NACHTLAND

Brighton has become a pulsing heart for the performing arts education scene and over at ACT in Kemp Town and the Lantern Theatre they have created a genuine community of theatre lovers of all ages. As well as hosting visiting companies across the year and becoming a favourite fringe venue, they also have a space in which the ACT students can perform both established works and new writing.

This time I was there to see Nachtland by Marius  von Mayenburg. It’s a challenging piece in so many ways, a challenge for the cast, conveying the moral conflict at the heart of the play, and for the audience when confronted by that moral dilemma. It’s a provocative story that on the surface is simply about a painting supposedly by Hitler and whether it should be given value, either as a work of art or in a monetary sense.

It’s also a dark comedy with threads of familial conflict, antisemitism and intellectual arrogance. And of course there is the total horror of Nazi politics, the holocaust and the current presence of neo-fascism. None of these elements are natural bedfellows for comedy but out of this writer Mayenburg wrings the kind of black humour that makes you laugh out loud and then shiver at the chilling realities of what made you laugh.

But it is not only the skill of the playwright that makes this work but the quality of both the cast and the director. The play comes with no stage directions whatsoever so director Janette Eddisford punctuates the whole with blackouts and frozen moments, passages delivered as narration breaking the fourth wall and giving the whole both rhythm and pace, there is a clarity to the staging that leaves the audience time to absorb the complex arguments being presented. And those arguments are not just about Hitler’s painting but far wider, the gentle sound of Wagner reminds us that he too was an anti-semite and following that thought how many other great artists by modern moral codes should we be cancelling? Picasso, Caravaggio and closer to home Eric Gill… the list goes on and on, genius yes but from the hands and minds of woman abusers, murderers and paedophiles.

Not much funny about that and certainly a challenge for the cast to get that balance right. Sophie Detevine as Judith is the moral compass at the heart of things, Jewish but not observant of her faith. She faces her German husband, Philipp played Gabriel Oprea, and his growing greed as the value of the painting becomes such a temptation and especially when the initial conflict between him and his aggressive and angry sister Nicola, played by Lilith Leonard, pales as the thought of hundreds of dollars looms large.

Nicola is married to Fabian, an almost innocent and ineffectual bystander to the hideous family conflict of brother an sister, but one keen to investigate the painting and in doing so ends up cutting his finger, an act that renders him hospitalised and clearly of little concern to his rather unpleasant wife. James Pattenden is excellent, delicately displaying the part of an oppressed and disrespected spouse.

Into the mix comes Evamaria, art historian and soon to be revealed a Hitler lover, happy to facilitate the buying and selling of a work by the fascist mass murderer for gain but also from a deep seated respect in a sense for Hitler. It’s a chilling role and one that Sarah Widdas pulls off with class and with style. Her buyer is Kahl, Elizabeth Thaarup delivering a towering and unnervingly aggressive lesbian predator prepared to pay 50% more for the very ordinary watercolour of a church by the dictator in exchange for dinner with Judith. Kahl is another anti-Semite but an avaricious monster keen to tick off “Jew” from her list of sexual conquests.

None of this sounds like it makes for comedy but the skill here is in making an audience laugh and then then dropping them into dark discomfort.

There is a final twist, one that I will not reveal, but a clever end to the whole.

This is an amazing play, thoughtfully constructed and played and thought provoking as we move forward in a world where cancel culture is so prevalent. Do I want to listen to Wagner, look at Caravaggio’s paintings and set type designed by Gill?  Do you? I wish I had an answer.

Andrew Kay

5 December

ACT at The Lantern

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