre, The City and the Town has been touring the UK and a Swedish language model will cross the North Sea within the autumn.
This time spherical, the goal is the hollowing out of working class northern communities and the function that has performed is fomenting a brand new model of the British far proper. And the microcosm via which it’s examined is the connection between brothers Magnus and Ben, assembly up for the primary time in 13 years on the event of their father’s funeral. Ben headed south to change into a profitable lawyer however in totally estranging himself from ‘home’, he’s left with some tough truths to reckon with now.
The City and the Town is a considerably old school play in its conceptualisation and building, a gradual drip of data main us ever nearer to the dustiest, deepest secrets and techniques within the household closet. And with Ben’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey additionally current and proper together with her personal causes and revelations in retailer, the unpeeling of layers of discontent and dissatisfaction with one another and the alternatives they’ve made, plus their very own decision-making through the years, amasses into an explosive ending.
Given all this, Dritëro Kasapi’s manufacturing leans into the normal with its single-room staging. There’s not fairly sufficient dynamism to cowl the stateliness of the primary half when an excessive amount of shouldn’t be but identified. But Samuel Collings’ Ben, Gareth Watkin’s Magnus and Amelia Donkor’s Lyndsey deliver life and depth to their roles, sympathies directed in sudden methods as Lustgarten skewers middle-class blinkered attitudes as being as a lot of the issue as institutional neglect.