Review Normal

Normal
by Anthony Neilson

Sanity On Trial
http://www.styx.space/

The gruesome tale of serial killer Peter Kürten, The Düsseldorf Ripper, executed in 1931, is surely a gift for any playwright with a mind to mine German language literature.

For the story, as related in a 1930s' sensationalist press and subsequent books including one by the trial psychiatrist, has so many echoes of literary classics. The Struwwelpeter scissorman, the grimmest of Grimm Fairy Tales, Wagner's Lohengrin, Kafka's The Trial as well as contemporary German and Hollywood horror films at a time when the two industries were intimately connected.

Yet Anthony Neilson, in one of his earliest playwriting successes, chose to interrogate the story through more forensic if also fantastical means. Normal is a memory play filtered through the mind of Kürten's defence lawyer, Justus Wehner, who finds himself in an amusement arcade outside Germany with his children many years later with a sideshow dedicated to his erstwhile client.

Normal then becomes  an exploration and critique of the law, the legal profession, psychiatry and the media through a unique trio of characters. In this it parallels Fritz Lang's celebrated 1931 movie M, also inspired by Peter Kürten's crimes, where gangland has as much legitimacy, if not more, than the police.

Wehner (Corey Montague-Sholay) is a lawyer straight out of law school who is given a quasi-masonic leg up by his colleagues. They hand him the prestigious role of defence lawyer for Kürten (Richard Ede) when the trial is the subject of national and international curiosity.

His aim is to prove that self-confessed killer Kürten is not a "normal" murderer in control of all his faculties but a lunatic who has conducted a macabre stabbing, fire raising and murder spree. In this, it seems, he is willing to go outside Germany, enlisting the help of his parents to bring the anti capital punishment Humanitarian League to pressurize the authorities.

However his mission to convert his parents, the public, the jury and even the intractable Kürten to the cause thinly veils the overweening ambition of a swot. His subsequent emotional turmoil may even contribute to making a more monstrous situation as he succumbs to a version of himself which he believes Kürten has moulded.

A three-hander,  it is the real or imagined character of Kürten, juvenile delinquent, petty thief, animal molester and slaughterer, sexual deviant, torturer, killer, trade unionist, husband and apparent respectable member of the community, who dominates.

Ede's dapper, grey-suited Kürten is naturally then at the centre of this universe with, as satellites around him, Montague-Sholay's buttoned up but easily corrupted lawyer and Cathy Walker's Frau Eva Kürten, the wife with a past.

Occasionally there is the danger of the plot becoming lost in over-stylization but for the most part the cast give elegant and visceral performances of great clarity. 

And in the midst of it all there is also the suggestion of other plausible scenarios against the accepted version of the story, even if they seem like throwaway remarks: there may be copycat killings or  Kürten may be part of a group of more than one killer.

As we have indicated, Emma Baggott's fluid yet sturdy production, like Blasted in the same season, opts for a stylized rather than naturalistic portrayal of violence, which mostly chimes well with a Germanic expressionist style.

While the subject matter is straight forward, if macabre, writer Neilson's exploration of post World War One Germany's complexities and a subtext relating the murders to the rise of National Socialism lifts the play over and beyond a mere chiller thriller. The lawyer, we are told somewhat ambigiously, managed to leave his homeland before he had blood on his hands.

A subtle, pulsing soundscape from Giles Thomas and a spare black-walled set from Grace Smart, with a chandelier of scissors hanging from the ceiling, a dining table with a chair at each end and a metal trolley prove a flexible background for the action.

Ciarán Cunningham's ingenious lighting almost becomes another character - flickering and flashing to reflect mental states.  Regimented rows of lights on the table also dig into the psyche.

An illuminated  wall transforms the action into a silent film. A sheet covering a body takes on a translucent quality reminiscent of horror movies like Frankenstein.

In short, an amber/green light for a thoughtful and forcefully-choreographed piece which we would recommend for strong performances as part of an agile, striking production probing troubled times and warped spirits. 

