Theatre review: Amsterdam

The Orange Tree's autumn season opens with the UK premiere of a play whose urgent theme and potentially fascinating story get buried under its frenetic, wilfully eccentric storytelling device. Maya Arad Yasur's Amsterdam, translated here by Eran Edry, follows a reasonably successful Israeli violinist now based in the titular Dutch city, heavily pregnant when her gas gets cut off and a €1700 bill arrives for it. The unpaid debt originates from 1944 and has been accumulating interest and fines ever since. Her enquiries into the bill's history reveal that it's not been forgotten or fallen through the cracks, but been left deliberately unpaid by generations of the late landlady's family because its very existence adds insult to historic injury.

The story itself is very simple and not too hard to predict - the text even references Anne Frank's House in case the significance of the letter's date and the location don't give it away - which may be why the play is built more on how it's told.

This is a very particular kind of storytelling theatre: In Matthew Xia's production narration duties are shared out between Dan Abelson, Fiston Barek, Michal Horowicz and Hara Yannas, and the conceit is that they're making the story up as they go along, offering twists and variations in the plot that the others can accept or reject along the way. Yasur even lampshades this by mentioning a "freestyle storytelling" class that takes place nearby.

It allows the narrators to introduce details and complications they think the story should acknowledge, notably when the violinist, nervous that her Middle Eastern appearance will be making potential bigots resent her place in the supermarket queue, imagines herself blurting out that she's a Jew not a Muslim, and a successful economic migrant, nor a refugee. Later when the backstory inevitably sees characters sent off to Auschwitz, Abelson's narrator is keen to ensure that not all of them are Jewish - not so much out of wanting to represent other minorities targeted by the Nazis, but out of fear that "another story about Jews" will put audiences off. It's a potential way to create an interesting meta-narrative, but disappointingly there isn't really a consistent feeling of each of the four having their own agenda they're trying to push.

Worse is the fact that while this is a strong cast doing their best to add a little nuance to their performances, the pretence that this is an improvisation means a rather relentlessly hyper style of performance as they excitedly interrupt and talk over each other, trying to add their latest detail to the world-building effort. The narrators' chipper presentation does provide some rewards in the ironic contrast with some of the darker elements of the story, but 80 minutes of it feels a lot longer. At least the introduction of a chain curtain through Naomi Kuyck-Cohen's until-then bare design gives some visual freshness in its evocation of the water running through the city, but overall this is a show whose presentation style keeps getting in the way of its substance.

Amsterdam by Maya Arad Yasur in a version by Eran Edry is booking until the 12th of October at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.