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A CurtainUp London London Review
State of Emergency



It is nice here, nice and quiet . . . except for the shootings at night.— Man
Whilst we wait to enter the gate auditorium, if you can call its tiny space an auditorium, to view State of Emergency we are subject to some filmed advertising for living in a gated community. On the walls are some posters promising the good life and momentarily we wonder if the Gate Theatre has some new sponsors and are we in one of those developments being hard sold by the salesmen in David Mamet's GlenGarry, Glen Ross? Inside, caged lioness Geraldine Alexander paces up and down her glass fronted, pale and modern living room, the glass imprisoning rather than liberating, the room due to the constraints of space at the Gate more a corridor than a regular living area.

Falk Richter's play is translated by David Tushingham who has translated the work of several modern German playwrights, including Roland Schimmelpfennig and David Gieselmann. State of Emergency is for the most part a dialogue between the woman (Geraldine Alexander) and her husband (Jonathan Cullen). She is observant and questioning, acting as if her husband is a stranger, an alien being who has been substituted for the real person. She is obsessive and talkative, he is evasive, shifty and uncommunicative. It is a clever device because as the audience we cannot be sure who is unhinged here.

She complains and describes what she hears outside. She thinks that someone has left the gate open and that people are coming into the enclave at night, there is the sound of shooting and sometimes they see bodies on the fence. She points out to him the value of living there, the security, the protection from crime and the outside world. He counters with how isolated they are and how none of their old friends has managed to get into the scheme. She berates him for not performing better at work and so risking the security of their tenure and how impossible it will be to find anywhere else because they are in their mid forties. She complains about their once a fortnight sex life. He is ineffectual and insipid. A late entrant into the play is their teenage son (James Lamb) who emotionally is committed to the risky society on the other side of the fence.

Whilst Geraldine Alexander's tense, single eyebrow raising portrait is the most effective of the evening, as a whole State of Emergency is more dramatic innuendo than beguiling dramatic tension.

State of Emergency
Written by Falk Richter
Translated by David Tushingham
Directed by Maria Aberg

With: Geraldine Alexander, Jonathan Cullen, James Lamb
Design: Naomi Dawson
Lighting: Neil Austin
Sound: Carolyn Downing
Video: Eleni Parousi
Running time: One hour twenty minutes without an interval
Box Office: 020 7229 0706
Booking to 13th December 2008
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 11th November 2008 performance at The Gate Theatre, 11 Pembridge Road, London W11 (Tube: Notting Hill Gate)
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