What happens to places where slavery took place, to the descendants of the enslaved and of the enslavers who live there now? Joy Nesbitt’s fascinating play looks at the legacy of the antebellum US South in an unusually nuanced and intriguing way. The setting is a former plantation, now available for booking as an Airbnb, a scenario which is both dark, comic and entirely credible. Talulah (Jodie Campbell) is a Black British woman, booked in for a stay to, as we discover, trace her family roots on the plantation. She wants advice from her ancestors. The plantation is run by the cringingly eager-to-please Nora (Hannah Morrish), whose awkwardness at dealing with a Black visitor has to be seen to be believed. Her husband, James (Patrick Vaill), is spectacularly thin-skinned, on the defensive as soon as he discovers Talulah may be a relation.
Alongside these present day scenes, parallel events take place in the same place during the Civil War. Ginnie (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ) is Talulah’s great-grandmother. She has children with John Goode, the plantation owner, also played by Patrick Vaill. Ginnie’s friend Bertha (Karene Peter) has hope for the future with Lincoln’s proclamation freeing slaves coming into force, but Ginnie has hard decisions to make. And Hannah Morrish makes a climactic appearance as John Good’s forbidding wife, Amanda.
Director Tatenda Shamiso makes the piece flow like a thriller, and it never feels as thought we are being lectured,. Although the dilemmas faced by the characters who do not fit the neat separations between right and wrong we like to picture are complex, Nesbitt communicates them through admirably believable individuals. Performances are excellent, including Campbell’s low key Talulah, Adékọluẹ́jọ’s fiery Ginnie and some impressive doubling of roles from both Valli and Morrish, who are nuanced in both eras. Set and costumes by Natalie Pryce occupy the small Upstairs stage with a highly convincing cabin, impressive patchy grass flooring, and a full size tree. It is an appropriately ambitious setting for a play which, calmly and confidently, reveals the complexity and continuing personal cost of one of history’s most notorious periods.
The Arcola stage is an architect’s office, complete with plywood desks and display models. Robert Innes Hopkins’ set places the production firmly in the 21st century design world of demanding clients, big egos and office politics. When Greg Hicks’ Halvard Solness walks in, the picture is complete. He is a charismatic, successful, demanding, senior architect in every way: a fully recognisable type. It is no surprise at all that, within minutes, he is exercising his power with his subordinates, and pursuing a surreptitious affair with his office manager, Kaja Fosil (Jade Williams). When his wife, Aline (Sally George), walks in she watches his excruciating attempts to behave normally with Kaja with disgust, and weary familiarity.
However, The Master Builder is a much more complex play than it first appears. One of Henrik Ibsens’ late plays, it combines realism and symbolism in a disconcerting manner, prefiguring his final work, When We Dead Awaken. Solness is soon playing a different kind of game with a different, younger woman – Hilde Wangel (Louisa Binder) – who walks into his office in her climbing gear to claim a promise she says he made her ten years ago, when she was 13. Solness kissed her and promised her a kingdom, then she watched him ascend the steeple of his new church for the only time in his life, overcoming crippling vertigo to hang a wreath on the weathervane. He doesn’t remember, but she’s very certain, and has come for her kingdom. She seems like a figure from a fairytale, calling in an awful bargain. It will clearly not end well.
The challenges of the play, and there are many, include finding a way to prevent this alarming encounter between a child and a grown man, and his enthusiasm for younger women, dominating our response to Solness. It is also tricky to balance the play’s contrasting tones. Mehmet Ergen, directing, overcomes these hurdles in an exemplary manner. Other productions lean further into the fairytale aspects of the work but, by allowing them to intrude into an entirely credible modern setting, Ergen allows an eerieness to grow which draws us along with the characters. He is helped by a series of riveting performances. Greg Hicks is a masterful actor with an highly impressive CV, and he oozes quality. He slips from egotistical dominance into a cringing fear in a moment in the presence of Hilde, showing us all of the self-doubt that has poisoned not only him, but all those around him. His exceptional performance is a privilege to watch close-up, in such a small space.
Hicks is matched by Louise Binder’s Hilde, who exudes confidence until the bitter end, effortlessly dominating those around her with her personality, and physically. Her reaction when Halvard tells her to sit, walking slowly along a bench to tower over him before lowering herself slowly down, is perfectly timed. Sally George, as Aline, presents a hard shell which hides impossible guilt about the death of her twin babies. Peter Guinness is excellent, slightly creepy as her more-than-friend, Doctor Herdal. Jade Williams makes the used and abused Kaja abject, while Ryan Wichert as her boyfriend Ragnar is on the verge of an explosion throughout. His father, Knut (Robin Hooper) is a desperate, powerless and dying, yet still winding Halvard up the wrong way.
