Dundee Rep
3 stars
When David Greig’s main-stage debut premiered a decade ago, the Bosnian war that forms the backdrop to this exploration of identity was like a dispatch from a foreign correspondent. Seeing it today, now everybody is European and with refugees commonplace, the current real-life train strike notwithstanding, things look a whole lot closer to home. It’s a shame, then, that Douglas Rintoul’s production allows the play’s focus to be swamped by a set which obstructs some of the most important scenes taking place on a high platform at the back of the stage.
Set on a forgotten railway platform in an un-named border town that becomes both battlefield and refuge, the action dovetails between Fret and Adele, who man the station, migrants Sava and Katia, and the local young men attempting to hustle their way out while the rest of the world whizzes by. Sava and Fret make the station their cause as well as their sanctuary, and Katia becomes Adele’s passport just as the bar-room boys led by Joseph Kennedy’s Berlin finally put the town on the map.
Greig exposes a black-economy driven underclass that falls prey to a vigilante culture and looks like any depressed small town fenced in by a public transport system that fails to serve it. Yet, for all Samantha Young excels as a pained-looking Adele and Kennedy makes a bitter, angry Berlin, an apparent disparateness needs to gel prior to its transfer to The Barbican Centre’s Bite07 festival. Scrapping the big screen on which are projected scene titles that swamps and splits the action would be a start. In a play like this, creating borders isn’t the point.
The Herald, March 9th 2007
ends
3 stars
When David Greig’s main-stage debut premiered a decade ago, the Bosnian war that forms the backdrop to this exploration of identity was like a dispatch from a foreign correspondent. Seeing it today, now everybody is European and with refugees commonplace, the current real-life train strike notwithstanding, things look a whole lot closer to home. It’s a shame, then, that Douglas Rintoul’s production allows the play’s focus to be swamped by a set which obstructs some of the most important scenes taking place on a high platform at the back of the stage.
Set on a forgotten railway platform in an un-named border town that becomes both battlefield and refuge, the action dovetails between Fret and Adele, who man the station, migrants Sava and Katia, and the local young men attempting to hustle their way out while the rest of the world whizzes by. Sava and Fret make the station their cause as well as their sanctuary, and Katia becomes Adele’s passport just as the bar-room boys led by Joseph Kennedy’s Berlin finally put the town on the map.
Greig exposes a black-economy driven underclass that falls prey to a vigilante culture and looks like any depressed small town fenced in by a public transport system that fails to serve it. Yet, for all Samantha Young excels as a pained-looking Adele and Kennedy makes a bitter, angry Berlin, an apparent disparateness needs to gel prior to its transfer to The Barbican Centre’s Bite07 festival. Scrapping the big screen on which are projected scene titles that swamps and splits the action would be a start. In a play like this, creating borders isn’t the point.
The Herald, March 9th 2007
ends
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