REVIEW: City Being Erased (LAMDA Directors’ Showcase) - A haunting critique of erasure, labour, and displacement

©️Credit Sam Taylor

In a city unravelling street by street, two women, one who remembers nothing, and one who is starting to forget, navigate vanishing maps and collapsing buildings, chasing echoes of lives they may have lived. City Being Erased is at once strange and uncannily real, conjuring a metropolis where memory itself is swallowed by the river, and where survival means holding onto whatever fragments remain.

This is a remarkable script by A. L. Benjamin, the image of a modern city consuming its residents’ memories is not a distant metaphor but a visceral reality on stage: the city itself acquires a force of erasure, mysterious and relentless. The delivery workers at the heart of the play become a perfect emblem—both hyper-visible and invisible, people in constant motion whose lives are precarious yet essential.

Director Haonan Wang deserves special praise for his deft adaptation, compressing a two-hour text into a taut 70-minute performance without losing depth. The physical score, shaped by movement director Kuba Pawelczak, adds another crucial dimension, binding the text to the stage in a visceral way.

The performances are outstanding. Selena Thompson as Suzie and Greta Abbey as Layla share a genuine chemistry that grounds the piece. Their delivery of the text is layered and precise, moving seamlessly between clarity and disorientation as memories slip in and out. The emotional interplay between them feels lived-in and compelling, and their presence ensures the surreal narrative always feels human at its core.

What results is theatre that feels urgent and unforgettable. The gig economy, gentrification, and displacement are given flesh, rhythm, and haunting beauty. City Being Erased does not just describe the instability of contemporary life; it makes us feel it, lose ourselves in it, and recognise its truth.

★★★★1/2

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Credits

Writer: A. L. Benjamin
Director: Haonan Wang
Set and costume Designer: Estrella Guo (Xingyu Guo)
Lighting Designer: Holly Higgs
Sound Designer: Velia DeNicola
Movement Director: Kuba Pawelczak
Intimacy Director: Adi Gortler
Stage Manager: Jessie Potts
Production Manager: Anna Short
Photographer: Sam Taylor

Cast

Suzie: Selena Thompson
Layla: Greta Abbey