There's something both infuriating and mesmerising about Katie Mitchell's atmospheric staging of Ferdinand Bruckner's 1926 drama, a cynical portrayal of a handful of medical students in what proved to be the interwar years.
Her former lover (Geoffrey Streatfeild's emotionally blank, Svengalilike Freder) corrupts the pretty maid and, for his own amusement, turns her into a prostitute, whilst just-qualified Marie (an intense Laura Elphinstone) ties up a rival by the hair before moving on to a shortlived lesbian affair.
The atonal music adds an uneasy edge to Martin Crimp's new version, and scene changes, (executed with clinical efficiency by the cast, dressed, temporarily, in modern black suits and protective gloves) have the air of a forensic examination, with the set initially swathed in plastic sheeting and props silently put in place, removed and bagged.
As seems to be more and more the case with Mitchell's work, her precise, stylised approach is likely to split opinion, but the sheer intensity of her ever-darkening account of a doomed society exerts an irresistible hold.
Set in 1923 in the Viennese boarding house which they share, it depicts them as a liberated but lost generation – selfabsorbed, pursuing (but only briefly finding) happiness as they indulge inpromiscuity, drugs and alcohol. The pervading anomie is as insidious as the destructive tuberculosis described in detail as they cram for their exams.
Suicidal countess Desiree (impressive newcomer Lydia Wilson) finds learning – and attracting both sexes – easy, but sees no point in living beyond the age of 17. For her, early death is the only alternative to a bourgeois existence in the future.Her former lover (Geoffrey Streatfeild's emotionally blank, Svengalilike Freder) corrupts the pretty maid and, for his own amusement, turns her into a prostitute, whilst just-qualified Marie (an intense Laura Elphinstone) ties up a rival by the hair before moving on to a shortlived lesbian affair.
The atonal music adds an uneasy edge to Martin Crimp's new version, and scene changes, (executed with clinical efficiency by the cast, dressed, temporarily, in modern black suits and protective gloves) have the air of a forensic examination, with the set initially swathed in plastic sheeting and props silently put in place, removed and bagged.
As seems to be more and more the case with Mitchell's work, her precise, stylised approach is likely to split opinion, but the sheer intensity of her ever-darkening account of a doomed society exerts an irresistible hold.
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