It is the start of an exciting new era at the Donmar as incoming artistic director Michael Longhurst unveils his first season.
How’s this for a punchy calling card? A revival of David Greig’s eerily prophetic 1994 drama about a Europe rocked by tensions and divisions. It’s set in an unspecified and nondescript small town somewhere on the Continent, but Greig forces us into the uneasy realisation that, whether in Mittel Europe then or Middle England now, the same set of often unpleasant human behaviours and reactions pertains.
There’s a terrifically damning Beckettian metaphor at the heart of the piece, as the action takes place in a railway station where no trains stop any more. Nonetheless two refugees (from the Balkan conflict, although it’s not explicitly stated), father Sava (Kevork Malikyan) and daughter Katia (Natalia Tena), have turned up and it’s the arrival of these strangers that sets in motion, in locomotion perhaps, a chain of events among the downtrodden and overlooked locals.
Greig’s sharp, clear-sighted writing unfolds over a number of short-ish scenes, in which he traces how industrial and economic decline leads to introversion, suspicion of strangers and, ultimately, devastating violence.
Longhurst’s fluid, intelligent production guides us confidently through this, with a fine ensemble cast of eight from which the two women shine particularly brightly.
Tena gives the conflict-hardened Katia nervy intensity, while Faye Marsay lends station worker Adele pathos as she dreams, perhaps hopelessly, of Europe’s far-away glamour spots.
One chilling line has special resonance now: “We’re still in Europe — we’ll be all right.” Greig and Longhurst force us to ask ourselves two hard questions: are we? Will we?
Until Aug 10 (020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com)
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