The Country by Martin Crimp is an intense, disquieting and cryptic play which was completely compelling to watch.

A Doctor brings home an unconscious girl whom he claims to have found in the road.His wife has suspicions about this story, and once the girl, Rebecca, wakes up their marriage and lives begin to unravel inexorably.

The stage is set in the middle of the room on a diagonal piece of green grass-like carpet. This restricted setting successfully develops the claustrophobic feeling generated by the play. The noise of bees buzzing between scenes was also effective, mirroring the unhappy circular thoughts of the wife Corinne (Kate Abraham).

Abraham’s depiction of a dissatisfied, somewhat neurotic woman of a certain age is masterful. The audience can easily empathise with her sadness but still feel irritated by her flustering attempts to converse normally with her husband. The Doctor, played by Ian Gain, simmers with aggression under the veneer of a professional normal life. As the play continues, it becomes obvious that this is anything but an ordinary marriage and Gain’s quasi-joviality becomes more and more forced.

The introduction of the young woman “found” on the side of the road adds extra hostility in a particularly sharp scene between the two women. Augustina Seymour's Rebecca was sensual, exotic and completely out of place in this supposedly respectable middle class home. Her conversation is full of underlying disguised nastiness. Indeed, throughout the play, no conversation is casual: all of the words are carefully chosen to wound, disarm or conceal the character’s true motivations.

The performance is ninety minutes long but feels like ten minutes because of the intensity of the acting, the interesting dialogue and the underlying mystery of the story. It wasn’t busy last night but deserved to be; thoroughly recommended.