FERDINAND BRUCKNER’S 1929 play, an expressionist piece set in Vienna in the 1920s, could have easily veered towards the abstract, but director Katie Mitchell and translator Martin Crimp resisted temptation, and created a compelling, beautifully presented show.
The play follows six medical students living in the afterglow of World War One and facing up to the misery of their existences. Their lives are all entangled, promiscuous and cripplingly co-dependent, as they swing between bored disillusionment and chaos.
They include the bisexual, provocative Desiree (Lydia Wilson), who says things like: “Everyone should shoot themselves at 17 – after that it’s all a disappointment”; and ambitious, highly-strung Marie (Laura Elphinstone), caught in an agonising love triangle that brings out her violent streak.
At the centre of it all is the monstrous Freder, played with brilliant malevolence by Geoffrey Streatfield. He’s an alcoholic, viciously manipulative of women (he tricks a naive housemaid into prostitution), a would-be rapist and by the end of the play, worse even than that.
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