Ergen’s classy production is made by its clarity and focus on the text, using David Edgar’s 2011 adaptation with its direct, casually earthy English. He makes sense of the overlapping histories and emotions which complicate each character’s relationships. Halvard’s ambition is matched by his belief that he does not deserve success, and must be unhappy to pay for it. Aline’s unresolved grief is terrible, while Ragnar is young but already embittered, and Kaja has sacrificed her happiness for nothing. Knut will die a broken man. Only Hilde will get what she wants, because her needs are cold and terrifying. Ergen makes the supernatural aspects of the play seem inevitable, because none of the earthbound humans can solve the tangle they are in for themselves. Halvard makes his final, fatal climb because he cannot exist in normality any longer. In a fine account of the play, it seems like the only possible choice.
Ten or more years ago, there were regular complaints that no-one was writing political plays any more. It seems like a very long time ago now. These days, post-Brexit, post-COVID, mid-climate and cost-of-living crisis and deep into the second coming of Trump, there is no ignoring politics. It looms large in everyone’s lives. It is in this context that a new play by Caryl Churchill feels like an event, and all the more so when it is a piece that runs for a mere 20 minutes, presented as a standalone production at the Almeida over a handful of performances. Triumph feels very much an occasion. The Almeida foyer is peppered with familiar faces, people whispering about who they have spotted, and front of house staff “unable to confirm or deny” whether Churchill herself is in the audience. There is real buzz of the kind not generally found on a Sunday afternoon.
Churchill is 88, but her work still feels essential. With new Churchill plays scheduled at the Almeida in the New Year, Triumph is statement of intent from new artistic director Dominic Cooke. Not since the theatre staged Harold Pinter’s final works in the mid-1990s has been associated with a writer making urgent, late-career statements on where society has got to. Tr(i)u(m)p(h) is a piercing, conceptually powerful piece about a Karoline Leavitt-esque press spokesperson, standing behind a lecture to deliver mind-boggling statements on behalf of their boss, combining terror with hubris and farce on a gothic scale.
Directed by James Macdonald, Triumph plays out on a set by Miriam Buether lit with burning braziers, half blood-red press conference dais and half blood-red double-bed. Spokesperson Iris (Kate O’Flynn) dons a blonde wig to read prepared statements, and takes it off to sleep with the opposition – journalist Marcus (Matthew Beard). The thing is, everything she says on behalf of ‘The Emperor’ is taken directly from Suetonius’ compendium of tyranny, The Twelve Caesars. Her announcements rang from the bizarre – “The Emperor has installed a gold throne” – to the ludicrous – “The Emperor is paying for 250 young Romans to learn how to applaud.” The tone becomes darker, as the consequences of crossing the leader become clear, for Marcus and for everyone else. The press conference acquires a section introduced as “In other amputations”, and the violence inflicted on opponents by the state increasingly grotesque. Iris thinks she is exposing the truth The Emperor wants to conceal, but discovers that the more ruthless he seems the more popular he becomes, and the happier he is.
Triumph is a short but very pointed broadside about what people do to keep the Emperor happy – “a grim joke about where we are today.” The conceit of quoting Suetonius is inspired, allowing Churchill makes brutal connections between the the lies, cruelty and decadence of the last days of ancient Rome and the horror show we find ourselves in, under the megalomaniac rule of a very current leader. The running time may be short, but Triumph is the length it needs to be, no more or less. It takes just 20 minutes to draw persuasive performances from the cast, and lodge a succession of horrific images firmly in the audience’s mind. It only takes 20 minutes to make the point, forcefully, that we have enabled monsters before and we have done it again, creating a situation where leaders, and one leader in particular, can do whatever they please. This bodes ill for society, but political theatre is right at the centre of our cultural response to despairing times.
Room 13 by Immersive Octopus – Battersea Arts Centre, London
Room 13 plays with the premise that the disastrous 2015 fire which destroyed the Great Hall at Battersea Arts Centre, and from which it almost miraculously recovered, has released a demon. More than likely in a rambling complex full of hidden rooms and spaces, which was once entirely taken over by Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death. This, too, is immersive theatre but on a smaller scale. There is a fair amount of pre-amble – a health and safety waiver, a waiting area with photos of the fire, and a randomised selection process, putting the audience into groups. We are brought to the door by an ushers, who warns us to keep silent to avoid raising the spirits, then guided through dark corridors and veils of curtain by a man in an antiquated costume. The show takes place around tables, where we have puzzles to solve involving occult-style symbols and statues. Then the lights go out. It very silly, but undeniably fun.
