DESTINATION by Thomas Bernhard. Volcano Theatre Company.

Tour

DESTINATION
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Jan-Willem van den Bosch.

Volcano Theatre tour.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

Review Vera Lustig at Riverside Studios, London

Fluid, highly watchable production of a three-hander that is virtually a monologue – but judicious pruning would have increased its impact.Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Thomas Bernhard: more than alliteration connects these three writers. Had Bernhard (1921-1989) been British, those other two intransigent visionaries, feted as they are in mainland Europe, yet marginalised here, would have clasped him to their flinty bosoms. The three Bs would have railed against Britain's bland populism and her insularity.

Bernhard did indeed repudiate his own country: his will proscribed dissemination of his works within Austria. Destination's translator suggests that the snarling widow who dominates both her daughter and the play, represents the Austrian state. The sullenly servile girl is the Austrian people. I'll take his word for it.

The two are holed up in a cellar, cluttered with old clothes and those cardboard suitcases so familiar from the iconography of World War II. The air is fuggy with regret. The mother (a role ideally suited to director Kathryn Hunter herself, though played with malign brio by Fern Smith) spews bile in a staccato cackle.

Her daughter (the beautiful, acrobatic Matilda Leyser – a little too modishly waif-like) swarms up the walls in gravity-defying, escape-bids, then hurtles back, to cower in her mother's lap. The walls sometimes melt away into black lace, behind which a man hovers in a pool of light. When the play is at its most balletic and enclosed, with its seductive repetitions and variations of speech and movement, it is at its most resonant.

When Destination shifts into naturalistic mode, it loses its elemental rawness and we become more aware of its artificiality. The play's destination is a painted backcloth of the sea, yet the earlier scenes, with the daughter hurling herself against the cellar walls, only to be drawn back by her mother, were far more evocative of the sea's ebb and flow, and the crashing of the waves.

2001-12-04 00:34:41