Matthew Needham in The Treatment. Photo: Marc Brenner

IN Martin Crimp’s 1993 play, revived here by Lyndsey Turner, realism and symbol co-exist. The plot is about a film treatment, a story development that is something to sell. The play is about identity; how others impose the way they want to see us, about the way that we all treat each other.

Anne (Aisling Loftus) flees a husband who ties her up and seals her mouth with gaffer tape to tell her story to a film company. As she travels through New York she sees squalor, her driver sees nothing: he is both literally and metaphorically blind.

Giles Cadle’s set, its walls like a padded cell, opens different doorways to create new places but the people going past beyond them are ignored or unnoticed. It’s a comment on life in the city.

Gary Beadle. Photo: Marc Brenner

Is Anne as naïve as she seems or is she making things up? Matthew Needham is intimidatingly tall as her husband and creepily attentive. Is he real? Well, we’ve already met him buying a fork from a crazy man with a suitcase.

“We don’t often meet real people here,” admit self-styled “facilitators” Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden), as they reinvent Anne’s story. They lack real communication and feeling.

An actor and would-be producer (Gary Beadle, bursting with energy) and secretary Nicky (Ellora Torchia) transform things further and a playwright (Ian Gelder) unproduced for half a century adds his own voyeuristic fantasies to the scenario that Andrew acts out. Does sex with Anne make Andrew discover real emotion? It certainly leads to a grisly scenario in “real” life.

“Art changes everything,” say these creatives but Crimp means far more. When, with a sharp stylistic change, we see what Anne’s view is it seems even more of an invention.

This satirical fable gets a stylish production, its seriousness leavened with humour, especially Ben Onwukwe’s slyly funny blind driver.

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