Room 13, directed by Tom Maller, was the shortest show I had ever seen, clocking in at 35 minutes. This status lasted only two days, overtaken by Caryl Churchill’s 20-minute Triumph. However, it is unusually brief, focused around some clever use of strobe lights and complete darkness, and some visceral sound effects. It is well-constructed and diverting, but it does feel like a rather limited experience, that could have been expanded extended – similar to the brand of shipping container-based work produced by Darkfield. In the context of the Edinburgh Festival, as part of the overall atmosphere and with any number of longer shows to see, it is very successful, but as an evening out it falls between two stools.
Sixty-four years after its premiere, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is now firmly a play from a different time, but continuing revivals throughout the 21st century suggest Edward Albee produced a work that continues to speak to and intrigue us. The play is many things. Most obviously, it offers a perfect pair of lead roles for warring couple Martha and George, combining humour, verbal dexterity, unashamedly bad behaviour, pathos, tragedy and a Shakespearian amount of time on stage. They are two of the biggest parts the theatre has to offer. Not only that: Albee gives us Nick and Honey, the younger couple, walking into something they definitely do not understand. These are complex and demanding supporting roles.
Marianne Elliott’s star-studded production at Soho Place has performers more than capable of relishing these parts. Gillian Anderson seizes the centre of the round stage as though she belongs there and performs – as an actor and as Martha, treating her own living room like a bull ring; and as a woman – standing right back up to anyone who dares test her, and using anyone she can. Billy Crudup, as George, is more than a match. He looks every inch the crumpled, sagging academic, an underdog in most situations and certainly whenever his wife’s in the room. But in fact he is every inch as theatrical and devious as she is, and he knows – most of the time – how to use his perceived status to his advantage. Both performers are magnificent and horrifying as they tear strips off each through the drunken early hours; and they are heart-breaking when the vulnerabilities they fight so hard to conceal finally start to wear through. The final scene, when the truth about their son is revealed, is difficult to watch.
Lined up for their pleasure are Josh Dylan’s Nick and Phoebe Horn’s Honey. Both performers have a great deal of fun – Dylan as a jock who is too easy to rub up the wrong way, and Horn as a young woman out of her depth. Then, as the barbs start to dig deeper and the older couple, George in particular, deliver carefully calibrated cruelty, they fall apart in dramatic fashion. It remains highly entertaining and horrifying to watch people pulling one another apart through words alone. The play never leaves Martha and George’s sitting room, which contains a constantly shifting combination of the characters in twos, threes and fours. It is a writing tour de force.
But the play remains more than the high-wire act. It is harder now to understand the impact in 1962 of a female protagonist who makes no concessions to men, to expectations of female behaviour, to social status or to politeness. Martha is fearsome, and before her there had been few stage women who said and did exactly what they pleased. She is powered by her powerlessness, as the daughter of a influential man (her daddy is the college principal) with no influence or status of her own, dependent on her husband to get ahead or be recognised.
The play’s brutal irony that, although she can rail against her surroundings she cannot escape them; but her real sadness is her failure to have a child – which is both what is expected of her, and what she really wants. Honey is in a similar situation, her great secret being a false pregnancy, leading Nick to question her value as a wife. The play makes the situation of women in the post-war era brutally clear, but also has meaning for an era when politics is not longer played out through personal relationships as it was a generation and more ago. Looking back is enlightening, both in terms of the underlying equality issues but also the directness with which the characters speak to one another, face-to-face. This lands very differently in a more impersonal, online era. Can four people just talking in room ever have quite this impact again?
Elliott’s highly assured production plays out on a remarkable set by Miriam Buether which revolves – but so imperceptibly slowly that it takes about 20 minutes to suddenly realise that all the furniture is in a different place. It is an eerie effect, and a very clever way to match the pace of the play, where vocal excitement flares but the underlying dramatic pace heats up gradually over hours, hitting a furious boil at the very end. It is an ingenious setting for a production that delivers a near-flawless account of a play which still hits hard.
