Theatre review: Europe

I first went to the Donald and Margot Warehouse during the Sam Mendes days, so I'm on to my fourth Artistic Director of the venue as Michael Longhurst starts his tenure by directing Europe, a 25-year-old David Greig play whose original inspiration was the breakup of Yugoslavia but whose nebulous, borderline-surreal setting makes it feel timeless. The town where the action takes place is never named, but it's somewhere in Europe, close to a national border but otherwise pretty remote and easy to ignore. Even easier, soon: Trains going to every corner of the continent pass through, but all of a sudden they don't stop at the local station. Station Master Fret (Ron Cook) can't figure out the new timetable he's been sent, not realising the fact he can't find when the trains are meant to arrive is an underhand way of telling him the station is closing.

He's probably too distracted by the fact that a father and daughter, Sava (Kevork Malikyan) and Katia (Natalia Tena) are sleeping rough in the waiting room. He's worried they're refugees or worse, Interrailers.

The station's not the only part of the town on the slide, as Berlin (Billy Howle,) Horse (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Billy (Stephen Wight) are among 200 factory workers to lose their jobs to machines. Billy is sanguine about it and leaves town in search of new work, while Horse becomes easy prey for a local far-right group blaming all their problems on immigrants (despite the fact that the town’s total immigrant population seems to consist of the two people living rough at the station.) Berlin sits somewhere between the two responses, until his wife Adele’s (Faye Marsay) friendship with Katia becomes something else. Occupying a slightly more cosmopolitan ground than the rest of the town thanks to his travels around Europe is the smuggler Morocco (Shane Zaza,) for whom the border isn’t a marker of national identity but a moneymaking opportunity.

As a launching pad for a new era at the venue Europe is an oddly downbeat choice (unlike the amazingly peppy Eastern European pop at the interval) but from Constellations to Amadeus via Carmen Disruption Longhurst has shown an ability for inventive staging, and now that he’s in a position to assemble his own creative team he uses them to give the play an unexpected dimension. On paper Greig’s play is a fairly quiet meditation on European identity, with flashes of the surreal and undercurrents of violent danger. But Tom Visser’s lighting and Ian Dickinson’s sound combine to give the passing trains the thrill of excitement Adele gets from them, while Simon Slater’s music is unapologetically cinematic. Chloe Lamford’s design puts a passenger information board centre stage displaying Brechtian captions for the play’s twenty scenes, as well as building to a coup de théâtre that hints at how Longhurst plans to use the space in the coming years (which possibly involves burning it down.)

This is the kind of play to unnerve you rather than provide a straightforward fun evening out, but there are occasional laughs, plus the warm moments as friendships build between Fret and Sava based on their love of railways and their engineering, and Adele and Katia over a shared deeper longing. An intriguing start to the Donmar’s next chapter, a play with a worrying message but not entirely without hope.

Europe by David Greig is booking until the 10th of August at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.