Adapted by Jason Patrick Rothery from the novel by China Miéville. An Upintheair Theatre and the Only Animal production, presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. At the Russian Hall on Friday, January 27. Continues until February 5

The idea is good, but… No, let’s make that the ideas are good. Upintheair Theatre and the Only Animal’s adaptation of China Miéville’s novel The City and the City has a lot to work with, beginning with the English author’s brilliantly confounding conflation of two very different places. Ul Qoma, a “well-oiled dictatorship” where the food is spicy-hot and fucking is a public sport, could not be further away from Besźel, a “ramshackle democracy” where there is no greater pleasure than a well-cooked potato—except that the two cities exist in the same space and time, their citizens maintaining a wall of separation by resolutely failing to see their neighbours.

To this, the producing companies have added a technological frisson: upon entering, audience members are cast in a variety of roles—some getting speaking parts, others simply being invited into the corps. They’re then given a pair of earbuds and a cellphone-sized radio receiver, through which they’ll be given their instructions.

It’s not hard to extrapolate from all of this a parable about Vancouver itself: a city of dwellers in shiny ocean-view towers coexisting with an unseen, potato-grubbing underclass increasingly exiled to the periphery. 

And is there a political message being sent by the use of “emergent audio technology”, a seductive-sounding term that gets no hits when Googled? Will technology empower us, giving citizens a speaking role in society’s drama, or is it merely a form of mind control?

Kudos to Upintheair Theatre and the Only Animal for at least raising these issues. What the audience actually gets, however, is a creaky police procedural that rarely, if ever, challenges the stereotypes of the genre. We have the rumpled up-from-the-streets detective (David Mott, in the only standout performance); the authoritarian cop who eventually cracks enough to show that he has a heart; a number of scantily developed female characters, including a corpse; and a classic mad-scientist villain, recast as a delusional academic. (The few funny lines here generally come at the expense of academe; why choose such a soft target?)

More disappointing is that the uncredited staging fails to play with the idea of two realities occupying the same physical space. Ul Qoma and Besźel are delineated by rows and walls of stacked plastic milk crates and lit with stark simplicity; more inventive use of light, shadow, and projections could add exactly the mystery that this mystery lacks. And while the intent to engage the audience in the performance is welcome, most of the “actors” serve as animate furniture, reshuffling the milk crates or forming a faceless crowd. Working the amateurs into the action also slows the pace so far that, in contrast, Waiting for Godot might seem sprightly. 

The City and the City makes for a very long, intermission-free 100 minutes. It could have been shorter—and it could have been so very much more.