The autumn season at Battersea Arts Centre is a statement of intent: an eclectic programme which reaffirms the venue’s commitment to experimental theatre. BAC takes risks to ask questions that matter, but that kind of theatre is more costly than ever and harder to sustain, especially in a glorious, rambling, impossibly expensive building like the former Battersea Town Hall. BAC is irreplaceable, but the feeling is growing that sooner or later we will have to fight for places like this. The fate of Edinburgh’s Summerhall, another shoestring arts complex now forced to compete for space with hotels and student housing, shows there are no guarantees. What better way then to affirm BAC’s role as one of the UK’s most important producing venues, than with an exciting, unashamedly confrontational new play.
Writer and co-director Caroline Williams and fellow co-director Deborah Pearson are a team who grew up on the space for experimentation provided at BAC, where they both started out. Williams wrote Nina during COVID and, intriguingly, it makes arguments which have since dropped out of wider discourse. The MeToo era has given way to anti-woke posturing, and questions about the way women experience the power of men have become obscured. Nina is a timely return to issues never properly addressed. It is also a powerful and absorbing piece of writing which shakes up expectations. It opens with a projected quote from the writer Trigorin who, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, proposes a short story in which a young, aspiring actress is destroyed by a man out of sheer boredom, shot like a passing seagull. This scenario plays out in The Seagull itself, as the young actress Nina is used and destroyed by Trigorin himself. And it plays out in Nina, as a series of actresses audition for the part.
Tomás Palmer’s set is a bare rehearsal room, where four young women stand in the spotlight, while director Goran (Rowan Polonski) directs their auditions, at first as a disembodied voice through a ‘God-mike’. He is an autocratic, generically European director. All the audition candidates tell him how much they love his work, and he manipulates them as he pleases. Nina 1 (Maya Bartley O’Dea) is shot like the seagull after just a couple of lines. Nina 4 (Gemma Barnett) is told she is too old for Nina, too young for the part of Irina Arkadina. Nina 2 (Samantha Begeman) is nervous and, professionally, in no position to assert herself. Nina 3 (Nina Bowers) is too self-possessed for Goran. In an intense and horrifying scene, Goran pressures her into channelling of pregnancy and abortion to enact a childbirth scene, recreating the experience of Nina in the play. When she asks for feedback, it turns out he went to lunch halfway through.
Goran’s treatment of Nina 2 is at the centre of the play. He casts her as Nina and pushes her through an exposing masturbation scene, ignoring his pleas to let her stop. The play is a success and it makes her a star but, when the pair are interviewed on TV, the cost to her becomes clear. Nina is based around a set of stellar performances. Samantha Begeman is remarkable in her journey from awkward inexperience to an insight she never asked for. She gives a speech about the way acting makes her feel she is able to stop time, in which she pretty much does exactly that. But the cost of putting her vulnerability on display, at the behest of a controlling male ego, is shocking. In Daniel Denton’s highly effective video design, her raw performance is projected behind her as she plucks the feathers from her costume in despair.
Nina Bowers is equally impressive as a woman who thinks she is an equal artistic relationship, only to discover she is being used in every way. Rowan Polonski is unnervingly convincing as a liberal, feted, deeply misogynist director. Joseph Payne is excellent playing Goran’s sidekick, a nepo-baby aspiring writer who is an analogue for Konstantin in the Chekhov play – both socially awkward and sexually opportunisitic, touching up Nina 3 the moment she tells him she is in a relationship.
Some of the gratuitous mistreatment of the actresses would seem cartoon-like, if it weren’t for Caroline Williams’ programme note explaining that everything in the play really happened, either to her or to friends. Her writing throws the treatment of women on stage back in the face of perpetrators, but it does more than that. She also challenges the dominance of a classical canon powered by male representations of women, like Nina, suffering trauma at their hands. And she challenges the expectation that actresses will relive their own personal traumas, also experienced at the hands of men, to perform these representations. Nina shows us how much we take for granted, from actresses and the theatre, and asks whether the costs are justified. It is a must-see show, with an exciting cast, from a writer who matters.
Man is Man by Manfred Karge – Royal Court Theatre, London
Tilda Swinton’s return to the Royal Court would be a serious theatrical event, even if she weren’t appearing in the play she performed on her last stage appearance – also at the Royal Court, in 1988. Since then, she has become a film star of remarkable character and credibility, building on her early fringe work and her artistic relationship with Derek Jarman to craft an entirely individual career. There is no doubting her star quality on screen, but what is it like to return to live theatre after a 38 year absence? It is hard to think of another actor who has taken on a challenge quite like this.
