A frustrating visit to East Berlin
National Theatre, London SE1 Anna
Ella Hickson divided audiences – and critics – last year with The
Writer at the Almeida, a boldly self-involved provocation looking at a female playwright’s attempt to avoid conventional (and “patriarchal”) structures and fashion something in her own voice.
Her latest endeavour literally divides the auditorium of the National’s Dorfman: the actors are boxed in and sealed off behind a giant glass wall; the only way of hearing what’s said on stage is by clamping on headphones.
Welcome to the GDR, circa 1968 – a gloomy East Berlin apartment on what was then called Leninplatz to be exact – where we get to snoop and eavesdrop, Stasi-style, on the lives of others. It’s impossible not to think of that Oscarwinning
2006 German film (Das Leben der Anderen), albeit Hickson – barely school-age when the Berlin Wall came down – has been influenced by a 1972 travelogue essay by Michael Frayn that wryly pottered about East Germany’s “obstinately unlovable” capital.
She suggested recently that she was more interested in the strange, residual socialist utopianism of the period, reflected in the pre-fab “plattenbau” architecture – replicated here by designer Vicki Mortimer – than by the idea of a thriller. And yet an ersatz thriller is what she has constructed.
The centre of our attention is the titular Anna (well played by Phoebe Fox, self-composed yet on the verge of imploding), an economics teacher ostensibly happily married to Hans, and the couple are throwing a party to celebrate the latter’s promotion to factory section manager. During the evening they greet the disgruntled wife of Hans’s brutally disappeared predecessor and his indomitable, apparently fiercely ideological new boss – and confront unpleasant truths.
The production, directed by Natalie Abrahami, has a meticulous eye for period detail and an ear for the clattering and clinking of domestic life. Using binaural technology, sound designers Ben and Max Ringham achieve a sense of ordinary things having an ominous dimension.
But there are too many characters piling in and Hickson crams in so much revelation and contrivance, it’s like she’s making a desperate dash for the border, trailing pages ripped from some beginner’s guide to life under GDR president Walter Ulbricht. None of it fully lives and breathes, which may make a valid point about those stultifying days of stilted speeches in praise of socialism, omnipresent inhibition and self-censorship, but also looks like an artistic deficit.
Call me a Cold War dinosaur but I’d rather watch a more expansive, less experimental drama about this grimly fascinating time, about which Frayn’s own Democracy remains the most wunderbar example. I’d take a hammer to that glassy fourth wall, for starters.