City review: A gentle epic more urbane than urban

In this solo play, an actor plays a city, turning its attention to its past and current inhabitants.

★ ★ 

Among the gratifying things that can be said about John McCarthy’s streamed play, it turns the table on that overused cliché going back at least to Woody Allen’s description of the setting of Manhattan: “The city is sort of one of the characters in the film.” For some reason when production lingers moodily on scenery, it can be counterfactually described as another person in the story, rather than calling the influential ambience of design what it truly is. 

For once, a city really is the central character. In this solo play, playing the unlikely role of a concrete settlement multiple stories high, the very flesh-and-blood McCarthy less resembles a fellow citizen than someone otherworldly. “Hello to the human people,” he says, as if landed from another planet. 

Such futuristic quirks won’t come as a surprise to McCarthy’s fans. His last deed for the now-defunct theatre company Hammergrin was the podcast series In Darkness Vast, a trippy science fiction drama. Wild conceits are usually followed up with admirable earnestness. In City, his narration speeds through streets while taking in vivid impressionistic glimpses, tracing the miraculous detail of buildings and infrastructure, awing at thrilling shafts of sunlight. He lays eyes on such achievements with fresh discovery, as if seeing them for the first time. 

Architecture can be beautifully attractive but it also needs to be functional. When the city’s attention turns to its current and past inhabitants, it exhibits three stories that are very different and intriguing, but their selection seems puzzlingly random. In the first episode, McCarthy transforms into a bluff American stuntman whose dangerous feat draws the attention of pushy journalists. Director Niall Cleary’s streamed production, mostly keeping to angles that allow for McCarthy’s neat physicality, reveals a close shot to underscore some Chicagoan newsroom yammering that wouldn’t be out of place in His Girl Friday. It certainly isn’t boring. 

The concept gradually becomes foggier as it swerves into mythology, to the battlefield where Ferdia trades apocalyptic blows with Cuchulainn. Against cataclysmic signs of the world falling apart around them, McCarthy plays both as still and laconic, allowing a silent brotherly affection to float between them. In fact, as careful vocal effects and mimicries become so exact as to melt effortlessly into Fiona Shiel’s absorbing sound design, the play often seems more lyrical than corporeal. The narration floats high above the city and wishes to see it “resolved into sound sheets.” Contemplating a sonic universe, is McCarthy still writing for podcast?

A sombre final story, centred on a worried mother caught in a desperate medical emergency, doesn’t make the circuit complete. Emotions on street level don’t swell into anything catching. McCarthy gives a pleasant-sounding performance like a speaker in an epic poem, gently recounting the details of a grand place, but it’s a city more urbane than urban. 

Streaming until 25th April.