Manfred Karge’s play is an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann, and is a one woman show – but the woman in question spend most of the night impersonating a man. Swinton plays Ella Gericke, whose husband Max is a crane operator in a 1930s German city. When he dies of cancer, a burial error means she can assume his identity and live as a man, experiencing the wild turmoil of mid-20th century Germany. In a string vest and Y-fronts, face crusted in white, Swinton roams her apartment telling her story. The play has undergone several updates since its première, not least when the Berlin Wall fell a year later. Now, it continues up to the present day (although this removes Ella out of any realistic timeline), to the point where the megaphones are out again and the menacing rise of AfD threatens to bring events full circle.
Directed by Stephen Unwin, who was also in charge of the 1988 production, this is a real reunion and, it has to be said, something of a throwback. It feels as though we are watching alternative theatre from a different era, which is indeed the case. It is easy to see the influence Man Is Man must have had first time around, but repeating the show does not have the same impact. The moral ambiguity of Ella, who goes with the flow and does what she must to survive, including becoming an SA prison guard, is still unsettling and politically challenging. The gender fluidity and the deeply unglamorous costumes and setting (by the original designer Bunny Christie) seem foundational for much subsequent fringe work during the 1980s and 1990s. The use of an onstage microphone to deliver speeches, and the flinging of paint over the back wall of the set, are examples of techniques that were clearly ahead of their time – but which we have seen many times since. The motivation for the revival – to highlight disturbing political developments in Germany – is laudable, but the production seems too much of an archival exercise, fascinating to students of theatre but much less urgent than it should be.
The other issue is, unfortunately, Tilda Swinton herself. She is fully committed and invested in a lengthy solo role, but she does not have the weight as a live performer fill the auditorium. Vocally, she is underpowered and would have benefited from being mic-ed up for the benefit of the back row. Her performance also lacks variation, undermining the intense drama of the events she describes. She uses a South London-esque whine throughout, which is quite a transformation, but does not leave her room to pitch or vary her performance. As a result, it lacks pacing and has neither peaks or troughs. The audience is always waiting for the moment that will grab them and draw them into the play, but it never quite happens. the result is an evening that fails to match up to its considerable promise.
The venues for the Ruhrtrienniale (which is, confusingly, an annual festival) are like no others. The region’s heavy industrial past has left a legacy of vast halls, chimneys, blast furnaces, gantries and bunkers which, at Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in particular, are imaginatively repurposed to stunning effect. Thus, Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic is staged in the 170m-long brick Kraftzentrale building, a former power plant for the surrounding iron works. The work fills the vast space with ease. Directed by Abramović, with a cast of 70 performers and a large production team, it completely ignores supposed boundaries between performance art, installation, film, music, dance and theatre, creating a full immersive parallel reality over the space of four hours.
This is the German première for a production co-commissioned by the Ruhrtrienniale festival with a number of other institutions, including Factory International, Manchester and Park Avenue Armory, New York, and has been playing around the world since 2025. The audience gathers in front of a 30m-high black curtain as a woman enters leading a funeral procession, followed by a Balkan band. She is Abramović’s mother Danica, played by Maria Stamenković Herranz, and this is the funeral procession for Yugoslav dictator Josep Broz Tito, whose death in 1980 signalled the beginning of the end for his country. The procession leads us into a space with thirteen separate stages, on which performances take place simultaneously. The audience can move between stages and experience the evening in any way they choose, including leaving temporarily for a drink. The performances combine endurance and skill with impressive, moving, funny and confrontational elements often combining in one setting.
The central funeral thread moves between two of the stages, including a carefully recreated 1970s Yugoslav café, where women dressed identically in black sit virtually motionless for a good two hours, occasionally lifting a hand to smoke, before finally rising to stand in turn on Tito’s coffin while the national anthem plays. The final woman stamps furiously on the lid. All this is overseen by Danica Abramović, whose stony face gradually softens as the evening progresses. Marina’s mother, a senior party official, was notoriously dictatorial and this show is undoubtedly her daughter’s attempt to come to terms with her upbringing. She brings the rituals of her home region to bear, focusing on the power of women as expressed through Balkan traditions to influence the weather and the land, and to bring fruitfulness to crops and couples.
On stages scattered around the huge space, these rituals are performed. The many scenarios include a graveyard in which naked men and women copulate with skeletons, moving in extreme slow motion, to awaken the earth; a violent knife dance, in which women assume the male role in a household lacking men; a dance in which five women in traditional costume bare their vulvas to the sky to banish the rain; three naked men humping the earth to bring fertility; and a lecture from a ‘scientist’ played by Elke Lutyen, who informed us about various Balkan sexual rituals, surrounded by giant phalluses.
