The eponymous treatment in Martin Crimp’s play is both the page or so on which Anne has sketched out her regular abuse by her husband – he binds and gags her while, gimp-masked, he rants to her about... er... the beauty of the world – and the way she is ground up when she attempts to have it told onscreen. A couple of “facilitators” insist that it must be made the tale of a plucky survivor of sexual assault; the star who brings the money ensures that it becomes about the male perpetrator; most damningly, an assistant peremptorily declares of her, “This is not my idea of Anne.” Treatment of material, and treatment of human beings and lives as nothing more than material.

When Crimp’s play premièred in 1993, it was looked upon as a savage satire of the impersonal machineries of both media and individual people, perhaps particularly in New York where the piece is set and from which Crimp had just returned at the time. A quarter century on, it strikes me as having admittedly been prescient but nevertheless now truistical almost to the point of banality. When one of the mainstays of our screen entertainment is “structured reality” and even the US presidency becomes a spinoff from a TV gameshow, how can we be expected to respond to this story as at all caricatured or egregious? OK, there’s the blind taxi driver and the reactionary writer who wants to introduce “a Shakespearean element” to the story and gets the Earl of Gloucester treatment himself... but none of these motifs of vision challenge ours.

Lyndsey Turner’s production is, of course, top-notch. Indira Varma and Julian Ovenden as the dealmakers, Gary Beadle as the star and Ian Gelder as the writer all turn in tastefully solipsistic performances. This creates a test for Matthew Needham as the semi-dislocated abuser and in particular for Aisling Loftus as Anne; her protests ineffective, she retreats into dissociation, which is not a helpful state for a drama’s viewpoint character. Crimp, of course, doesn’t want simple emotional engagement from us, but active interrogation. I’m afraid, though, that the first question now is “What’s the big deal about these callous attitudes?” Even as we indict ourselves by asking, it remains unanswered.

Written for the Financial Times.