Review Blasted

Blasted 
by Sarah Kane

It Couldn't Happen Here
http://www.styx.space/

It's an expensive room in a hotel which could be anywhere, but it happens to be Leeds. There's a bed, a clock, a bunch of flowers in a vase, an ashtray, a black chair, an ensuite bathroom. Well, it is a little strange. Everything is black, even the flowers in the vase.

An overweight man occupies the room, smoking himself to death. Except that he is already dying of lung cancer and every cigarette and swig of gin could be a last hurrah or it could be force of a habit that he cannot break. Or a bit of both.

Sporadic stage directions are projected on the wall. Opposite tabloid hack Ian (Nigel Barrett), who spouts wildly racist comments without blinking and apparently leads a double life, is much younger Cate (Verity Barrett). She seems a bit, well, simple, suffers from fits yet remains a sentient, resilient being with an almost jack-in-a-box instinct for survival.

Yet she also seems to know Ian, who strips off before her, from old. And she knows his ex-wife and son as well. And then the premise of the play is truly blasted, entering another dimension including a one-man invasion of the hotel room by a starving, vengeful machine-gun toting soldier (Nima Taleghani).

Sarah Kane's 1995 play Blasted sucks the audience into a vortex of  abuse, violence, rape, buggery, masturbation and cannabilism but of course it's not the list that counts but how they are linked in the play and what it all means. How thin are the walls between Leeds and violence in and outside the city and outside in the world.

The converted ambulance repair depot in Totthenham Hale  has a traverse space on the warehouse floor with a  steep rake of chairs for the audience  on each side. Grace Smart's set design has dotted lines on the floor marking the demarcation lines beween rooms. Chalk shapes enclose words indicating "window", "clock" and so on.

The play itself certainly still has power - as does Shakespeare's King Lear or Titus Andronicus or, as the playwright herself pointed out, some portions of the Bible. Ali Pidsley directs a mostly clear and lucid production with effective and affective lighting by Matthew Vile and sound by Kieran Lucas.

There have been many more conflicts since Bosnia and we're now more likely to read about the almost full gruesome details through official or unofficial channels since the spread of the internet. Police, journalists and state authorities are no longer the sole conduits, selecting details for public consumption.

So it makes sense to have a faintly satirical art installation touch to a world where the walls between have come down and a representation of a baby which also represents a basic human need.
 
Watching it for the first time (at last), it struck us that it may have been influenced by Before The Rain, a 1994 Macedonian movie, which TLT saw around then.  In terms of its experimentation with time, the stage directions about rain and the invasive violence from Bosnia spreading to London.

For TLT was around and conscious in 1995 - except that Sarah Kane's Blasted never entered her radar. Romans In Britain, yes, after Mary Whitehouse's private prosecution of director Michael Bogdanov, but not Blasted.

That only happened when, some years later, a newsdesk faxed over a news cutting of a death in a hospital and sent TLT to the opening of an inquest at Southwark Coroner's Court. Even then TLT had never read or seen any of her plays. TLT was more disturbed about  the evidence briefly outlined at the opening.

How a  seemingly successful university-educated young woman, surrounded by so many people apparently feeding off her life and work, hoarded prescription pills and finally ended her life in a hospital in a manner more reminiscent of jail block suicides left extraordinarily with the facilities to kill themselves  

So TLT had also missed Jeremy Paxman's sunflower tie and sarky summary on Newsnight alongside a strange interview with a guarded Royal Court Theatre Artistic Director Stephen Daldry and a cheerful Daily Mail critic, the late Jack Tinker who surely knew what he was saying when he called her "a girl"?

Enough - it's important to say the dark humour in Blasted  still comes through and in some ways the whole play which we saw at The Styx comes from a romantic sensibility where the values of the maternal instinct and nurturing still pierce through the violence. Blasted runs until Saturday March 11 at The Styx, as part of a series of 1990s' plays put on by RIFT and it's a amber/green light from TLT.