The most moving and arresting peformance is, perhaps, the black wedding – a ceremony in which a young man is joined with a woman after death. His ‘widow’ dresses his naked corpse, the weight and difficulty of moving a body evident in every tender gesture. Meanwhile, a troupe dressed in black perform intense, mutually supportive dances. A man carries two women, one on each shoulder, clasped around him. The quality of the choreography, by Blenard Azizaj, is outstanding.
The show also has a Durational Performance Director, Billy Zhao, whose work is crucial to the evening. There is an element of endurance for the audience, as they watch repeated, ritualistic actions, but the entertainment value makes the show pass remarkably quickly. However, the commitment of the performers, who are too numerous to name, is astonishing. A woman, for instance, dressed in red and looking like Marina herself, poses on a high platform beside a coffin, moving roughly every 40 minutes, in a performance of pure discipline. The vulva-baring women dance non-stop throughout the full four hours, a feat of remarkable endurance. Marina Abramović describes Balkan Erotic Epic as her most ambitious work, and it is certainly her most complex and collaborative. It is hard to imagine anyone attempting anything comparable, and the result is an experience which those lucky enough to attend will not forget. Her originality and vision are indisputable, and so is her ability as an artist, and now as a director, to bring performances and audiences with her, teaching us to speak her language.
The huge Maschinehalle, once the engine house for the Zweckel coalmine in the heart of Ruhr, looks as much like a mansion as a place of work, with balconies, staircase and a space inside like a ballroom. Standing alone, surrounded by forest, it makes a bewitching venue for Lisaboa Houbrechts’ production of Siddhartha, adapted from the novel by Herman Hesse about the journey towards enlightenment made by a young prince in the time of the Buddha.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Lisaboa Houbrechts, Caroline Shaw, Latvian Radio Choir – Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck
The scale of the production matches the space, which is especially wide, and ideally suited to the grand, symbolic gestures which structure the production. Houbrechts not only directs, but has also written what is described as ‘the libretto’. The production has a cast of 27, most of whom are members of the Latvian Radio Choir, providing a chorus which is varied, and at times stunningly, performed. They move through the production as a group of fully committed extras, directed and managed in great detail, contributing throughout. They combine singing with movement, resulting in a series of very memorable moments. The cast process, slowly and deliberately, in copper robes, carrying flaming brands, and performing a piece using only intonations of breath. It is as though an ancient ritual has sprung to life in front of us. Dressed in black and white they form a village, and later a town, while performing a varied, impressive soundtrack which includes the entirety of Caroline Shaw’s ‘Partita for Eight Voices’. At one point the choir also sings the first lines of ABBA’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’. That they not only pull this off, but make it a moment of extreme poignancy, is testament to the production’s confidence. The show has a musical leader, Christian Balvig, and Casper Clausen working on soundscapes, while Kaspars Putnins conducts the choir on stage as part of the ensemble. The scale and impact of a choir, filling the space both physically and musically, is a result of many people’s work.
Credit must go to Oumar Dicko, whose costumes are a key part of the setting, and to set designer Sammy Van den Heuvel. He bookends the remarkably wide stage with a set of white steps on one side and a long white slope on the other, each a good 20 feet high. The steps represent the hard way, and the slope the easy way, but the latter of course is not as easy as it seems. Houbrechts has adapted Hesse’s novel by changing the gender of the Siddhartha, who becomes non-binary, played by a woman – Belgian singer-songwriter Meskerem Mees. Her lead role is demanding, as she has to not only sing but at times express her struggle through pure physical movement, and she does occasionally feel a little lost in the space. The show works best when it fills the room with people, but is anchored by some key performances, including from Sufi singer Zila Khan as a harrumphing, chuckling Buddha, and Claron McFadden as Siddghartha’s mother.
The production achieves some remarkable moments. One is the boat – in the form of a floating wheel – which drifts across the stage as it becomes a river, apparently of its own accord, in a piece of bold stagecraft. Another is the use of the Machinehall’s big windows, open to the trees beyond, as the backdrop to the entire show. The sun sets as the evening progresses, and the natural light fades, bringing us closer together in the room. When the central doors are flung open to the outside, once at the start as Siddhartha begins her journey, and again near the end as the Buddha appears, the effect is simple but startling.
Siddhartha has been five years in the making, and is a fine example of a clarity of vision, purpose and ambition which characterises the best theatre in Germany and the Low Countries. It plays at Antwerp’s Tonelhuis over the winter, before touring, and is very much worth a trip across the Channel.
