EUROPE. To 31 March.
London
EUROPE
by David Greig
Barbican (Pit) To 31 March 2007
Mon-Sat 7.45pm
BSL Signed 27 March
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 0845 120 7511
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 March
Borderland drama still has a strong impact.
When David Greig’s play opened at Edinburgh’s Traverse in the mid-1990s, it defined the decade’s preoccupation with borders and displaced people. Since then the subject’s grown nastier, with gang-crime, people-trafficking and racist hatred of asylum-seekers. All are shown or implied in Greig’s play, set around an unnamed railway-station in an insignificant town somewhere near a border which History’s swung either side of the town. Now, trains no longer call and it’s as if the place itself were being wiped off the map.
A massive list of destinations, none legible, is posted on the station. Meanwhile, luggage mounts as father and daughter Sava and Katia take root in the waiting-room. Morocco flits between countries, a fixer for a price, while unemployment drives one local youth away and his friends into an angrily destructive response.
One, Berlin, is also jealous as his partner Adele, on the station staff, falls for Katia and her wandering life. Removal of borders means freedom as well as danger, brings opportunity as well as fear.
Despite some fashionably distressed projection of scene titles and other images, Douglas Rintoul’s production (up the line from Dundee Rep) is largely realistic. This can make the play’s theatrical poetry seem prosaic and brings a heaviness to a script designed to make a narrative from densely-composed stage images - a style Greig was actively involved in with Suspect Culture theatre company in the nineties.
The Barbican’s studio-scale Pit emphasises the length of the acting area over depth, and with it the production’s fragmentation of the small groups that compose the action, thereby placing narrative line over the developing impact of the play’s montage of events.
There is good work from the members of Dundee Rep’s Ensemble, mixing Scottish, English and European tones to increase the sense of a melting-pot where ingredients come to the boil without actually melting or melding. Greig’s plays (or, at least, their early productions) encourage a comparatively subdued playing-style, tuned-in with telling techno-aspects of production, and that’s reflected here. Dundee’s shown this is a piece worth reviving: happily, for its skill, sadly, for its continued societal relevance.
Adele: Samantha Young
Berlin: Joseph Kennedy
Billy: Graeme Rooney
Fret: Robert Paterson
Horse: Cameron Mowat
Katia: Michelle Bonnard
Morocco: Chris Ryman
Sava: Hannes Flaschberger
Director: Douglas Rintoul
Designer: Colin Richmond
Lighting: Ian Scott
Sound: Emma Laxton
Projection: Mick McNicholas
2007-03-21 06:08:08