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Tom Georgeson as the landlord and Laura Donnelly as his daughter Anna |
Town derailed by disaster express
JUDGEMENT DAY
Almeida
THE opening minutes of Odon von Horvath’s small town tragedy unfold in near-perfect silence.
Only the screaming whistle of the fast train tearing through the station shatters the calm.
“That was the express,” explains one glum local. “It doesn’t stop here.”
The scene is set for a Beckettian slugfest, but Horvath has different ideas. The next express does stop here, abruptly and disastrously, when the station master is distracted from his duties by the town publican’s coquettish young daughter.
Eighteen are dead, and from the carnage and the smoke emerges a taut, engaging study of the evil that men do – either to save their honour or because they see no other way out – and the self-perpetuating myth of deceit.
Because there’s nothing like a spot of death to muddy the soul. The landlord’s daughter Anna (Laura Donnelly) begins the play as “innocence personified in person”, at least in the eyes of the poisonous town gossip, Frau Leimgruber; but she is soon perjuring herself as a witness for the station master (Jospeh Millson), a man who repeats the mantra that he has “always followed orders and done his duty” so many times he comes to believe he really is innocent of the charges. Only his wife, who spied the fatal flirtation, disagrees. The fickle townsfolk shift allegiances swiftly and cruelly.
Halfway through Christopher Hampton’s 90-minute version, the train crash is commonly accepted as an “act of God” – a poignant prognosis from a playwright who was crushed to death by a falling tree branch in Paris in 1938 – but the hatred finds a new focus. Horvath, who returned to Nazi Germany to observe National Socialism at close quarters, has a keen sense of the fairweather nature of public opinion.
His stark, occasionally metaphysical writing holds an ungentle poetry, laced with elements of the classic whodunnit.
James Macdonald’s motile production, complete with a clever revolving stage, turns the screw gradually and effectively: it charts the course of personal tragedy well, but scores its most palpable blow in the untethered, hysterical madness of crowds.
“You want me to look into my heart?” asks one character. “What am I supposed to find?”
Until October 17
020 7359 4404 |
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Your comments:
GREAT review - I will definitely go to see the show. I have heard from other people who have been to see the show that Katharine Gwen Pons is a real find and a name to watch out for.
S. Allen
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