Theatre review: Nachtland

Despite an incredibly irritating social media publicity campaign (who were those messages raving about the show months before it opened even meant to be from, anyway?) I've been looking forward to the Young Vic's Nachtland: Marius von Mayenburg's dark satire (translated here by Maja Zade) has a viciously clever premise, and Patrick Marber's production has a great cast. The resulting evening is an entertaining one, but a frustrating one as well. The audience enter to Anna Fleischle’s set absolutely covered in dusty old props, which the cast clear away before the action starts: Siblings Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) are clearing out the house of their recently-deceased father, bickering about who looked after him when he was alive and whose story it is to tell even as they narrate it to the audience.

Things take a different turn when Nicola’s husband Fabian (Gunnar Cauthery) finds a rather kitsch painting among the junk; when he takes it out of its frame they discover they’ve got an original Hitler watercolour, and discussions over whether it’s actually any good are replaced by discussions over how much they can get for it. Philipp’s Jewish wife Judith (Jenna Augen) argues they shouldn’t profit from it at all.

von Mayenburg is looking at modern Germany’s complex relationship with its past, the rise of neo-Fascism there, as well as the fact that the country has spent the decades since the end of the War publicly atoning for the Holocaust and making sure its past crimes aren’t forgotten. It seems an ironic contrast to the UK’s attitude to history in a way: This country has spent the last century pretending there was nothing problematic about its colonial past, and continues to aggressively resist any attempt to acknowledge the harsh realities. Meanwhile von Mayenburg suggests that Germany’s collective mea culpa has resulted in people like Nicola, frustrated and bitter about being made to feel guilty all their lives for their grandparents’ crimes.

It’s a point he makes with a sledgehammer early on, as Nicola responds to Judith’s concerns with a sudden stream of casual anti-Semitism. Meanwhile it turns out that while the inter-faith marriage was never even a subject of discussion, Philipp has been feeling a sense of smug superiority all along about how his wife’s background doesn’t matter to him. It’s the sort of uncomfortable lurch from polite language into what’s been suppressed that would form the climax of an American play about race, but here it comes about 20 minutes in, feeling very much like a shock tactic. And it’s not that it leaves the story with nowhere to go, more that it then goes… pretty much everywhere.

So we get into the idea of the fetishisation of the Nazis as art expert Evamaria (Jane Horrocks) arrives to authenticate the painting; her knowledge of Hitler’s art is something that’s come down through her family, but it’s soon obvious she has a genuine fervour for the art and possibly… other things the artist did. Which is before we even get to Kahl (Angus Wright,) the buyer she’s got lined up, whose interest in the painting for reasons he insists don’t ally with his personal beliefs is mixed with a creepy exoticisation of Judith as a Jewish woman.

We also have a diversion into discussion of Israel and Palestine, and a potentially interesting thread that expands the premise to ask questions about the amount of artists over the centuries who’ve expressed anti-Semitic views, and separating the art from the artist. That one could potentially have been the subject of the play in itself, but as it’s one of many diversions it’s not dealt with long enough to address the false equivalency in the premise (Hitler isn’t primarily known for his art nor was it ever considered particularly important in its own right, so to use his case to ask whether Chaucer should be cancelled requires logical steps the play just doesn’t have the time for.)

It feels a bit of a cop-out to say that European theatre tends to have a very different, more expressionistic style than the UK, but I wonder if that’s part of why Nachtland doesn’t quite work here. Marber’s production is far from naturalistic, but maybe it’s still a way from the tone the script was designed for – the performances are a little bit broad but far from clownish, always funny but perhaps suggesting the characters are following some kind of logic. On the other hand we get moments like Kahl’s first appearance, dancing around the stage in fetish gear several scenes before he’s actually brought into the story, a scene never to be alluded to ever again. Or Fabian getting highly symbolic tetanus from the picture frame, being more or less ignored as he possibly dies in the background, and eventually leaving the stage with his arm stuck in a Nazi salute.

These are big lurches into the surreal and I wondered if that was meant to be more representative of the play as a whole. Nachtland is worth seeing in my opinion – well-acted, funny and raising interesting subjects but the way it deals with them is ultimately too chaotic. And I’m not sure if that’s down to the writing or the production: If it was intended to really dig into modern Germany’s dark legacy its approach is too scattershot and fond of shock tactics that come out of nowhere, in which case it’s the former. Whereas if the intention was to fling as many conversational topics and surreal moments as possible at the stage and see what sticks, a production that embraced that chaos more might have served it better.

Nachtland by Marius von Mayenburg in a version by Maja Zade is booking until the 20th of April at the Young Vic.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.