The urban play

Living in the city, everything is on show and we know it. The car you drive, the clothes you wear, even the book you're reading on your daily commute, are all likely to be scrutinised, noted and catalogued in the semi-conscious of the fellow crowd member. It's a strange incongruity that in a place so often lonely and alienating from fellow man, we are all participants in a pageant whose meaning can be understood but rarely articulated.

The couple having a loud argument in the street know they're watched, the woman's tears perhaps more extravagant because of it. The man on the bus talking loudly about the expensive holiday he's just come back from is well aware that everyone else can hear what he's saying. Street conversations are not overheard, they are broadcast to the passer by.

Even more curious is the habit, particularly marked in the wealthy houses of Chelsea, of opening the front bay window of an expensive house to the walker's view, seemingly insouciant of the danger that burglars will spot an expensive painting or piece of silverware. We are invited to look (not too long) and admire these empty stage-sets, to imagine their occupants, perhaps even glimpse a shaded hand or head in the dim interior. Perhaps people are truly unaware that they may be watched, their houses viewed as part of a slide show of bay windows and fan-lit black front doors, or perhaps they affect to be so. Perhaps they wish to show off their wealth and elegance to the world, as working class houses so carefully hide themselves behind net curtains and thick brocade. Or perhaps it's a truly magnanimous desire to share a moment of personal domesticity with the journeyer through this impersonal city.

The performance becomes more complex, however, when you notice the camera of their expensive security system in the doorway, following your movements. With the advent of CCTV we've all become unconsenting extras in an ever-rolling film of city life, which is only revealed in its strange unreality when a terrible crime is committed and blurry figures are shown on TV walking by, never noticing the camera, never noticing the crime which, it turns out, is the true plot of the play.